THE TWO BOSES WHO DELIVERED THE BRITISH THE COUP DE GRACE

THE TWO BOSES WHO DELIVERED THE BRITISH THE COUP DE GRACE

The duo that freed India, now neglected to India's misfortune.

A country that is ungrateful finds it difficult to rise. India since independence has had to overcome numerous hurdles which have hindered her progress, reduced its pace and relegated her to being one of the major players in the world of geopolitics today where she could have been in a far more preeminent position were she to officially recognise the contributions of her revolutionary heroes who freed her from colonial bondage. Alas, that was not to be. Hence, her present predicament with political factions tearing the polity apart. A national sense has not developed in sufficient measure as yet among large sections of the citizenry, titular components of the nation that they are without obligations of unconditional nationalism that would have mightily strengthened the nation.

Rash Behari Bose engineered two revolutions. The first one was staged at the height of the First World War, the Ghadar Revolution which was aborted in India but broke out in Singapore nonetheless where it was most brutally crushed. At home traitor Kripal Singh undid the revolution at the penultimate moment. Rash Behari escaped to Japan and regrouped forces abroad to prepare for the second assault.

Earlier Rash Behari Bose had bombed Viceroy Lord Hardinge in 1912 along with accomplice Basanta Kumar Biswas. Biswas was betrayed unto the British by a family member and was hanged. Bose went underground, making multiple daring escapes in disguise till he finally hoodwinked the British authorities in the guise of P.N.Tagore to Japan. There he had to live underground for years with the British demanding of the Japanese his extradition. Finally, with help from prominent Japanese politicians and revolutionaries and with altered geopolitical situation Japan allowed him citizenship and Bose, now married to a Japanese lady, settled in protected peace as the son-in-law of the Nakamuraya family of bakery fame.

Rash Behari Bose had to change residence eleven times in Japan to avoid arrest and extradition to India. Wife Toshiko did all of housekeeping and liason and sheltered her husband from harm. But the strain was too much for this wonderful woman, India's best friend, and she passed away untimely leaving behind two children, a son and a daughter, and a grieving husband who never married again.

From now on Bose's mother-in-law took care of the children as Bose dived deep into activating support across East Asia for a pan-Asia revolution against British colonial occupation of Asia. His target was to relieve Asia of European colonialisation. To this end he focussed his considerable energy. At home he developed the Nakamuraya bakery, innovating and introducing Indian curries which became a rage and continues to be so till date. The rest of his hours were spent in garnering Japanese support for the cause of India's independence and for organising a pan-Asian movement against British colonialism. He was ably supported in his work by an Indian by the name A.M. Nair.

Meanwhile in India, Subhas Chandra Bose, protégé of the veteran leader Chittaranjan Das, was going strong and slowly emerging as one of the two leftist leaders of the Congress along with Jawaharlal Nehru. Deemed a dangerous revolutionary with secret links to the extreme Bengal revolutionaries, Bose spent the bulk of his time in incarceration in British India and in exile in Europe. He established international links with revolutionaries abroad and after his second term as Congress President was humiliated into expulsion from the party whereupon he embarked upon one of the most momentous journeys abroad in history, having escaped from house-arrest in a most daring adventurous bid. Calcutta-Gomoh-Peshawar-Kabul-Moscow-Berlin-Sumatra-Tokyo-Singapore-Rangoon-Andaman-Imphal-Rangoon-Singapore-Bangkok-Saigon-Taihoku -- this was the circuitous route that the hero took before he simply disappeared into the mist post 17 August, 1945.

Where did the two Boses converge then? Well, this was during the Second World War when in Singapore Rash Behari Bose handed over the charge of the Indian Independence League which he had earlier founded and days later the reins of the Indian National Army to Subhas Chandra Bose. The ageing Rash Behari found the younger Subhas the man of the moment who could fittingly lead India unto independence.

On 21 October, 1943 Subhas Chandra Bose formed his Provisional Government of Free India in Singapore. Two days later he declared war on the Anglo-American Alliance. India was now provisionally free by Bose's declaration and her independent status was recognised by eleven nations of the Axis Alliance. Back home the Quit India Movement of Gandhi had fizzled out and the Congress leadership were in prison. It was from now on that expatriate Indians took charge of India's independence.

There from distant Singapore and Tokyo the ailing Rash Behari watched proceedings as the Indian National Army backed up by the Nipponese forces led the assault on British India till it had freed 300 sq. km of British Indian territory in Imphal. An unusually heavy monsoon, flipping fortunes of the Axis Powers in Europe and the resultant Japanese imperative for rearguard action to save the motherland forced the INA retreat whereupon heavy casualty to the tune of 26,000 dead tilted the scales of war in favour of the Allied Powers. Subhas Chandra Bose ordered the disbanding of his forces and in attempting yet another escape to favourable terrain to continue battle disappeared into thin air. Thereafter, there is a blank in history amid continuous surfacing of fantastic conspiracy theories of his return to India in the guise of a strange monk who was marshalling fresh forces to end Anglo-American hegemony in Asia. 

Rash Behari Bose had died in January, 1945, months before the nuked submission of imperial Japan to the Allied Powers. He died a hero in Japan, having been honoured with the Second Order of the Rising Sun by Emperor Hirohito, the highest civilian honour for a non-royal. Here Subhas Chandra Bose disappeared, never to return.

There have been countless revolutionaries for India's freedom whose names were 'writ in water', to quote the English poet Keats. They had this revolutionary code of absolute secrecy which meant that they themselves destroyed evidence of their revolutionary activities. But that does not mean that free India should fail to remember them even if they had wanted to erase their names from history but could not when their names and activities were recorded by British intelligence. It is a dastardly desertion of these leonine souls by successive governments of free India for which we are paying the price today. 

As we survey the political spectrum today and the polity that it is ruled over by these opportunists, we notice even in the appalling darkness a stream of light penetrating through clouds of despair, and it is this unifying reverence of one and all for our revolutionaries for freedom, foremost among whom are Netaji, Rash Behari Bose, Bhagat Singh, Chandrasekhar Azad, Ramprasad Bismil, Khudiram Bose, Benoy-Badal-Dinesh, Masterda Surjya Sen, the Chapekar brothers, Udham Singh, Madanlal Dhingra, Durga Bhavi, Jatin Das, Bagha Jatin, Ullaskar Dutta, Batukeshwar Dutta and a whole host of others. Countless heroes and heroines have sacrificed their lives at the scaffold and before the bayonet and the bullet to free the motherland from her colonial shackles. That the political dispensation post-independence chose to ignore them and allow them to sink into oblivion could not quite achieve the said purpose as public memory survived and was reinforced, nonetheless, through stray sources, odd literature, oral transmission and diligent research by concerned historians who worked outside the ambit of governmental influence to bring to light facts of the freedom struggle that lay thus far beyond easy audience reach. The internet has facilitated this process of mass dissemination of data and now the nation is becoming increasingly aware of the exploits of these daring daughters and sons of Mother India. Truth is triumphing at last. And what do we see in this growing awareness? The unifying reverence of the people of India, cutting across borders of class, caste, community and creed for these sacrificing souls, the valorous sons and daughters of the soil. Here we see a seamless unity among the otherwise disjointed factions of the polity. And here lies the hope of future India to forge a bond of unity among the diverse peoples that animate this great land.

Written by Sugata Bose