India's biggest cover-up

by Anuj Dhar

  Capt Badhwar reported that the Congress leaders’ turnaround had little to do with any love for their ousted former president or the people who fought under his command. He sourced the information to Asaf Ali, a leading Congress Working Committee member. Before taking a stand on the INA issue, Congress high command had sent out Ali on a recce mission to gauge public feeling. He travelled across India and discovered that people were overwhelmingly in support of the INA. “This inflamed feeling forced Congress to take the line it did,” Badhwar revealed.

  In his free-wheeling talks with Badhwar, Asaf Ali, free India’s first Ambassador to the United States, offered the information that “Congress leaders had realised that those who joined the INA were far from innocent”, and that’s why Nehru always made it a point to refer to them as “misguided men” even in his public speeches. Ali was positive that as and when Congress came to power, they “would have no hesitation in removing all INA from the Services and even in putting some of them on trial”.

  Badhwar asked Ali why couldn't the Congress “repudiate their championship of the INA” when they knew “the true facts”? Asaf Ali replied that “they dare not take this line as they would lose much ground in the country”. Boyace’s comment at the end of his note was: “In other words, the present policy [to back the INA] is one of political expediency which is, I think, well known.” [7]

  During my stint with Hindustan Times, I saw the evidence. Flipping through 1945-1946 vintage editions I found little sign of any freedom struggle worth the name being carried out by the Congress party at that time. The Congressmen were very vocal about fascism and Japanese imperialism, but no such anti-Churchill feelings were evident. This is when we know how anti-India the British PM was. In all fairness, many British themselves despised Churchill’s anti-India rants. His private secretary recorded in February 1945: “The PM said the Hindus were a foul race ‘protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due’ and he wished Bert Harris could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them”. [8] A recent book has adduced fresh evidence to the old charge that Churchill deliberately contributed to the famine that devoured millions in Bengal, the hotbed of Indian revolutionaries.

  The Red Fort trials led to so much of public outcry that Hindustan Times, then functioning more or less as a Congress mouthpiece, had to run big stories with banner headlines, a rarity in those times. Those were the days when Congressmen raised the cries of Lal Quile se ayee awaz, Sehgal, Dhillon, Shah Nawaz. Inqlab zindabad. “The war cry comes from the Red Fort. Sehgal, Dhillon, Shah Nawaz. Long live revolution.” They were playing to the gallery than anything else. It is, of course, not to say that all Congress leaders were against Bose or to deny a genuine change of heart at that time. KM Munshi, for instance, wrote that Bhulabhai Desai told him that “his attitude to Subhas Bose had undergone a radical change as a result of his study of Bose’s plans, programmes and achievements emerging from the evidence which he presented to the court in the Red Fort”. [9]

  The top Congress leadership’s duplicitous disapproval of Bose and INA was exposed by numerous pre-1947 statements made by its leaders, especially Nehru. The wounds inflicted by the politicking of those days had not fully healed when Subhas’s nephew Dwijendra Nath Bose appeared before the Khosla Commission. He made some real harsh statements, indicating the level of hurt among Bose’s family and his supporters. He spoke of “vindictiveness of Nehruji towards Netaji” and produced a pamphlet published on 19 December 1945. Dwijendra said it had been brought at the direction of his uncle Sarat Bose who could not tolerate Nehru publicly taking swipes at his kid brother.

  “[Sarat Bose] called me to get two or three people because Panditji was to address a public meeting in Calcutta in Shardanand park on the 21st December, 1945. He showed us the cuttings of the observations Panditji had made at different times about Netaji and he asked us; rather I would say that he helped us in writing this pamphlet—a few questions to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.”

  Dwijen then read out from the pamphlet for the benefit of GD Khosla who said he had “never come across this”. The first para related to a 1942 Hindusthan Standard report my young friends Abhishek Singh and Saurabh Garai traced for me in a jiffy. I just wanted to check if the details given by Dwijen were correct.

  Dwijen resumed reading: “Will Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru kindly answer the following questions at the public meeting he will address in Calcutta on the 21st and 22 December, 1945. On the 21st February, 1942, at a public meeting at Shardanad park, Calcutta, you said the following: ‘Let him not commit the error that they had fallen into the past by thinking that they could ask for the aid of any power outside. Therein lay dangers; therein lay peril; and if any of them thought in those terms, it was not any kind of courage, it was a sign of cowardice.’”

  “Who was the person whom you are referring to? Was it Subhas Chandra Bose? Did you yourself not seek Chinese and American intervention and aid in the movement for Indian independence?” the pamphlet read.

  “Question No 2: On the 12th April 1942, at a press conference in New Delhi, you said as follows. ‘It is a slave’s sentiment, a slave’s way of thinking to imagine that to get rid of one person who is dominating us we can expect another person to help us and not dominate later. Free man ought not to think that way.’”

  “Who was the person with a slave’s sentiment? A slave’s way of thinking, you were referring to at that time? Has your attitude towards that person changed since?”

  “Question No 3: On the 12th April, 1942 at the same press conference you also said that you ‘would oppose and fight Subhas Bose to death’. How do you intend to fight him? Would you fight him under the British auspices and British control?”

  “In numerous public statements and speeches between April 1942 and August 1945, you said that Subhas Bose and his Azad Hind Fauz were ‘misguided’, ‘misled’, ’wrong in their methods’ and all the rest of it. Does your attitude towards Subhas Bose and his Azad Hind Fauj continue to be the same today?”

  “In July-August 1945, in answer to some American journalist at Delhi you stated: ‘Subhas Bose formed the Forward Bloc to attack the Congress.’ Will you kindly tell us in what respect Subhas Bose or his Forward Bloc attacked Congress? Did not the Forward Bloc always function as the left wing within the Congress? Was not Subhas Bose’s suggestion in 1939 to serve a six-month ultimatum on the British Government accepted by Gandhiji in toto in his Quit India resolution of August 1942?”

  “In April 1942 you rejected Cripps’ offer and refused to cooperate with the British in defending India against Japanese aggression. In June-July 1945, you accepted Lord Wavell’s first condition, namely, the new Executive Council was to prosecute the war against Japan with the utmost energy till Japan was utterly defeated. What was the change in circumstances in and outside India which led you to accept Lord Wavell’s first condition?” [10]

  According to a letter previously written by Dwijendra to Shah Nawaz Khan on 5 July 1956, Nehru was “heckled by the public in meetings addressed by him in Calcutta on the 21st and 22nd December 1945" because of this pamphlet.

  Such a scathing attack on the former Prime Minister made the counsel recoil in shock. One of them tried to salvage the situation by reminding Dwijendra that Pandit Nehru had after all defended the INA soldiers during the Red Fort trials. But Dwijindra was not impressed. His response that the Congress support to INA heroes was a pre-election gimmickry matched with the accounts in the yet to be declassified British records.

  This pamphlet was dictated at a time Panditji had already put up a garb to show the public. Do you understand the word namavali, which means the words “Hare Krishna Hare Rama” are printed and it is worn by Brahmins. So, Panditji thought it proper to wear that namavali of INA to cross the river of election. [11]

  Unrelenting, Dwijindra accused the Congress leaders of “rubbing their noses on the floor” before the British and washing their hands off the Quit India movement after it turned violent. “This is not o
ur movement. This is all violence going on. You have put us in jail before the movement was started,” [12] Dwijindra taunted. There was some force in his argument. The Quit India movement of August 1942 had been “crushed within three weeks,” wrote Khushwant Singh, not a fan of Subhas Bose, in a column in 2003. A person no less than Jayaprakash Narayan, a Gandhi loyalist, had said that “to fasten the August programme on Gandhiji is a piece of perjury” and put the blame on the British. [13] Khushwant Singh wrote further: “The British were not evicted from India; they found it increasingly difficult to rule it and decided to call it a day.” [14]

  Many Indians still do not want to accept, and perhaps never will, that the “failed” INA military onslaught and the Red Fort trials of 1945-46, and not the Quit India movement, majorly impacted the British decision to quit India. The colonial British regarded Bose as their sworn enemy. No top Congressman of the “peace loving” variant fell in that category. Maj Gen FS Tucker, GOC Eastern Command, thought Bose was a “plump Bengali” of “over-weening personal ambition” and like everyone else demanded a “condign punishment for the INA”. [15]

  But in the face of public anger and much in their own interest, they had to backtrack. India was sitting on a tinderbox. The Transfer of Power volume has the text of a letter which Viceroy Wavell received from the United Province in November 1945, saying that “handwritten leaflets are said to have been found in a hotel that if any INA soldier were killed, Britishers would be murdered. These may be rather petty matters, but they do show which way the wind is blowing”. [16] On 12 February 1946 Commander-in-Chief General Claude Auchinleck was forced to explain to his top military commanders through a “Strictly Personal and Secret” letter the reasons why the military had to let the INA “war criminals” and “traitors” get off the hook:

  Having considered all the evidence and appreciated to the best of my ability the general trend of Indian public opinion and of the feeling in the Indian Army, I have no doubt at all that to have confirmed the sentence of imprisonment solely on the charge of “waging war against the King” would have had disastrous results, in that it would have probably precipitated a violent outbreak throughout the country, and have created active and widespread disaffection in the Army, especially amongst the Indian officers and the more highly educated rank and file. [17]

  Some thirty years later, Lt Gen SK Sinha came out with the inside story in an op-ed article in the Statesman. I understand the former J&K Governor still stands by it. You have to pay attention to his every word, for he as a young captain along with fellow Lt Col Sam Manekshaw and Maj Yahya Khan—who took on each other in 1971—were the only natives posted to the hitherto exclusively British Directorate of Military Operations. “The real impact of the INA was felt more after the war than during the war,” Sinha opined, adding: “There was considerable sympathy for the INA within the Army. ...I am convinced that well over 90 per cent of officers at that time felt along those lines.”

  In 1946 I accidentally came across a very interesting document…prepared by the Director of Military Intelligence. It was classified document marked “Top Secret. Not for Indian Eyes”. …The paper referred to the INA, the mutinies at Bombay and Jabalpur and also to the “adverse” effect on the Indian officers and men of the humiliating defeats inflicted by the Japanese on the white nations in the early days of the war. The conclusion reached was that the Indian Army could no longer be relied upon to remain a loyal instrument for maintaining British rule over India. [18]

  The touchstone for Indian leadership’s bona fide with regard to Bose and INA was in the way they expressed gratitude towards them after 1947. The start was ominous: Nehru’s stirring “Tryst with destiny” speech had not a word about the man but for whom the day would not have come in 1947. On August 28 the Constituent Assembly of India decided to have a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi in the House. HV Kamath pleaded that portraits of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Subhas Bose be also given place. The president of the House, Rajendra Prasad, just cut him out. The same year, the Intelligence Bureau prepared a report about the re-employment of INA personnel in public service. Some of Bose’s top aides were eventually taken into government service so that the INA veterans could not regroup in India. Most were assigned overseas postings and the rest, as I heard from a disgruntled veteran, were treated “like they were stray dogs”. The Indian Army, which had fought against the INA, had no compunction in appropriating their battle cry “Jai Hind”. And yet, no serving Service chief ever paid tributes to Bose or the INA.

  Maj Gen Mohammad Zaman Kiani, the INA’s head after Bose, took umbrage over the Indian government’s attitude in his memoirs published in Pakistan. He described how once in Parliament Nehru had described the liberation of Indian land by the INA as “occupation”. He felt that Nehru was simply trying to belittle “the historical role of his dead rival”. [19]

  Indian embassies world over celebrated birthdays of Gandhi and then of Nehru, but Bose was not even discussed. Radios constantly blared out eulogies on Nehru-Gandhi, but even on Bose’s birthdays the broadcasts would not last more than a few seconds. Top historian Dr RC Majumdar was deprived of a deserving chance to write the official history of India for his views that Bose played an unrivalled role in making India free were anathema to the establishment. In the hands of court historians of free India, history became exclusionist. In 1984 the Government of India financed Gandhi swept the Oscars. In the entire movie, not even one shot depicted Subhas Bose. It would take many years before sane voices would appear. An Indian Express editorial touched the raw nerve in 1997:

  If comic-strip accounts of the past are anything to go by, Netaji’s contribution to the freedom struggle has been reduced to the two slogans which have been associated with him: “Chalo Delhi” and “give me blood and I will give you freedom”. Juxtaposed against the more enduring images of Mahatma Gandhi and even Jawaharlal Nehru, these have the effect of reducing Subhas Bose’s to the periphery of Indian nationalism. [20]

  The reason why all these details have been gone into—even though in essence they are well known—is to emphasise the point that we must bear in mind who Subhas Chandra Bose was while deliberating the matter of his fate. The role that he played in making India free was on a par to that of Gandhiji’s. And when someone has got such an exalted position, outrageous one-liners such as “why waste public money on resolving the Bose mystery”—“let’s move on”—“how many years will we go on inquiring into the mystery” must be rebutted with the contempt they deserve.

  First the issue of money. There are hundreds of ways to save precious public money in India. For example, huge swathes of prime land in Delhi worth billions of rupees have been turned into memorials for the dead leaders. This is when there is no such custom among the Hindus and many of the deceased would have preferred if the land was better utilized for the poor. Recently the authorities decided to add a spectacular addition to Vir Bhumi—one of the two memorials dedicated to Rajiv Gandhi—after having been “inspired by the illumination at 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero in New York”. [21] “Three high-intensity lamps will fire shafts of light into the sky that will intersect 400 feet above ground and will be visible 12 km away” [24] in a city which suffers from perennial power breakdowns. The immediate cost of the venture would be four million rupees. But then there are many valid arguments for having such memorials and landmarks—huge costs notwithstanding—in a country where, according to the government estimate, no man who spends more than Rs 32 or half a Euro a day can call himself poor.

  In Gujarat, the pipe dream of “prohibition” is the state policy in deference to Gandhi’s views. All it does is cause loss of revenue worth millions of rupees each year. Of course it doesn’t work and never will. Prohibition has never worked in India; even the 14th century tyrant Allauddin Khilji failed to stop Delhi tipplers from having their daily doses. If one extends this line of argument, there have been talks of doing away with extravagant Republic Day military parade, more so because it does not behove G
andhiji’s nation—which won freedom “solely due to non-violent efforts”—to make a display of its military might. Are we game for it?

  My own personal survey tells me that people who usually display great concern for the public exchequer while the Bose mystery is being discussed are scarcely interested in public interest drives to expose gigantic loots running into billions of rupees. A question was asked a few years back in Parliament by Dr Daggubati Purandeswari, current Minister of State for Human Resources. I don’t know what made her put the question about the amount of money spent on the Mukherjee Commission’s foreign visits. The UPA Government was ready with the details: UK, Rs 3,13,760; Japan, Rs 4,39,635; Taiwan, Rs 1,47,288; Russia, Rs 2,01,761.

  Some will say these one million-odd rupees are a lot of money for a nation whose hunger and debt-ridden farmers commit suicide routinely. But that’s not too much of money when you consider the real wasteful expenditure of public money. I have yet to see a newsitem where Dr Purandeswari is talking about massive scams to the tune of billions of rupees or is backing Swami Ramdev’s movement to bring back the black money stashed abroad.

  I live in Delhi and if you happen to take a tour of the city at night, you will find thousands of homless people sleeping on the roads. Isn’t it criminal that when Commonwealth Games were organised in Delhi in 2011, some of these roads were spruced up with imported streetlighting! Did anyone suggest that this money would have been better spent in making shelters for the poor? And do you know of the net loss the exchequer had to bear as a result of fraud in giving parts of the city international standards lighting? Rs 46.02 crores!

  The cost of free food distributed during a typical political rally in India is far more than what Justice Mukherjee incurred during his trips abroad.