TREACHERY AT TRIPURI AND ITS AFTERMATH

TREACHERY AT TRIPURI AND ITS AFTERMATH

By virtually forcing Bose to resign from the Congress Presidency post Tripuri, Gandhi did incalculable harm to the prospects of an integrated nation and paved the way for a prospective Partition that became a reality within a decade. By disempowering Bose, isolating him from the political mainstream, foiling him in his political propaganda as an independent Congress worker, ousting him thereafter from the party itself, Gandhi in effect forced Bose into self-imposed exile to seek alien assistance for freedom. He, thus, significantly weakened the Congress and empowered Jinnah's All India Muslim League to come powerfully into the limelight, removed from the national scene the one enemy of the Raj they feared the most and, thus, helped forge a perfidious alliance between the Raj and the League that was bent upon dismembering the nation in the event of independence.

Jinnah could have been well contained by a totally secular Bose who separated 'the State and the Church' in his approach to governance and would not allow theocratic influences to interfere with the administration of the State. As such Jinnah would have been more amenable to accepting the Bose solution to the communal problem and it may be conjectured that Partition could have been avoided thus. That Gandhi thought otherwise and always entwined religion with politics led Jinnah to toughen his stand on the communal issue and demand for a separate State to protect the Indian Muslims from majoritarian oppression. Gandhi failed to convince him that his fears were unfounded and that harmony would prevail despite the Hindus holding the numerical superiority.

The 1940s saw the rise of communal frenzy to a fever pitch that eventually led to Partition. Bose was abroad soliciting foreign help for freedom. It was in his absence that the British worked on the weakening links within the Congress and thrust the League forward as an alternative political option for the 10 crore Muslims to en masse cling to. Thus the British did deliberately as the follow-up programme to their longstanding policy of 'Divide and Rule'. The Ramsay MacDonald measures to divide the polity early on and the even earlier founding of the 'All India Muslim League' to provide for a political balancing act to the Congress, all these designs were now beginning to pay their dividend as India stood on the threshold of a divided Dominion status. Bose who was urgently needed in the national scene had been made an outcast by Gandhi and, so, he could not contribute to arresting this cancerous growth of corrosive communalism. Alone and ageing, forsaken and forgotten by his younger comrades in Nehru and Patel who all but neglected to consult the Mahatma in their strategic moves ahead and relied instead on making common cause with the British for a quick resolution to the Independence issue, the Sage of Sabarmati wondered if he had indeed laid his bet on the wrong horse on this race for freedom. Would it were that his other son in Subhas had been there at this critical hour of the nation's destiny to lend him support where his protégé in Nehru had let him down.

These were the thoughts of the Mahatma in those painful penultimate hours when blood flowed freely on the streets of Bengal and the Punjab to precipitate Partition in a perfidious way. No amount of persuasion to avoid Partition worked with Jinnah as an intransigent Nehru, eyeing the Prime Minister's portfolio, stood in the way of the Mahatma's total capitulation to the League's demands, and as an intransigent Jinnah refused to be reassured by Gandhi's pledge for perpetual Hindu-Muslim peace. The Great Calcutta Killing of 16 August, 1946 and the subsequent Noakhali massacre of the Hindus by the Muslims over and with Jinnah and Suhrawardy's declared threats of continuous like Hindu carnage, the Congress, devoid of a well-disciplined army of workers, caved in to such pressure and acceded to the demand for Partition just as the British had always wanted.

Now let us cast a glance at the past and see what happened at Haripura, 1938. When the young left-wing of the Congress started gaining in popularity in the mid-thirties, Gandhi thought it expedient to keep his reins on them by nominating them to the Congress Presidency. Thus, Nehru became President on 1936 and 1937 and it was deemed necessary to nominate Bose the following year. There was nothing magnanimous about it. It was purely political expediency that determined the choice of President to keep Gandhian moderation in control over rising radical left-wing demands that threatened the future of passive politics as the mainstay of the Congress.

So, Bose became the youngest President at the age of 44 and Haripura offered him the occasion to outline his principles and programmes of resistance to continued British occupation in India. But the Presidential speech was so radical that the Mahatma was not only miffed but in a state of consternation. Bose pronounced the necessity of the Congress rank and file to organise themselves into a well-disciplined army of non-violent workers who could take up the cause of national reconstruction. But the Mahatma read deeper into it. He smelled growing radicalism within the Congress with not only its consequential dangers of disarray with the movement, Governmental repression, possibly the banning of the organisation, but also the dangerous implication in the word 'army' that gave the scent of an impending move towards violent revolutionary methods that would jeopardise the entire passive politics of the patriarch.

Written by Sugata Bose