TREACHERY AT TRIPURI AND ITS FALLOUT
Gandhi played into the hands of Jinnah by getting Subhas Bose ousted from the Congress. He then favoured the weak Nehru to the exclusion of the more robust Patel and further weakened post-Partition prospects of India.
Had Gandhi retired after Bose won the Tripuri Presidential elections, the motherland would have been spared her martyrdom. For in dismemberment she is slowly dying, a fate which only a robust reunification can alter and prevent.
Gandhi's plotting from behind the curtains to oust Subhas from the Presidential position, then from all offices of the Congress and, finally, from Congress itself proved to be the turning point in the nation's history and altered her destiny for good. Partition was from here on a much stronger possibility with Jinnah gaining ground under the patronage of the British who would, they made sure, partition their colony as and when would leave it under the pressure of circumstances.
The 1940s were years of not so much the struggle for national freedom within the ranks of the Congress as they were of the struggle to contain the League from dividing the country. The only real work for freedom came from abroad where Rash Behari Bose and Subhas Chandra Bose were working up an international alliance against the British. Their twin organisations in the Indian Independence League and the Indian National Army followed by the Provisional Government of Free India dealt the sledgehammer blow against the very foundations of the British Empire and shook it to its precipitous collapse.
It is difficult to say whether Partition could have been avoided in the end, for the intransigence of the Muslims in regard to peaceful coexistence with the Hindus might have precipitated it at any rate in the long run as even today the threat looms large in independent India despite the cataclysmic Partition that did, after all, take place as an apparent solution to the communal problem then. For the Muslims, so long as they are held by allegiance to theocratic dictates of their clergy who, in practical terms, interpret for them their scriptural commands, are always culpable to a refusal to live with the major community, the Hindus, and this could have post 1947 have precipitated Partition unless, of course, if Netaji managed to March in with his Indian National Army to separate the State from the Church, so to say, in the real sense and abolish all theocratic indulgences that, in the altered scenario, successive governments of free India have since independence catered to and helped flourish.
But with Bose out of the way post 1945, the British made a last-ditch effort to squash the move for freedom with ruthless repression of the INA prisoners of war in their transit camps in Barasat, Neelgunge and Jhikargachha. Murdering thousands of soldiers overnight, they wanted to silence all who could potentially spread the message of Netaji's War of Liberation with Japanese help across the Eastern frontier. The filtering of the dangerous disloyalty of so many soldiers of the British Indian Army to join the ranks of the Azad Hind Fauj was a real threat that the British feared, information that could ignite mass rebellion with the existent ranks of the Indian soldiers under British command and trigger off a revolution that would make mincemeat of the Empire in no time. This was the fear and to prevent the leakage of information on the exploits of the INA and its charismatic leader, Netaji Bose, the British flouted all norms of the Geneva Convention to mass-murder the INA prisoners of war.
By way of a final act of exposure of the 'treachery' of the defected soldiers of the British Indian Army who formed the Indian National Army, the British Indian Government called for the Red Fort Trials of three topmost officers of the INA. This was by way of conventional court marshalling of officers who had violated the soldier's vow of unflinching loyalty the Crown unto death. Once convicted and suitably sentenced to death, the British -- high-handed as they were with regard to their Indian soldiers -- thought that the effect of the judgement would be on all other officers as well and would serve a notice to them to maintain absolute loyalty to the King Emperor. But the move backfired. It boomeranged on the British with the court proceedings making headlines in all national dailies, allowing countless millions of tyrannised Indians to get to know for the first time in blooming detail what their departed leader, Netaji, and his INA had done for liberating India.
Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, Prem Kumar Sehgal and Shah Nawaz Khan became in the eyes of the nation the prospective martyrs to freedom. The whole country was stirred like never after the Revolt of 1857.
Written by Sugata Bose
Gandhi played into the hands of Jinnah by getting Subhas Bose ousted from the Congress. He then favoured the weak Nehru to the exclusion of the more robust Patel and further weakened post-Partition prospects of India.
Had Gandhi retired after Bose won the Tripuri Presidential elections, the motherland would have been spared her martyrdom. For in dismemberment she is slowly dying, a fate which only a robust reunification can alter and prevent.
Gandhi's plotting from behind the curtains to oust Subhas from the Presidential position, then from all offices of the Congress and, finally, from Congress itself proved to be the turning point in the nation's history and altered her destiny for good. Partition was from here on a much stronger possibility with Jinnah gaining ground under the patronage of the British who would, they made sure, partition their colony as and when would leave it under the pressure of circumstances.
The 1940s were years of not so much the struggle for national freedom within the ranks of the Congress as they were of the struggle to contain the League from dividing the country. The only real work for freedom came from abroad where Rash Behari Bose and Subhas Chandra Bose were working up an international alliance against the British. Their twin organisations in the Indian Independence League and the Indian National Army followed by the Provisional Government of Free India dealt the sledgehammer blow against the very foundations of the British Empire and shook it to its precipitous collapse.
It is difficult to say whether Partition could have been avoided in the end, for the intransigence of the Muslims in regard to peaceful coexistence with the Hindus might have precipitated it at any rate in the long run as even today the threat looms large in independent India despite the cataclysmic Partition that did, after all, take place as an apparent solution to the communal problem then. For the Muslims, so long as they are held by allegiance to theocratic dictates of their clergy who, in practical terms, interpret for them their scriptural commands, are always culpable to a refusal to live with the major community, the Hindus, and this could have post 1947 have precipitated Partition unless, of course, if Netaji managed to March in with his Indian National Army to separate the State from the Church, so to say, in the real sense and abolish all theocratic indulgences that, in the altered scenario, successive governments of free India have since independence catered to and helped flourish.
But with Bose out of the way post 1945, the British made a last-ditch effort to squash the move for freedom with ruthless repression of the INA prisoners of war in their transit camps in Barasat, Neelgunge and Jhikargachha. Murdering thousands of soldiers overnight, they wanted to silence all who could potentially spread the message of Netaji's War of Liberation with Japanese help across the Eastern frontier. The filtering of the dangerous disloyalty of so many soldiers of the British Indian Army to join the ranks of the Azad Hind Fauj was a real threat that the British feared, information that could ignite mass rebellion with the existent ranks of the Indian soldiers under British command and trigger off a revolution that would make mincemeat of the Empire in no time. This was the fear and to prevent the leakage of information on the exploits of the INA and its charismatic leader, Netaji Bose, the British flouted all norms of the Geneva Convention to mass-murder the INA prisoners of war.
By way of a final act of exposure of the 'treachery' of the defected soldiers of the British Indian Army who formed the Indian National Army, the British Indian Government called for the Red Fort Trials of three topmost officers of the INA. This was by way of conventional court marshalling of officers who had violated the soldier's vow of unflinching loyalty the Crown unto death. Once convicted and suitably sentenced to death, the British -- high-handed as they were with regard to their Indian soldiers -- thought that the effect of the judgement would be on all other officers as well and would serve a notice to them to maintain absolute loyalty to the King Emperor. But the move backfired. It boomeranged on the British with the court proceedings making headlines in all national dailies, allowing countless millions of tyrannised Indians to get to know for the first time in blooming detail what their departed leader, Netaji, and his INA had done for liberating India.
Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, Prem Kumar Sehgal and Shah Nawaz Khan became in the eyes of the nation the prospective martyrs to freedom. The whole country was stirred like never after the Revolt of 1857.
Written by Sugata Bose
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