'MY ENEMY'S ENEMY IS MY FRIEND' IS BAD PHILOSOPHY FOR BOSE BUT GOOD PHILOSOPHY FOR CHURCHILL. IS THAT SO?
There you are, Swapan Kumar Ghosh, having hit the hammer on the head of the nail. These are alliances that have ever been sought historically to gain temporary advantages out of an international situation and in no way do they thereby indicate the official sanction or support of a country in regard to the political policy or ideology of the ally in question. The alliance is purely pragmatic in nature and sealed during turbulent times of war to save a situation or to secure freedom from a ruthless occupier of one's nation. It is a political alliance of expediency and not of ideology professed and practised. This must be clearly understood in the case of the Provisional Government of Free India's seeking of Axis alliance during the Second World War to free India from British occupation.
Unnumbered instances may be cited of Britain having herself done the same over the centuries to secure and maintain her hegemonic control over the greater part of the world. Hence, the argument against Netaji on this count falls flat. However, Hitler has been so demonised as the vanquished in World War II that there are other obvious considerations that prompt the Allies to charge Netaji thus with the 'War Criminal' tag and malign him in history, and the Government of India plays second fiddle to it, doing nothing to absolve him of this heinous epithet. But such epithets are ever the prize of the vanquished for defeat in war.
The question arises not whether Bose is a war criminal or not in the eyes of the Anglo-Americans but whether he was so in the eyes of the Nehruvian dispensation that ruled the country for six decades since independence, and if so or if not, what steps they had taken to absolve him of such charge in the international understanding. Had Hitler won the war, Churchill and company would have been branded likewise and tried as war criminals for sure. But would the Government of Great Britain or of USA continually comply with this tag to allow the defamation of their own leader and, thereby, their own country indefinitely, that is, even after they had recovered from the immediate ravages of the war and settled into the decency of self-governance once again? This is the moot point where debate ought to rage in the polity. Otherwise, our independence is ill-begotten and our status as free citizens of the world a sham.
As regards the aforesaid statement --- 'My enemy's enemy is my friend' --- there may be debate whether it was ultimately in the good interests of India for Bose to have allied his forces with the ruthless Axis Powers in Nazi Germany and fascist imperialist Japan in his bid to secure freedom for his motherland. The principle may have a simple logic to it apparently but carried deeper consequential bearings for our motherland which Bose must have well contemplated on and come to his conclusions whereby he thus decided on his then historic political venture.
Was it a misadventure after all? So Gandhi, Nehru and his Congress colleagues thought and so have many a historian owing allegiance to the Anglo-American powers ever since articulated. Perhaps, they are right in their assertions in the light of the atrocities unleashed by the Nazis on the Jews by way of their 'Final Solution' and that of the Japanese 'Rape of Nanjing' in China. In the light of such revelations one may even shudder to contemplate the consequences of Axis occupation of India post liberation from the British. Would the Japanese forces simply hand over the governance of India to the Congress or would they set up a puppet government under Bose while they carried on the plunder and rape of India just as they had done in China in line with their own imperialist designs? To these worrisome political possibilities Bose had his own credible answers which shall be presented by this writer soon enough after the British barbarism in their colonies the world over has been revealed to bolster Bose's argument for his seeking Axis alliance in his bid to free India.
Bose had revealed to his comrades and the vast populace of three million expatriate Indians who had supported him in the Far East that the British were no less than any other global power historically in terms of the capacity for barbaric behaviour and the destruction of civilisation. He could thus elicit spontaneous support for his cause. Here was a man who completely exposed the British to the marrow and brought to light their savagery in the name of proffered civilisation. There was no other major politician in India at that time who had the character and command of history and international relations to be able to fathom the perfidious designs of the British the world over to bring about their centuries' old colonising hegemony in the name of spreading their superior civilising influence. Bose was intellectually so gifted and politically so sharp that he could penetrate the ploys of the wily British and take his guard accordingly. Gandhi's gullibility was not Bose's attribute nor was Nehru's allegiance to the English by way of temperamental affinity and inherent opportunism Bose's character failing. While the British with some effort could win over the mild Mahatma and the pretentious Pandit to seeing things their way, they sensed in Bose a dangerous enemy of the Empire who would brook no opposition to his uncompromising fight for freedom and would not barter his country's best interests to preserve those of the British. These were the imperatives then as Bose embarked on his epic struggle for freedom.
The home situation was no better. Gandhi's intransigence in his dogmatic insufficient bid for independence through passive struggle, Nehru's socialistic vacillations, compliance under Gandhian compulsion and frequent betrayal of the radical cause espoused by Bose, and the Congress bandwagon's servile acceptance of the Gandhian diktat by way of democratic functioning frustrated Bose's hopes of seizing the historic opportunity afforded by the onset of the Second World War to liberate India. He argued with the Mahatma and urged him to launch a massive civil disobedience movement across the nation to paralyse the British machinery for war and exhorted him to demand from the British complete and unconditional independence of India within six months, for Bose reckoned that the European War would break out in about six months. Bose was prophetically right but Gandhi refused under the pretext that the country was not ready for yet another civil struggle against the government.
A year earlier at the Haripura Congress during his Presidential address, Bose had stunned the Mahatma with his exhortation to the Congress to develop its army and massive machinery for launching non-violent struggle against the British as and when the occasion arose. The young leader was well aware of the developing international situation in Europe and the Far East and with prophetic premonition was preparing for it. But the Mahatma was of duller perceptions and full of idealistic gibberish that was of no consequence in the world of realpolitik where even he was struggling with his quaint notions of humanity and freedom. Bose was thwarted thereon at every bend and turn by Gandhi and his brigade till matters touched an all-time low in open confrontation between the young eagle and the seasoned practitioner of dubious democracy prior to the election of the President for the Tripuri Congress.
Bose had been Gandhi's nomination for the post of Presidency at Haripura in 1938. Gandhi had hoped to contain the leftist wing within the Congress by offering Bose, their radical leader, the post of Presidency. He was thus compelled into the act of pacifying Bose despite his absolute reservations about the latter's radical ideological inclinations which were anathema to the Mahatma. The polity had been much divided by the British, especially, after the declaration of the Ramsay MacDonald Communal Award which offered separate electorates to its different sections. The fractured polity had to be repaired as best as possible to lead the non-violent movement to fruition, so the Mahatma reckoned. The socialists were not under his direct command or influence and if Bose and Nehru could be kept quiet, his absolute control over the majority of Indians would remain intact. But Bose proved to be of a different mettle from Gandhi's milder protege, Nehru, and soon the two camps of the mild and the militant were on a collision course.
Sensing the danger that Bose was bent on radicalising the Congress and using its machinery to engineer his revolutionary ideas which would throw overboard the cherished principles of non-violence and passive resistance and could even drag the country into a catastrophic collision course with imperial Britain and could have incalculable future consequences, Gandhi stepped in and asked Bose not to contest for the post of President in Tripuri. Bose made his intentions amply clear that he would run for the post and could not be dissuaded from his decision by Nehru and the other colleagues in Congress. A headlong collision with the Mahatma was now on. Gandhi nominated his candidate in Bhogaraju Pattabhi Sitaramayya to contest Bose and even announced that should Bose win, he would take it as his personal defeat. Bose won and Gandhi made his epic statement : "Pattabhi's defeat is my defeat."
Bose was now President of Congress for the second year in succession and was in a position to fashion Congress policy on the eve of the Second World War. Or was he? Gandhi now stooped to despicable levels of manipulative machinations in his bid to foil Bose and his programme for radical reformation of the Congress machinery and movement. He issued a secret directive to the members of the Congress Working Committee to resign their office and paralyse the President thereby.
Tripuri unfolded amid acrimony and allegations that cast aspersions of pretence on the President, that he was feigning sickness when in reality he was suffering from high fever consequent on a bout of double pneumonia that he had been felled by. The Working Committee resigned. Gandhi offered Bose the option to choose his own Working Committee and lied that he had anything to do with the resignation of the current one. Bose was mystified by the Mahatma's machinations and to prevent a split in the Congress which would help the British in effect, himself resigned his Presidency.
What followed was malice made malignant by the toxin of treachery injected into the body of India's future aspirations for freedom luminous and whole. Bose, despite being deprived of his democratically won Presidential powers of the Congress which mightily debilitated his programme of wresting freedom from the British in their hour of weakness, started campaigning extensively throughout India to garner support for his revolutionary cause. Now the Mahatma prevailed upon the new Congress Working Committee of his choice to expel Bose from all executive offices of the Congress. When Bose did not still relent in his stirring campaign to solicit support for his cause, Gandhi had him expelled from the Congress totally without turning a hair. The Mahatma had now revealed his real fangs and had bitten Bose through.
But Bose was prepared and the poison could not paralyse him. He launched forthwith his Forward Bloc Party and carried on campaign as before, all the while preparing secretly to leave India in his bid to secure foreign help for freedom.
Since his twenties Bose had been contacting members of the Soviet Communist Party as his reading of the interwar historical situation had convinced him as early as 1927 that a second world war was imminent around the year 1940. How he could have guessed so accurately the future fate of the world is a matter of conjecture but it clearly shows that he had an unerring sense of history and could, thus, read into its developments with such seemingly infallible accuracy. Now these contacts paid off as Bose prepared to exit India. His first choice of ally was the Soviet Union and after his famous escape in 1941 from house arrest, he arrived at the doors of Moscow only to be rebuffed by a diffident Stalin who did not dare distancing Britain at this crucial stage of the war when he feared any day a German invasion of Soviet territory when he might have to seek British alliance to meet the challenge. However, Bose was graciously offered by the Soviet leader a transit visa to fly to Berlin in a Luftwaffe aircraft and this was made possible by the as yet operative German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 23 August, 1939. Thus, Bose landed in Nazi Germany as the child of destiny, quite not in keeping with his own aspirations of seeking Soviet help but under the compelling circumstances of fast-evolving world history.
Bose harboured fascination for neither communism nor fascism nor, for that matter, the latter's darkest derivative in Nazism, but sought alliance with them being impelled by historical forces. He had studied these totalitarian ideologies and had met at first hand many of their adherents in Europe to be able to comprehend how unfit their direct application in India would be. Consequently, he was in his mind trying to arrive at a system of governance for future India which would incorporate fascist discipline within a democratic polity. He wrote in his book 'The Indian Struggle' that India needed a synthesis of the finest principles of fascism and communism suited to Indian conditions but this statement of his was blown up later by his political adversaries into his open advocacy of totalitarian governance in India of which assuredly he would be the dictator. This his detractors did consequent on his alliance with Nazi Germany and fascist imperial Japan during the Second World War. But the truth was that Bose never became a dictator in the malefic sense of the term even though he was the Supreme Commander of the INA and the Head of the Provisional Government of Free India. He always espoused the democratic cause for his country with the Congress at the helm of affairs. He never wanted dictatorial control of independent India as is alleged to have been his altered designs since assumption of power abroad by his detractors at home who he admired and highlighted in his military organisation but who in turn doubted his motives and back-stabbed him at every turn save when it suited them to align themselves with his patriotic cause so that they could secure political advantages from such show of sympathy. (Note the INA Trials of 1946 and Nehru's role as defence counsel.)
Churchill diverted Bengal crops to Britain, Greece and Yugoslavia and elsewhere to the already well-supplied and well-stocked British army by way of a diabolic deal that dealt the death of over three million (Satyajit Ray's 'Ashani Sanket' or 'Distant Thunder' estimates it as over five million) famished Bengalis and took no measures whatsoever to brief relief to the victims even after repeated requests and even remonstrances by governmental representatives. Bengal perished in a man-made famine masterminded by Britain's war hero, the champion of the Empire and the upholder of Britain's 'superior civilisation'. And forget not the massacre of INA prisoners of war by the thousands at Neelgunge, Jhikargachha and Barasat, and all these were orchestrated by the civilised victors of the war, the barbaric British.
Now coming to the original contention whether it was right for Bose to seeking alliance with the Axis Powers during the Second World war. Why not when such alliances were deemed alright as forged between imperialist Britain, capitalist USA and communist Soviet Union? Did it mean that USA or Britain had therefore adopted communism as their national ideology or that the Soviet Union had renounced communism and adopted democracy and capitalism as their new socioeconomic model? Not at all. These were alliances of the hour when faced with dire security concerns and the threat of impending loss of national sovereignty to the enemy. In a like manner had the Americans sought French monarchical help in their War of Independence against the British, although, they were about to set up the democratic form of government as against their ally's tyrannical monarchical set up which soon brought about its own doom on account of its participation in the American campaign. The Americans were fighting monarchical tyranny of the British but conveniently sought the help of an even worse form of monarchical tyrannical order in the French to win their own freedom. Would the Americans now admit that they were wrong and that their independence was thus ill-begotten, or would the British think it politically expedient to censure the Americans even today for their seeking the help of the enemy's enemy in the French for ousting the British from their land? No, none of these will they do for this is the practice of nations to constantly change alliances to achieve their geopolitical objectives. And yet they have the temerity to charge Bose with epithets of their choice simply because the Indian government lacks the spine to vociferously protest and espouse Bose's cause of freedom as his motivating principle of forging alliance with his enemy's enemy.
As it stands then, Churchill, the mass murderer of Bengalis, a crime that was worse and faster executed in a year than the Nazi holocaust perpetrated over a decade, continues to be eulogised as the hero who saved civilisation through alliance with his enemy's enemy but Bose, that misguided patriot in the conception of many an enlightened Indian and, surely, a quisling in British estimation and a lackey of the Japanese in the eyes of Indian communists, continues to be castigated as a traitor to civilisation, a war criminal and a fugitive who ought to have been caught and executed after the customary torture. And why so? Because Churchill did what he did to save his motherland from bondage to the Germans and Bose did what he did to save his motherland from bondage to the British. Churchill, morally corrupt and with no human feelings for the entire mass of subjugated humanity groaning under the crushing wheels of his country's imperial tyranny, is the hero for espousing his country's cause of colonial control and Bose, patriot premier and supremely spiritual with impeccable character and an unblemished record in human affairs is the criminal for espousing the cause of freedom of his motherland and of all of suppressed humanity. This, indeed, is international justice and this,indeed, is the right chronicling of history. This is how I feel about the issue in contention. Pray, tell me now how you do feel about it.
Written by Sugata Bose
There you are, Swapan Kumar Ghosh, having hit the hammer on the head of the nail. These are alliances that have ever been sought historically to gain temporary advantages out of an international situation and in no way do they thereby indicate the official sanction or support of a country in regard to the political policy or ideology of the ally in question. The alliance is purely pragmatic in nature and sealed during turbulent times of war to save a situation or to secure freedom from a ruthless occupier of one's nation. It is a political alliance of expediency and not of ideology professed and practised. This must be clearly understood in the case of the Provisional Government of Free India's seeking of Axis alliance during the Second World War to free India from British occupation.
Unnumbered instances may be cited of Britain having herself done the same over the centuries to secure and maintain her hegemonic control over the greater part of the world. Hence, the argument against Netaji on this count falls flat. However, Hitler has been so demonised as the vanquished in World War II that there are other obvious considerations that prompt the Allies to charge Netaji thus with the 'War Criminal' tag and malign him in history, and the Government of India plays second fiddle to it, doing nothing to absolve him of this heinous epithet. But such epithets are ever the prize of the vanquished for defeat in war.
The question arises not whether Bose is a war criminal or not in the eyes of the Anglo-Americans but whether he was so in the eyes of the Nehruvian dispensation that ruled the country for six decades since independence, and if so or if not, what steps they had taken to absolve him of such charge in the international understanding. Had Hitler won the war, Churchill and company would have been branded likewise and tried as war criminals for sure. But would the Government of Great Britain or of USA continually comply with this tag to allow the defamation of their own leader and, thereby, their own country indefinitely, that is, even after they had recovered from the immediate ravages of the war and settled into the decency of self-governance once again? This is the moot point where debate ought to rage in the polity. Otherwise, our independence is ill-begotten and our status as free citizens of the world a sham.
As regards the aforesaid statement --- 'My enemy's enemy is my friend' --- there may be debate whether it was ultimately in the good interests of India for Bose to have allied his forces with the ruthless Axis Powers in Nazi Germany and fascist imperialist Japan in his bid to secure freedom for his motherland. The principle may have a simple logic to it apparently but carried deeper consequential bearings for our motherland which Bose must have well contemplated on and come to his conclusions whereby he thus decided on his then historic political venture.
Was it a misadventure after all? So Gandhi, Nehru and his Congress colleagues thought and so have many a historian owing allegiance to the Anglo-American powers ever since articulated. Perhaps, they are right in their assertions in the light of the atrocities unleashed by the Nazis on the Jews by way of their 'Final Solution' and that of the Japanese 'Rape of Nanjing' in China. In the light of such revelations one may even shudder to contemplate the consequences of Axis occupation of India post liberation from the British. Would the Japanese forces simply hand over the governance of India to the Congress or would they set up a puppet government under Bose while they carried on the plunder and rape of India just as they had done in China in line with their own imperialist designs? To these worrisome political possibilities Bose had his own credible answers which shall be presented by this writer soon enough after the British barbarism in their colonies the world over has been revealed to bolster Bose's argument for his seeking Axis alliance in his bid to free India.
Bose had revealed to his comrades and the vast populace of three million expatriate Indians who had supported him in the Far East that the British were no less than any other global power historically in terms of the capacity for barbaric behaviour and the destruction of civilisation. He could thus elicit spontaneous support for his cause. Here was a man who completely exposed the British to the marrow and brought to light their savagery in the name of proffered civilisation. There was no other major politician in India at that time who had the character and command of history and international relations to be able to fathom the perfidious designs of the British the world over to bring about their centuries' old colonising hegemony in the name of spreading their superior civilising influence. Bose was intellectually so gifted and politically so sharp that he could penetrate the ploys of the wily British and take his guard accordingly. Gandhi's gullibility was not Bose's attribute nor was Nehru's allegiance to the English by way of temperamental affinity and inherent opportunism Bose's character failing. While the British with some effort could win over the mild Mahatma and the pretentious Pandit to seeing things their way, they sensed in Bose a dangerous enemy of the Empire who would brook no opposition to his uncompromising fight for freedom and would not barter his country's best interests to preserve those of the British. These were the imperatives then as Bose embarked on his epic struggle for freedom.
The home situation was no better. Gandhi's intransigence in his dogmatic insufficient bid for independence through passive struggle, Nehru's socialistic vacillations, compliance under Gandhian compulsion and frequent betrayal of the radical cause espoused by Bose, and the Congress bandwagon's servile acceptance of the Gandhian diktat by way of democratic functioning frustrated Bose's hopes of seizing the historic opportunity afforded by the onset of the Second World War to liberate India. He argued with the Mahatma and urged him to launch a massive civil disobedience movement across the nation to paralyse the British machinery for war and exhorted him to demand from the British complete and unconditional independence of India within six months, for Bose reckoned that the European War would break out in about six months. Bose was prophetically right but Gandhi refused under the pretext that the country was not ready for yet another civil struggle against the government.
A year earlier at the Haripura Congress during his Presidential address, Bose had stunned the Mahatma with his exhortation to the Congress to develop its army and massive machinery for launching non-violent struggle against the British as and when the occasion arose. The young leader was well aware of the developing international situation in Europe and the Far East and with prophetic premonition was preparing for it. But the Mahatma was of duller perceptions and full of idealistic gibberish that was of no consequence in the world of realpolitik where even he was struggling with his quaint notions of humanity and freedom. Bose was thwarted thereon at every bend and turn by Gandhi and his brigade till matters touched an all-time low in open confrontation between the young eagle and the seasoned practitioner of dubious democracy prior to the election of the President for the Tripuri Congress.
Bose had been Gandhi's nomination for the post of Presidency at Haripura in 1938. Gandhi had hoped to contain the leftist wing within the Congress by offering Bose, their radical leader, the post of Presidency. He was thus compelled into the act of pacifying Bose despite his absolute reservations about the latter's radical ideological inclinations which were anathema to the Mahatma. The polity had been much divided by the British, especially, after the declaration of the Ramsay MacDonald Communal Award which offered separate electorates to its different sections. The fractured polity had to be repaired as best as possible to lead the non-violent movement to fruition, so the Mahatma reckoned. The socialists were not under his direct command or influence and if Bose and Nehru could be kept quiet, his absolute control over the majority of Indians would remain intact. But Bose proved to be of a different mettle from Gandhi's milder protege, Nehru, and soon the two camps of the mild and the militant were on a collision course.
Sensing the danger that Bose was bent on radicalising the Congress and using its machinery to engineer his revolutionary ideas which would throw overboard the cherished principles of non-violence and passive resistance and could even drag the country into a catastrophic collision course with imperial Britain and could have incalculable future consequences, Gandhi stepped in and asked Bose not to contest for the post of President in Tripuri. Bose made his intentions amply clear that he would run for the post and could not be dissuaded from his decision by Nehru and the other colleagues in Congress. A headlong collision with the Mahatma was now on. Gandhi nominated his candidate in Bhogaraju Pattabhi Sitaramayya to contest Bose and even announced that should Bose win, he would take it as his personal defeat. Bose won and Gandhi made his epic statement : "Pattabhi's defeat is my defeat."
Bose was now President of Congress for the second year in succession and was in a position to fashion Congress policy on the eve of the Second World War. Or was he? Gandhi now stooped to despicable levels of manipulative machinations in his bid to foil Bose and his programme for radical reformation of the Congress machinery and movement. He issued a secret directive to the members of the Congress Working Committee to resign their office and paralyse the President thereby.
Tripuri unfolded amid acrimony and allegations that cast aspersions of pretence on the President, that he was feigning sickness when in reality he was suffering from high fever consequent on a bout of double pneumonia that he had been felled by. The Working Committee resigned. Gandhi offered Bose the option to choose his own Working Committee and lied that he had anything to do with the resignation of the current one. Bose was mystified by the Mahatma's machinations and to prevent a split in the Congress which would help the British in effect, himself resigned his Presidency.
What followed was malice made malignant by the toxin of treachery injected into the body of India's future aspirations for freedom luminous and whole. Bose, despite being deprived of his democratically won Presidential powers of the Congress which mightily debilitated his programme of wresting freedom from the British in their hour of weakness, started campaigning extensively throughout India to garner support for his revolutionary cause. Now the Mahatma prevailed upon the new Congress Working Committee of his choice to expel Bose from all executive offices of the Congress. When Bose did not still relent in his stirring campaign to solicit support for his cause, Gandhi had him expelled from the Congress totally without turning a hair. The Mahatma had now revealed his real fangs and had bitten Bose through.
But Bose was prepared and the poison could not paralyse him. He launched forthwith his Forward Bloc Party and carried on campaign as before, all the while preparing secretly to leave India in his bid to secure foreign help for freedom.
Since his twenties Bose had been contacting members of the Soviet Communist Party as his reading of the interwar historical situation had convinced him as early as 1927 that a second world war was imminent around the year 1940. How he could have guessed so accurately the future fate of the world is a matter of conjecture but it clearly shows that he had an unerring sense of history and could, thus, read into its developments with such seemingly infallible accuracy. Now these contacts paid off as Bose prepared to exit India. His first choice of ally was the Soviet Union and after his famous escape in 1941 from house arrest, he arrived at the doors of Moscow only to be rebuffed by a diffident Stalin who did not dare distancing Britain at this crucial stage of the war when he feared any day a German invasion of Soviet territory when he might have to seek British alliance to meet the challenge. However, Bose was graciously offered by the Soviet leader a transit visa to fly to Berlin in a Luftwaffe aircraft and this was made possible by the as yet operative German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 23 August, 1939. Thus, Bose landed in Nazi Germany as the child of destiny, quite not in keeping with his own aspirations of seeking Soviet help but under the compelling circumstances of fast-evolving world history.
Bose harboured fascination for neither communism nor fascism nor, for that matter, the latter's darkest derivative in Nazism, but sought alliance with them being impelled by historical forces. He had studied these totalitarian ideologies and had met at first hand many of their adherents in Europe to be able to comprehend how unfit their direct application in India would be. Consequently, he was in his mind trying to arrive at a system of governance for future India which would incorporate fascist discipline within a democratic polity. He wrote in his book 'The Indian Struggle' that India needed a synthesis of the finest principles of fascism and communism suited to Indian conditions but this statement of his was blown up later by his political adversaries into his open advocacy of totalitarian governance in India of which assuredly he would be the dictator. This his detractors did consequent on his alliance with Nazi Germany and fascist imperial Japan during the Second World War. But the truth was that Bose never became a dictator in the malefic sense of the term even though he was the Supreme Commander of the INA and the Head of the Provisional Government of Free India. He always espoused the democratic cause for his country with the Congress at the helm of affairs. He never wanted dictatorial control of independent India as is alleged to have been his altered designs since assumption of power abroad by his detractors at home who he admired and highlighted in his military organisation but who in turn doubted his motives and back-stabbed him at every turn save when it suited them to align themselves with his patriotic cause so that they could secure political advantages from such show of sympathy. (Note the INA Trials of 1946 and Nehru's role as defence counsel.)
Churchill diverted Bengal crops to Britain, Greece and Yugoslavia and elsewhere to the already well-supplied and well-stocked British army by way of a diabolic deal that dealt the death of over three million (Satyajit Ray's 'Ashani Sanket' or 'Distant Thunder' estimates it as over five million) famished Bengalis and took no measures whatsoever to brief relief to the victims even after repeated requests and even remonstrances by governmental representatives. Bengal perished in a man-made famine masterminded by Britain's war hero, the champion of the Empire and the upholder of Britain's 'superior civilisation'. And forget not the massacre of INA prisoners of war by the thousands at Neelgunge, Jhikargachha and Barasat, and all these were orchestrated by the civilised victors of the war, the barbaric British.
Now coming to the original contention whether it was right for Bose to seeking alliance with the Axis Powers during the Second World war. Why not when such alliances were deemed alright as forged between imperialist Britain, capitalist USA and communist Soviet Union? Did it mean that USA or Britain had therefore adopted communism as their national ideology or that the Soviet Union had renounced communism and adopted democracy and capitalism as their new socioeconomic model? Not at all. These were alliances of the hour when faced with dire security concerns and the threat of impending loss of national sovereignty to the enemy. In a like manner had the Americans sought French monarchical help in their War of Independence against the British, although, they were about to set up the democratic form of government as against their ally's tyrannical monarchical set up which soon brought about its own doom on account of its participation in the American campaign. The Americans were fighting monarchical tyranny of the British but conveniently sought the help of an even worse form of monarchical tyrannical order in the French to win their own freedom. Would the Americans now admit that they were wrong and that their independence was thus ill-begotten, or would the British think it politically expedient to censure the Americans even today for their seeking the help of the enemy's enemy in the French for ousting the British from their land? No, none of these will they do for this is the practice of nations to constantly change alliances to achieve their geopolitical objectives. And yet they have the temerity to charge Bose with epithets of their choice simply because the Indian government lacks the spine to vociferously protest and espouse Bose's cause of freedom as his motivating principle of forging alliance with his enemy's enemy.
As it stands then, Churchill, the mass murderer of Bengalis, a crime that was worse and faster executed in a year than the Nazi holocaust perpetrated over a decade, continues to be eulogised as the hero who saved civilisation through alliance with his enemy's enemy but Bose, that misguided patriot in the conception of many an enlightened Indian and, surely, a quisling in British estimation and a lackey of the Japanese in the eyes of Indian communists, continues to be castigated as a traitor to civilisation, a war criminal and a fugitive who ought to have been caught and executed after the customary torture. And why so? Because Churchill did what he did to save his motherland from bondage to the Germans and Bose did what he did to save his motherland from bondage to the British. Churchill, morally corrupt and with no human feelings for the entire mass of subjugated humanity groaning under the crushing wheels of his country's imperial tyranny, is the hero for espousing his country's cause of colonial control and Bose, patriot premier and supremely spiritual with impeccable character and an unblemished record in human affairs is the criminal for espousing the cause of freedom of his motherland and of all of suppressed humanity. This, indeed, is international justice and this,indeed, is the right chronicling of history. This is how I feel about the issue in contention. Pray, tell me now how you do feel about it.
Written by Sugata Bose
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