Incarnations

by Sunil Khilnani

  Still, virtually no other pre-Independence Indian leader, including Nehru, considered hard power as essential as Bose. He hadn’t fought in the Great War—his bad eyesight rendered him fit only for a student defense force, where he developed an abiding taste for uniforms and parades—but he took to heart what he saw as the conflict’s lesson. “The war had shown,” he wrote, “that a nation that did not possess military strength could not hope to preserve its independence.”

  Even in the years when he was closest, emotionally, to his Congress colleagues, this difference kept him somewhat aloof. In a photograph taken at the 1928 Congress session in Calcutta, amid a rank of party leaders dressed in Indian styles (kurtas and dhotis, sherwanis, turbans, and Gandhi caps), stands what looks like a well-decorated officer of the Japanese Imperial Army. It’s Bose, in the jackboots, jodhpurs, buckle, cap, and baton that, in addition to his spectacles, would become his trademark. The outfit evoked the combat he longed for but had not known. It would take another war for the costume role to become real.

  * * *

  In 1942, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi chief of propaganda, made an excited if somewhat underevidenced entry in his diary: “Bose’s appeal has made a deep impression on world opinion.” Bose, now in Berlin after scarpering from his Calcutta house arrest, had just given his first shortwave radio broadcast, telling listeners in India and elsewhere that the “enemies of British imperialism are today the natural allies of India.” He added, “We shall heartily cooperate with all those who will help us in overthrowing the common enemy.”

  What had happened in the 1930s to drive him here? Bose, who wasn’t a Nazi, recognized that Germany might be “fascist or imperialist, ruthless or cruel,” but he was desperate for action after a decade of jail, exile, incrementalism, and Congress infighting, which had given him a taste of power and then withdrawn it. He’d had enough talk of nonviolence and passive resistance.

  Bose had broken formally with Gandhi in 1933, coauthoring a political manifesto that urged the Congress to find a new leader, a new principle, and a new method. Gandhi responded in the way he did to most of his occasional challengers: asphyxiate the opponent with compassion and accommodation, then bring him back into the fold. When Bose finished a prison stint in 1937, Gandhi arranged his election as Congress president, at a moment when Indian political representation had markedly increased. In the middle part of the decade, Britain had expanded the Indian franchise sixfold and created eleven elected provincial assemblies with legislative powers. By 1938, Congress had formed governments in seven of these.

  With these legislative levers in Indian hands, there seemed to Bose to be a genuine chance to pursue his political agenda: to press for sovereign powers, industrialization, and population control. But his leftist calls for land reform and labor rights had unsettled the big landowners and industrialists (men such as G. D. Birla), on whose support Gandhi and Congress depended. That year, Bose won reelection despite Gandhi’s opposition, but in 1939, Gandhi orchestrated his removal, describing him in one letter as the Congress family’s “spoilt child.” Bose, militant as ever, was further sidelined by another stint in prison, where he was appalled, if not surprised, by Gandhi’s pacifist reaction to the Second World War.

  Bose believed that, after his private war expelled the British, Free India would achieve a historical synthesis of fascism and communism, the two progressive currents of modern times. Installed in Berlin, he admired German discipline and planning, especially Germany’s ability to strike with lightning military speed. Yet what he couldn’t see, through his patriotism and self-belief, was that India’s insignificance as a global entity was part of the reason his war had not yet begun.

  He had intended to cull troops from around fifteen thousand Indians captured by the Germans, but so far only a few thousand captives agreed to join his Free Indian Legion and swear allegiance to Hitler and him. Meanwhile, he waited for Hitler to meet with him or declare his support for Indian independence. Instead, Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941—a disaster for Bose’s plans. As Bose knew, in a war between Germany and Russia, Indians would side with Russia, whose ideology was more attractive to a poor, colonized people. His hopes of marching by land across Afghanistan and to India evaporated.

  So where did that leave Bose in Berlin? Instead of leading a beautiful struggle, he was a minor propaganda tool: Lord Haw-Haw with a Bengali accent, a role he was tiring of but would have to endure for another two years. A visitor to his hotel room in the summer of 1941 found Bose sitting in the lotus position, deep in gloom, peering down at a map of the world. His eyes swiveled to Japan.

  * * *

  To get to Japan undetected, the only way was under the seas. He convinced the Germans to put him in a U-boat for half the journey, then transferred mid-ocean to a Japanese submarine. British intelligence was following the craft as it powered toward Tokyo, but chose not to intercept it. They were after bigger fish, and didn’t want to reveal to Japan that its code had been broken. Bose had escaped again. His new incarnation was as leader of the Japanese-supported Indian National Army. This time, his troops awaited him: Indian prisoners of war who had been captured when the British garrison of Singapore fell in February 1942.

  The following year, Bose launched his new campaign, Chalo Delhi (Onward to Delhi), an echo of the sepoys’ cry of 1857. The Malay Peninsula contained a large Indian diaspora, and an ornately uniformed Bose toured it in an open-topped Dodge, addressing vast audiences and raising money and recruits; his men intimidated and occasionally tortured those who denied him. The destitute agricultural workers who joined him became known as “rice soldiers.” He also raised a several-hundred-strong women’s regiment, named after the Rani of Jhansi (see 23, Lakshmi Bai). Overall, his army grew to somewhere between thirty thousand and fifty thousand fighters, men and women who probably didn’t realize that their charismatic, uniformed leader had no military experience.

  By now, India had become a prize in the war, and interest in Bose increased accordingly. For the Axis powers, the conquest of India would enable the Japanese and German military theaters to come much closer to connecting. For the Allies, with the collapse of Britain in Southeast Asia, holding on to India was vital; it was a base from which to provision Chiang Kai-shek in China and guard supply routes up to Russia, and otherwise hinder further Axis expansion.

  Back in India, the entire senior Congress leadership was in jail. Gandhi had rejected British entreaties to support the war, instead launching the Quit India movement in 1942—a collective do-or-die effort to throw the British out. The arrests aborted Gandhi’s satyagraha, or “passive resistance,” and left Bose, for now, the only freedom fighter standing—on Japanese-held soil. He declared himself the head of Azad Hind, an Indian government in exile, and began planning his future state, from provincial structures and taxation down to table manners. He envisioned battling his way to India, and taking control, in about a year. His arguments helped convince the already overextended Japanese to push into India from Burma, through Arakan and across the Imphal plain. When he reached Bengal, he told them, he would be able to incite a revolt that would destroy the British Empire.

  But Bose’s blindspot had traveled with him. Here, as in Berlin, he was less a leader than a persuasive power to be exploited. Although he imagined his army spearheading the campaign into India—according to the historian and strategic analyst Srinath Raghavan, Bose “insisted that the first drop of blood which should be shed in the course of the offensive should be Indian”—the Japanese considered his soldiers poor fighters, useful primarily for building and repairing roads and bridges, and carrying supplies. Only a modest “Bose Brigade” was allowed at the front, while operational command remained with the Japanese. With Bose sidelined in Rangoon, his soldiers (poorly supplied, poorly equipped, and then split between battalions) now marched toward the worst land defeat ever suffered by a Japanese army.

  Even as Bose’s soldiers succumbed to death, disease, starvation, desertion, and defection to t
he British, they didn’t quite extinguish his hope of governing India. Congress leaders were now free, negotiating again with the British and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (39). Bose understood there was no going back to the family—unless, just maybe, he approached the problem from a different direction, with the help of another great power.

  The fascists having failed him, he decided to escape to Soviet Russia. A few months later, just days after the Japanese surrender, and with the Soviets now also at war with Japan, he boarded a plane heading for Russian territory (exactly where remains unclear). But as it took off after a fuel stop in Taipei, it crashed and burned.

  * * *

  If Bose is today regarded as the most formidable military leader of the nationalist movement, it’s because he was the only one. Nationalist hagiography abhors a vacuum. Yet the historical record shows no particular gift for military strategy or leading troops; instead, he possessed courage, moral myopia, and a capacity for outlandish reinvention that rivaled his nemesis Gandhi’s whenever faced with an impediment to the goal of independence. He was a single-minded instrumentalist, in pursuit of great powers to serve his ends, but underestimating always the peripherality of his goals to theirs.

  Nevertheless, his unpredictability became a tangential pressure in the British decision to resume negotiations with more moderate leaders instead of keeping them imprisoned. A wild-card warrior such as Bose made a Nehru seem as manageable as a houseplant. So, in this way, Bose enabled the final thrust toward a freedom he would never see.

  But India may have benefited even more broadly from its own renegade Trotsky. Bose’s years of arguing against the conventional wisdom did much to clarify the thinking of his Indian opponents. And his decision to partner with two of the titanic powers of his time (with the Soviets seemingly next) helped entrench a post-Independence resistance to military pacts and Great Power alliances.

  Nehru had been dismayed by his old friend’s pact with the Nazis, saying, “It is a bad thing psychologically for the Indian masses to think in terms of being liberated by an outside agency.” As Nehru followed Bose’s course from Berlin to Tokyo, Singapore, and Rangoon, he saw the strategic shortcomings, too. The concerns of a poor, militarily weak nation didn’t really rate in the eyes of the leading powers. In any divergence of values or goals, the interests that prevailed would not be India’s.

  That skepticism—the inverse of Bose’s magical thinking—was turned into policy when Nehru became the first prime minister, giving the life of Bose one of the great ironic codas in modern Indian history. In the end, the convinced aligner and advocate of hard power helped underwrite independent India’s commitment to the accumulation of soft power and to staying resolutely nonaligned.

  38

  GANDHI

  “In the Palm of Our Hands”

  1869–1948

  Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat, is named after the region’s most famous son, Mohandas Gandhi—the Mahatma. It’s a new, well-planned city, spacious, with good infrastructure, and some years ago I happened to watch a film there about the plot to kill Gandhi. As the screen assassin pumped bullets into Gandhi’s body, the audience erupted into wild applause and cheers.

  In many parts of the world, Gandhi is virtually a saint, an icon who transcends political and national divisions. In 2015, a hundred years after Gandhi began his campaign against British rule in India, a statue of him was put up in London’s Parliament Square. He seems to be gazing almost idly at the buildings from which the world’s largest empire was run—the one he helped to bring down.

  Protect me from my friends, flatterers, and followers, Gandhi once said. But these days he has as many foes, especially in India. Hindu right-wingers, whose glee I heard that evening in the city that carries his name, despise him as an appeaser of Muslims, and blame him for India’s Partition. Others regret his induction of Hindu rhetoric and symbols into Indian nationalism, revile him for his refusal to disavow caste, believe he betrayed the laboring classes, and are appalled at his views on women. Modernizers and advocates of Indian hard power dismiss his anti-industrialism and pacifism.

  It is right that Gandhi should have enemies, and unsurprising that he provokes so many angles of attack. I can’t imagine he would have expected otherwise. He never saw himself as a model. He saw himself as an incitement. His entire life was an argument—or, rather, a series of arguments—with the world. That life stretched across three continents, and a third of it was lived outside India. It also spanned the most murderous decades in human history: Gandhi lived through the Boer War and the suppression of African rebellions, through two World Wars, and the Partition of the Indian subcontinent—with some personal experience of all of them.

  Gandhi’s eccentricities make it hard to get his measure. It’s clear to me that he was a political figure who ranks beside a very small number of his contemporaries: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—men who remade the modern world. Except that Gandhi, unlike the rest, chose to try through nonviolence. Also unlike those men, Gandhi never commanded a state, and his leadership of the Indian national movement was episodic. He was at the center of agitations, or led negotiations with the British, only for brief periods: from 1920 to 1922, when he launched his first Indian civil disobedience campaign; during his Salt Satyagraha of the early 1930s; and in the years leading to his final mass protest, Quit India, in 1942. Each of these mobilizations was followed by spells in prison, and in between were long periods when he retreated to one of his several ashrams.

  Yet in a society with no history of large-scale collective action, where politics was for most a domain of distant and spectacular power, Gandhi made people believe that they could make a difference. He built a movement, shaped a nationalist imagination, and expanded the world’s repertoire of dissent, protest, and peaceful disagreement.

  His achievement in part had to do with the force of his own personality: Gandhi had a voracious appetite for self-improvement (however quirky), an openness to experiment with ways of living, and a remarkable imperviousness to embarrassment. He was a quick assimilator of elements from other cultures and traditions, repurposing them to express himself in direct and startling ways.

  His impact also had to do with the nature of his opponent. British imperialism justified itself in terms of a liberal ideology of constitutional government and the rule of law. Yet the Raj, though cloaked in British ideals, was premised on the routine use of draconian “emergency” powers and coercive force to control dissent and opposition. Gandhi became a master at revealing the fault lines and contradictions of the liberal imperial state, subverting its pretensions, and showing it to be a violence-dispensing machine.

  There was a third element: his command of the media, Indian and global. Europe and the subcontinent became linked by the telegraph just around the time of Gandhi’s birth, and his life coincided with the rise of a new type of political power: public opinion. In the West and many parts of Asia, as states raced to amass military might, they also recognized the need to develop methods of propaganda. Gandhi became a master at using his own image, body, and words to shape global opinion in a way that undermined imperial self-justifications.

  What would India be if Gandhi had not lived? It would still have gained independence from colonial rule, but it would have taken a more violent and divisive path, leaving legacies yet more bitter than they are today. Gandhi made himself into a unifying ideal for Indians, established discussion and negotiation as the way they did politics (though he’d resort to coercive fasts unto death when negotiations weren’t going his way), and did much to lessen their sense of victimhood.

  The India he left behind remained a flawed place. It is true that he did not abolish untouchability. But he did delegitimize it. It is true that he failed to bring about unity between Hindus and Muslims. But he did make many Indians feel shame when religious violence and killings occurred. Unlike a Stalin or a Mao, who tried to change the imagination of their people by wielding state power, Gandhi used imagination to try to change the nat
ure of power and the state.

  * * *

  The most famous modern Indian might not have become famous if he had stayed in India. His years abroad, especially two decades in South Africa, enabled him to break free of many social conventions, to explore different kinds of intimacy, and to build political associations across religious and caste divides. He would draw upon this experience to invent, back in India, a different way of doing politics.

  When Gandhi arrived in Bombay in January 1915, an Indian politician described in a letter to his brother the impression he made: “modest downward face and the retiring speech,” with “one front tooth missing on the left side”; eating only “queer food”—no salt, milk, ghee—just “fruits and nuts.” To most who met him in those early days of his Indian homecoming, the forty-five-year-old Gandhi was an oddity. He didn’t exude the glamour of power. “I should have passed him by in the street without a second look,” a viceroy later said of him.

  Gandhi was born in 1869 and raised in relative privilege. His father served as a senior official in several of the small princedoms of western Gujarat, though the family was of the Bania caste, a trading community an order below the Brahmins and Kshatriyas. That subordinate position made Gandhi sensitive to social rank and power and aware that his own rank was not much to exploit.

  Breaking the rules of his caste against travel abroad, he decided as a nineteen-year-old to go to London to qualify as a lawyer. In his two and a half years there, he reveled in a freedom that led him to discover vegetarianism, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Victorian ethic of self-help. Yet he failed to master a fear of public speaking and, unable to establish a legal career in India, accepted a brief that took him to South Africa in 1893.