WHEN THE SHADOWS LENGTHEN

WHEN THE SHADOWS LENGTHEN 

INTRODUCTION 

To prevent the country from careering into the cult of violence with all its revolutionary dangerous consequences, Tagore was always on his guard and never supported extremist revolutionary activity going on in early 20th century. So was Gandhi. So were the early leaders, the Moderate Congressmen like Gokhale. But so what? There was the the godlike Vivekananda guiding the youth of Bengal the other way to taking up aggressive means to drive the British away. And he left behind his fiery spiritual daughter, Nivedita, to translate into action what his failed form could not accomplish within its short sojourn on earth.

SWAMIJI 

Swamiji, on the other hand, had exhorted the Bengal revolutionaries like Jatindranath Mukherjee, alias Bagha Jatin, Hemchandra Ghosh and others to drive away the British by any means and to devote their lives solely to that purpose alone. He had said that their only religion was then the extrication of the motherland from the octopus-hold of the corrupt colonists and securing for her political independence.

Swamiji died in 1902 but had lit the flame of freedom which after his death burst into a vast conflagration. The Bengal revolutionaries were all inspired by his teachings and carried his photograph and books with them, the latter, along with the Geeta, becoming their Gospel, their guiding text in revolutionary inspiration. Implicit in Swamiji lectures were hints on revolution which the discerning revolutionary leaders could decipher and disseminate among the firebrand youth of the day. Swamiji had even predicted the exact year of India's liberation. He was the Polestar of India's freedom by which revolutionaries navigated their way through the dark night of their onward advance unto either liberation or death in the bargain. 

TAGORE 

Quite in contrast to this, Tagore feared the country's sliding into revolutionary anarchy in the wake of sporadic political murder, dacoity to fund revolutionary work and so on, and never harboured sympathy for the cause, although he did highlight on several occasions in his writings the suffering of the common Indian at the hands of the unfeeling British officers. However, Tagore may be faulted for not writing in a forceful manner like Bankimchandra or Saratchandra in favour of the cause of India's freedom. His were rather barbed attacks on extremist revolutionary violence. On a positive note, though, he made oblique petitions for the cause of freedom but never quite the bold and intrepid literary expression or otherwise against the British that one would expect of a colonised people's most representative poet. 'Pather Daabi' of Saratchandra was a pointer to this effect, a novel which Tagore could not remotely replicate or originate amidst his diverse literary exhibition of the day. This is sad, indeed.

One more thing. Quite often we hear that Tagore's was the only voice of protest against the Jallianwala massacre when he renounced his knighthood of the British Empire. Undoubtedly a laudable effort, sincere and feeling for his fellow men, but did it take Tagore the felling of over a thousand innocent Indians to realize the barbarism, the brutality, the evil nature of the British regime? How could he, for heaven's sake, receive the knighthood in the first place from those British hands that had just the other day tightened the noose on the necks of Khudiram, Satyen and the like? Did Tagore do it right to become a knight of the evil British Crown which had already reduced colonised humans to beasts of burden? Or was he that naive that he thought the British to be the great civilisers of their debased subjects across the world, a cause to which he in rightful loyalty ought to contribute?

AUROBINDO  

The retirement of Aurobindo Ghosh from active political life was itself the severest blow revolutionary activity ever suffered in India. His was the mastermind behind all of India's early aspirations for freedom through armed action. But Aurobindo lacked planning and was temperamentally unsuited for the rigours of revolutionary life unlike his younger brother, Barindra, who was of sterner steel. Intellectual ignition is one thing and active bomb-making, figuratively speaking, quite another. So it was that Aurobindo inspired others to die for the cause -- Khudiram, Prafulla, Satyen, Kanailal and a host of others --, sent dozens to deathly exile across the seas in Andaman, but when himself confronted by the rigours of imprisonment for a year, quickly fell into 'spiritual trance' that required transportation of his divine self to the safe haven of French Pondicherry. This was the end of his active revolutionary life and the beginning of the end of India's early revolution as well, although not everybody followed suit, following his 'divine' calling. There were more valorous souls like Bagha Jatin, Rashbehari Bose, Sachindranath Sanyal, Hemchandra Ghosh, Surjya Sen and the budding boy, Subhas, who were all inspired by Swamiji unto death, who would not forsake the motherland's cause of freedom like Aurobindo apparently did, albeit for a supposedly 'higher cause, and who would yet ignite kindred souls to light up India with the fiery aspiration for freedom.

GANDHI 

Now to Gandhi. He was another one who stifled the revolutionary fervour of the people issuing spontaneously from the early uprisings of the 20th century. An import from South Africa when the country's revolutionary activity was in the lull, a man who was bent upon rendering justice to indentured Indians in that equatorial habitat for twenty years, Gandhi descended upon India like a timely messiah, a man of the masses, a 'prophet' with a mission but with a bleak vision that seriously questions his credibility to national leadership, at least now in hindsight. Even then the young eagle, Subhas Chandra Bose, freshly returned from England after relinquishing his I.C.S. service, did quiz Gandhi in erstwhile Bombay as to his plans and programmes prior to and post independence. Gandhi's lack of clarity in this regard dumbfounded him and in frustration he sought shelter under the wings of the celebrated C.R.Das. But that is not the subject matter of this essay. Gandhi's perverse opposition to revolutionary armed action, his complicity with the British in indistinctly distinct ways (subject to interpretation), his conniving with his coterie of sycophantic followers to oust Subhas Chandra Bose from the Congress, his mean manipulations, his deft maneuvering to help weaken revolutionary activity, to dampen public enthusiasm for the revolutionary cause (all no doubt with the noble intention to prevent spiritual India from going down the fascist Italy-way of the communist Russia-way) -- this is the core content being highlighted in this essay.

The point to be noted here is this that Gandhi, Tagore, Nehru, Patel, Azad and the like may have had noble intentions towards  in their pronounced leanings towards nonviolence and in their opposition to the creed of armed revolutionary resistance but they in effect diluted the manhood of the emerging nation that would have equipped them to fight manfully for independence. Compromise with the enemy was their key to winning freedom on friendly terms and here they sold the self-respect of the nation in no uncertain terms by not making the country rise up in arms as they should have or at least should not have tampered with and dulled the current of such manly endeavours evident elsewhere for independence. The fact that few today revere these seminal figures of yesterday as they do Netaji, Rashbehari Bose, Bhagat Singh, Surjya Sen, Chandrasekhar Azad, Ramprasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, Rajendranath Lahiri, Sachindranath Sanyal and the rest of the revolutionaries is because they find in these latter ones living illustrations of deathless love for the motherland, far more than the Gandhians ever remotely approached.

SUBHAS CHANDRA BOSE 

This one was the spirit-child of Swamiji, the revolutionary fulfilment, the harmony of a million melodies, concordant, discordant et al, the leaping lion of India's forward thrust for freedom, the soul of an suppressed race seeking succour, the aspiration of rising India along eternal paths to self-fulfilment, the Vivekananda Force in full flow that capsized the Crown's Colonial Liner mid-ocean whence it never rose again. 

Bose followed another Bose, Rashbehari by name, dangerous by consequence, who has shaken the citadels of the British Empire before seeking shelter in distant Japan to further his revolutionary resistance. Rashbehari was led by that luminous figure of Jatindranath Mukherjee (Bagha Jatin) who Charles Tegart had likened to Admiral Nelson after engaging in a titanic struggle with the patriot's might in Balasore and overpowering him with his overwhelming numerical and ammunition strength of police. Jatin Mukherjee failed to bring off the revolution via the arms supply by the Germans as the Hindu-German Conspiracy plot was foiled by a double agent in America. Rashbehari Bose failed to bring off the Ghadar Revolution as Kripal Singh betrayed the cause and the pan-Asian movement was aborted. Bose bombed Hardinge and escaped to Japan amidst treacherous conditions with his scalp valued at Rupees 100,000, a free booty for any who could hand him over to the British. But wily as the British were, Bose was wilier and he escaped from before their very nose in the guise of Tagore's cousin, P.N. Bose, straight to the Land of the Rising Sun.

These were valorous men who never found favour with Tagore, Gandhi, Nehru and the like on grounds of their different temperamental dispositions, philosophies and fears which they harboured about the eventual fate of revolutionary violence with regard to the polity's longterm larger interests. But these were the real 'salt of the earth' who struck fear in the hearts of the British and precipated circumstances eventually that ejected the dastardly colonizers from the holy soil.

RANI LAKSHMIBAI 

Subhas Chandra Bose. This was the man of the moment, the child of destiny, the climactic hero of this epic journey to freedom where a young heroine had first paved the path before effeminates stole the show. I mean the Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi. She did what men in their noble Nobel attire and Mahatma's loin cloth dared not, rather coaxed and cajoled a waking country towards a compromised peace with the dastardly demons who had for centuries sucjed the lifeblood of the motherland. Swamiji wept at the very mention of her name, saying that she was a goddess. Netaji named his women's regiment after her, she who had refused to relent but resisted every move if the British to take over her kingdom by diplomatic foulplay or by military force. She cried out when the British advanced their avaricious palm towards her domain, "Meri Jhansi nehi doongi." ("My Jhansi I shall not give up.") Yes, she indeed a lioness who fought to preserve freedom and, so, set up a tradition of valour which only virile men and women understood and not poets and scientists who accepted knighthood or Mahatmas who spun their way to increasing deliberations with an enemy hell-bent on looting India, despairing her to build Britain and eventually to permanently impair our motherland by dismembering her beyond redemption. Yes, these were the effeminates that followed the one lioness who dived on her open sword to die when encircled in battle by the enemy, but not after dealing death-blows to quite a number of them.

THE INDIAN NATIONAL ARMY -- THE BUILD-UP AND THE WAR 

Subhas Chandra Bose was always in revolutionary touch with his network spread far and wide despite his innocuous Congress work. For this suspected offence he was imprisoned time and again -- eleven times in all -- and exiled abroad as well so that he could be kept out of dangerous contact with the extreme elements working for India's independence. He was cyanide for the Crown and the Crown was scarce prepared to die out of his contagion. Bose had external enemies in the British, true, but he had internal enemies far worse as is often the case with an enslaved race that knows not what patriotism in real earnest is. The Congress High Command was hostile to Bose right from early days but the hostility grew with the growing feathers of the fledgling, the wily leaders led by their violent votary of nonviolence -- for even psychological violence, direct or directed from behind curtains, is violence after all -- uniting to malign, maul and marginalize the   maverick who could not be mandated to mow grass at the Mahatma's behest like he majority has acquiesced to doing. Consequently, despite being the most dedicated of the lot, a fighter par excellence whose character shone with a lustre that is rare among revolutionaries, whose qualities of head and heart and hand were the stuff of fantasies and not concrete reality where means are meagre and men measly, despite it all, this young eagle from Bengal was kept at bay by the Sage of Sabarmati, threatening as he seemed by his revolutionary turn of mind to the moderate Mahatma.

"Bose has to be kept at bay. So, promote Jawaharlal who can be coaxed and cajoled into submission. These Bengalis are dangerous. They simply will not listen. I have seen this right from the days of the Swadeshi, Aurobindo, Barin, Jatin Mukherjee, Rashbehari, Khudiram, Basanta Biswas, Hemchandra, Sachin Sanyal, Rajendra Lahiri et al. The list seems endless but they will have to be reigned in. No, no, Subhas cannot be allowed to bloom into a bloody revolutionary while remaining within the ranks of the Congress. He must be curbed." So mused the Mahatma. And Jawaharlal seemed to be the way.

But the leftist Jawaharlal had much in common with the leftist Subhas and the duo combined would be dangerous. So, Jawaharlal was given early patronage by the paterfamilias of the party who, though, was not even a four anna member of the Congress ever even as he dictated terms to it as extra-constitutional authority which Congressmen acceded to on account of the Mahatma's mass following. They had no other alternative, it seems, for even the repressed revolutionaries of Bengal, a large section of them, joined in the ranks of the Mahatma's bandwagon, casting in their lot while gathering strength for a fresh assault on the Raj. In this regard it must be mentioned, though, that not all subscribed to the Mahatma's dictates and one such was revolutionary Sachindranath Sanyal who argued with Gandhi over the journal 'Young India' for four years about the relative merits of armed struggle and passive Gandhian nonviolence. Sachin Sanyal and the like could never be subdued by dubious Gandhian logic and remained true to their revolutionary ways and philosophy right till their incarcerated insulting end which independent India under Nehru and his successors have much to answer for.

Chittaranjan Das died in 1925 and Subhas was left politically orphaned. But intermittent activity, incarceration, deportation and exile abroad kept the years rolling till with gathered experience and grown stature Bose was now a force to reckon with and Gandhi was forced to take sufficient notice of him to preserve his own preeminence in the party and the polity. The leftists within the Congress were growing too strong with Bose increasing his influence among them by the day. There was no way he could be ignored anymore. So, the masterstroke of the Mahatma comes and Bose is made President of the Congress for its 1938 Haripura Session.

Bose has been fed the fodder but is he cattle that he can be tamed thus? He is a veritable lion in leap, the springing tiger of Bengal, the messiah of modern India, Vivekananda reborn in altered garb, condensed India yet again. Bose quickly rose to the occasion and took to the task of nation-building, planning for the immediate ends and for the future development of India. He was way ahead of his times, a visionary looking deep into India's past and peering into the future through the dense foggy atmosphere of the day. But he was unerring in his diagnosis of India's maladies and in his prescription for their cure. One thing he had overlooked, though, or perhaps even this he did not but was incapable of bypassing or overcoming, and it was the wily maneuvering of the Mahatma and his cronies in the Congress when they had to anyhow subdue the duly elected Rashtrapati.

Haripura could have been the turning point in India's history. The plans and programmes charted out by Subhas Chandra Bose in a brilliant Presidential speech were later partly implemented by independent India but some of the more radical means and methods suggested by him alarmed the Mahatma. It was clear to the wily old man that Bose had come of age and that, with his arrival, the youth of India had arrived onto the national scene which in derivative terms implied that the days of the Mahatma at the helm of affairs dictating terms was over. The Apostle of Peace smelled war in Bose's speech, war against his domination, and he could sense his impending overthrow from his seat of power. This could not be. Bose was compromising India's future with the threat of revolutionary violence which was against the thread of Indian civilization as the Mahatma understood. Bose was dangerous and had to be stopped. Favouring him with Presidency could not win him over. Rather it backfired. Now the plotting began.

Tripuri saw the culmination of the corruption that sank the Mahatma and his coterie to abysmal depths. The Presidential speech by Bose at Haripura had alarmed Gandhi and he now resorted to vile tactics to marginalize Bose. To begin with he asked Bose not to run for re-election for the Presidency at Tripuri but Bose insisted on doing exactly so. Matters came to a head when the Mahatma fielded his nominee, Pattabhi Sitaramaiyya, against Bose. Bose mustered all leftist forces within the Congress and handsomely defeated the Mahatma's candidate. Gandhi made a double-edged public statement that Pattabhi's defeat was his own defeat which Bose reckoned as unfortunate and wrongly political. From now on the maneuvering of the Gandhi wing reached its nadir and India's fortunes sank.

Soon the Tripuri Congress session saw political ugliness sink to perfidious proportions when at the Mahatma's behest the Congress Working Committee enmasse resigned, making it impossible for the President to conduct affairs. Consequently, Bose met the Mahatma to resolve the crisis but the latter pretended innocence of the whole affair and exhorted Bose to form his own Working Committee instead which he refused in order to avoid splitting up Congress along the line of current differences.  

CONCLUSION

History avenges past injustices and renders justice to past wrongs. So are these seminal figures of the freedom movement being judged by popular conception about their deeds and misdeeds. None can now fault the masses for their wrath at these leaders who often played with India's fortunes the wrong way despite doubtlessly -- at least in their minds or in that of their projected selves -- harbouring noble intentions towards her developing fate. That they have dismembered the motherland and destroyed her hopes in mutilated motion can hardly absolve them today in the growing consciousness of the masses. So must they suffer while the revolutionaries see their late resurrection. 

Written by Sugata Bose