Churchill's Secret War

by Madhusree Mukerjee

  Subhas Chandra Bose no longer hoped to liberate his homeland—at least not through conquest. He still believed that the Indian National Army had to set an example of heroism and sacrifice that would spark a spontaneous response in India. So he dispatched most of his remaining forces to resist the British advance, with the exception of the Rani of Jhansi regiment, which stayed back in a small town in the Burmese highland to tend the wounded and the sick. Lakshmi Swaminathan, its colonel, was a doctor who possessed no combat experience, and Bose had no wish to expend the regiment on a suicide mission. But airplanes bombed the hospital, killing many patients and severely injuring one of his best field commanders.

  A battalion of the Indian National Army tried to oppose the enemy—the Indian Army under Field Marshal Slim—as it crossed the Irrawaddy River, but bombs sent it scattering. Another INA battalion was caught in the open, facing tanks and armored cars with rifles and bayonets, and literally crushed. The remnants of two INA divisions retired to the steep forested slopes of a dormant volcano, Mount Popa, where they could get water from natural springs, taking shelter there while their commanders directed swift, short guerrilla raids on the jungle patrols of the enemy columns passing below.

  There could be no doubt who was winning the war. From their perch the INA commanders could see clouds of red dust billowing from an unending train of tanks, armored cars, and troop-laden trucks trundling by, and in July 1945 they decided to retreat before their escape route was cut off. One of their battalions emerged from the jungle by mistake and was wiped out. Another group of soldiers were sheltering in a village when airplanes circled overhead; they had been spotted. The villagers asked that the soldiers surrender, lest the homes be bombed; surrender they did. Other commanders tried to slip out of the British cordon with their troops but were surrounded and had to give up.

  With the enemy approaching Rangoon, Bose gathered his remaining soldiers, including the Rani of Jhansi regiment, and began a retreat. Swaminathan opted to stay behind to look after the wounded, but after the headquarters were again bombed she dispersed her patients and fled into the jungle with a small group. She was ultimately captured by a British patrol.

  Bose and his forces marched at night and rested by day for fear of being bombed. After six days they reached a railhead, where Bose sent the women ahead by train. But a rail bridge had been destroyed, and they had to disembark and set out again on foot. In the end, only a tenth of the soldiers whom Bose had brought into Burma got out. On August 6, 1945, while in Bangkok, he got news that the Americans had dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima.

  Some years later, Bose’s elder brother would receive a letter in a familiar Bengali hand. “Today once again I am embarking on the path of danger,” it began. “But this time towards home. I may not see the end of the road.” Subhas Chandra Bose had written his farewell shortly before leaving Germany and had left the missive with his wife. “I have married here and I have a daughter. In my absence please show my wife and daughter the love that you have given me throughout your life.”34

  The fate of Subhas Chandra Bose is one of the enduring mysteries of the war. British intelligence reported in late August that he had been badly burned in an airplane crash in Taiwan on August 18, 1945, days after Japan’s surrender, and had died that night. It appears that Bose had been flying from Bangkok to Tokyo, via Saigon, along with an associate and several Japanese officers. He planned to eventually reach the Soviet Union, which he hoped would aid his struggle for Indian freedom. After departing Saigon, the aircraft had halted in Taipei for an hour, and immediately after takeoff from there the left engine had broken off. The aircraft had banked and dived to the ground from a height of between twenty and thirty meters. Bose was seated near gasoline tanks, was splashed with the fuel, and caught fire.35

  Special Operations Executive agents were all over Southeast Asia at the time, and the assassination order against Bose seems to still have been in effect—which raises the possibility that the aircraft had been tampered with. A spy in British service, known as Agent B1189, had infiltrated the Indian National Army’s upper echelons. He may have been able to convey Bose’s travel plans in time for SOE agents to sabotage the plane.36

  FOR THE LONGEST time, Gandhi refused to accept that the prodigal son would never return. He hoped against hope that Bose had gone into hiding, where he was seeking a way to renew the struggle. The newspapers had already reported Bose’s death in 1942, Gandhi told his associates. “Since then I have had a feeling that Netaji could not leave us until his dream [of freedom] had been fulfilled.”

  In July 1944, shortly after Gandhi had emerged from prison, Bose had addressed a broadcast to his former mentor in an effort to explain his controversial choice to ally with the Axis powers and raise an army. Every Indian would be happy if freedom could be won by nonviolent means, he had said. Bose believed, however, that appeals to the conscience did not work on British leaders, who were determined to retain control and, indeed, to “make good their present losses by exploiting India more ruthlessly than ever before.” Indians would have to “wade through blood” to achieve their goals. “Father of our nation: in this holy war for India’s liberation, we ask for your blessings and good wishes,” Bose concluded.37

  Although Gandhi deplored Bose’s methods, he could not but admire his devotion to Indian independence. Moreover, the condition in which Gandhi had found India upon emerging from prison had heightened his awareness of the violence structured into a colonial society. He visited Bengal—and was heard to wonder why the starving had died in front of overflowing shops but had not looted food.38

  On Christmas Day, 1945, Gandhi journeyed to Midnapore to investigate claims that some of his most ardent followers had committed murder. More than 100,000 men, women, and children lined the canal along which his boat traveled. They stood in notable silence, because Gandhi was feeling ill in mind and body and had asked for quiet.

  Satish Samanta, who had just been released from prison, arranged for Gandhi to stay at a famine orphanage in Mohisadal. The day after his arrival, Gandhi handed his host a signed complaint that he had received from several senior Congress workers. It related the two-year campaign of extortion and assassination that the Tamluk National Government had conducted. Samanta had been behind bars for most of that period, but after consulting with subordinates he confessed that the allegations were true. The Mahatma sat as if turned to stone. After a few minutes Samanta pleaded, “Won’t you hear under what circumstances we did these things?”

  He told Gandhi about the police atrocities. Gandhi asked for proof, and two days later his doctor, Sushila Nayar, and his granddaughter, Abha Gandhi, went to Masuria. The men of the village were not allowed into the session that followed, but they could hear the wailing from afar. Their pain unfrozen by the empathy of their audience, dozens of women told of the terror and sobbed. “We wept with them,” Nayar wrote. (Kanonbala Maity said that she had missed the meeting, because her father-in-law had forbidden her to attend.)

  “If you were really nonviolent, you wouldn’t be here to tell the tale,” Gandhi admonished the men of Midnapore. “You would have perished defending them [the women] nonviolently.” As for the Tamluk government, Gandhi acknowledged that he did not really know how he would have responded to the circumstances it had confronted: even violence was preferable to the cowardice of doing nothing, he said. Sushil Dhara, who was anxiously following events from his prison cell, heard the verdict with joy and relief. Gandhi would have been happier if the Tamluk government had stuck with nonviolence, but its achievements, he said, were nonetheless “heroic.”39

  ALTHOUGH HE PROBABLY did not live to see it, Subhas Chandra Bose’s dream of inciting an Indian uprising ultimately came true. News of the Indian National Army’s example of valor and sacrifice roused the country to a fever pitch. For the first time since the 1857 rebellion, an insurrection would challenge the loyalty of the sepoys.

  It was Commander-in-Chief Auchinlek who unwittingly orchestrated the drama
that unfolded at Delhi’s Red Fort, a towering structure of red sandstone and marble redolent with the grandeur of Mughal emperors and haunted by the bloody ghosts of 1857. In November 1945 at the fort, Auchinlek placed three of the INA’s surviving commanders on public trial for treason and murder. The men were Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Kumar Sahgal, and Gurbux Singh Dhillon—a Muslim, a Hindu, and a Sikh, whose religious identities were proof of the extent of Bose’s embrace. As the trial wore on and newspapers avidly reported every twist and turn of testimony, Indians came together in outrage that an occupying power should have the hubris to try for treason men who were fighting for Indian independence.

  In February 1946, sailors of the Royal Indian Navy struck work and began driving around Bombay, waving Congress flags. The naval mutiny spread to several other ports and ultimately involved twenty ships. Mobs spilled into the streets in sympathy, facing off with the police and the army. The white forces in India were too small to contain a full-fledged mutiny by the military, Auchinlek gauged, and if one broke out, “nothing short of an organized campaign for the reconquest of India” would suffice to establish control. The courts ultimately found the three INA officers guilty of treason and sentenced them to deportation for life (presumably to the prison and penal colony on the Andaman Islands), but Auchinlek commuted the sentences and set them free. As he explained to furious compatriots, “any attempt to enforce the sentence would have led to chaos in the country at large, and probably to mutiny and dissension in the Army, culminating in its dissolution.” For the first time since 1857, India could not be possessed by means of its own army—which meant that it could not be held at all.40

  The three commanders had become household names. They soon learned, however, that the India for which they had fought was not the one to which they had returned. Shah Nawaz Khan appeared at political rallies to plead for unity among Hindus and Muslims. But upon emerging from a Calcutta mosque he was shocked to find Muslim League supporters stoning his car and shouting slogans favoring the separate nation of Pakistan.41

  SO IT WAS that World War II sowed the seeds both for the independence of India and for its division. Independence became an imperative because the raw misery of the war years had sparked rage beyond the colonizer’s power to subdue. Division was demanded because by exacting heavy penalties for attacks on imperial interests, the authorities could deflect the fury into internecine bloodshed that would rend Hindus apart from Muslims. During the war, the necessity of containing nationalist insurgencies had led the police to ignore criminals and, thereby, to embolden them. The same necessity, combined with the need to keep Muslim soldiers loyal, had led the authorities to empower religious separatists. As the British sought an exit from India, their primary concern would be to limit white casualties, and the forces of mayhem would run rampant.

  Elections held in 1946 revealed the polarization that the war years had fostered. The Muslim League ran on a platform of partition. Before the war it had failed to get 5 percent of the Muslim vote, but it now earned 76 percent. In Bengal the famine had aided—rather than hurt—the party’s fortunes because the civil administration had relied on workers of the Muslim League and the Communist Party of India to distribute relief, and as the visible faces of succor both groups had gained traction in rural areas. The Muslim League won the elections in Bengal and joined a coalition of British business interests to form the government there; the former food minister, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, became chief minister.42

  The Indian National Congress also did well, among non-Muslims all over the country, and it won the North West Frontier Province as well. In complex negotiations with representatives of the United Kingdom’s new Labour government, Congress politicians outmaneuvered the Muslim League and formed a transitional government in New Delhi. Finding himself sidelined in spite of his electoral success, Jinnah vented his frustration in a call for civil disobedience. On August 16, 1946, ominously termed Direct Action Day, Muslims would show that they were serious about establishing Pakistan. That day, at a packed Muslim League rally in Calcutta, Chief Minister Suhrawardy denounced Hindus and assured the crowd that the police would not interfere in its actions against them. The mob dispersed to burn and loot Hindu shops, and to kill.43

  The governor of Bengal, Sir Frederick Burrows, learned that Suhrawardy was visiting the police control room in Calcutta, allegedly to ensure that the killing could continue unchecked—but Burrows did not intercede. “I had always to consider the susceptibilities of my Ministry,” Burrows explained to Viceroy Wavell. When desperate residents sought the aid of Calcutta’s police chief, D. R. Hardwick, the chief responded sarcastically, “Who am I to interfere in your affairs? The Hindus want us to get out. The Muslims want us to leave the country to them. I am so helpless. Why not ring up the Congress office?” Over the next two days—while the police stood aside—the criminal underworld, both Hindu and Muslim, stabbed and pillaged until the streets of Calcutta resembled, Burrows reported, the trenches of the Somme in World War I.44

  There was one reason to be relieved, the governor informed the viceroy: not a single European had been harmed. A Muslim League official had earlier assured the authorities that the agitation would be “directed not so much at the British as at the Hindus,” and an editorial published in a Calcutta newspaper on the morning of Direct Action Day had advised Muslims that attacks on “British men or women, be they civilian or military,” were “against the spirit and letter of Islam.” As a result, Muslim thugs had turned their fury entirely upon Hindus and Sikhs, and gangs from those two communities had retaliated—spectacularly bolstering the British claim that it was only the Raj that had kept the fractious subjects from one another’s throats. Historian Rakesh Batabyal speculates that some such motive lay behind the British delay in calling out the army, which was summoned only at 8 P.M. on the second day of the killings, whereas it had intervened immediately whenever demonstrations or riots had had an anti-imperial tone.45

  The uncontained slaughter in Calcutta, which left up to 10,000 dead in a matter of days, sparked a series of vicious religious pogroms across India, which would make partition a fait accompli. The killings paused for a while, but in October they began again, this time in Noakhali in eastern Bengal. There a gangster-turned-politician had long tried to mobilize peasants against landlords, with no success—until he observed the success of the Muslim League’s tactics and inducted Islam as a weapon by which to achieve his political ends. The famine had eased his task, because government propaganda had already convinced Muslim peasants of eastern Bengal that their Hindu landlords were entirely to blame for their hunger. Worse, the wartime reign of the Muslim League in Bengal, in concert with the hostility toward Hindus that emanated from the highest levels of the imperial government, had thoroughly communalized the province’s police and administration—both signaling and ensuring that the authorities would deal leniently with attacks on Hindus. Although the army was eventually called into Noakhali, civil servants simply freed the offenders whom the army handed over to them.46

  In the end, the vast majority of victims in Noakhali were not landowners but villagers of the lowest castes—people who had also suffered grievously from famine, as well as from forced evacuations, rape, and other depredations by Allied forces stationed in the region.

  AT THE TIME of the strife in Noakhali, Ashoka Gupta was living in Chittagong. The famine had changed her life, turning her gaze out of the home and onto the world beyond. The joy she derived from saving a child by giving her food and shelter and “bringing back a smile to her lips” was more than she had ever obtained from attending to her household chores. When the pogrom in Noakhali began, she resolved—with the help of the All India Women’s Conference—to help the afflicted villagers, and in particular to rescue violated women and girls, who were being rejected by their own families after assaults by Muslim men.47

  Gandhi arrived soon after in Noakhali, in the hope of bringing calm by trekking from village to charred village. Discouraged by the v
astness of her task, Gupta went with a friend to seek his advice and found him living in a burned-down house. Gandhi was in agony; everything to which he had dedicated his life was falling apart. That religion should be used in service of violence appalled him and challenged the very foundation of his creed. But none of this turmoil was visible to Gupta. To the two women, Gandhi said that it was not enough to visit the ravaged areas: they would have to reside there. “Only if we ourselves had the courage to face the dangers of the situation, and lived continuously in the villages over an extended period of time, would the local people be assured about our commitment and return to live in their own homes,” Gupta recalled him saying. “For courage, like fear, was contagious. Just a single example of a courageous deed would act like a beacon of hope and would arouse the bravery and the self-confidence of the local people.”48

  With a toddler in her arms, Gupta made a home in the terrifying ghostly hulk of what once had been a peaceable fishing village. Slowly the killings died down—but things never did return to normal. One young woman confided that she was being taken away every night by gangsters, raped, and returned the next morning to her husband. The couple dared not complain to the police for fear of reprisals.49

  NOTHING COULD HUSH the screams that emanated from Noakhali. The outflow of terror-stricken refugees, spreading across Bengal and into Bihar in a desperate search for safety, convinced many Hindus that they could no longer coexist with Muslims. Wealthy Bengalis of both faiths began to pack up and migrate to the regions where they would be in a majority.

  The pogroms of Noakhali sparked even more horrific retributions in Bihar, where Hindu landowners organized mobs to butcher poor Muslims. The toll would reach 20,000. Viceroy Wavell turned down legislators’ pleas that killer mobs in Bihar be strafed by military aircraft. “Machine-gunning from the air is not a weapon one would willingly use,” he noted in his diary, “though the Muslims point out, rather embarrassingly, that we did not hesitate to use it in 1942.” As recently as July 1946, Wavell had ordered the destruction by bombing of villages in the North West Frontier Province—because some tribesmen had kidnapped a British consul. Compared with his resolve when imperial interests were at stake, the viceroy responded mildly to the far more lethal internecine riots. The director of the Intelligence Bureau had urged that the massacres not provoke the authorities “into action which would reintroduce anti-British agitation.” If anything, he added, the religious warfare had its uses, being “a natural, if ghastly, process tending in its own way to the solution of the Indian problem.”50