Author: N.S. Rajaram
Publication: Psenthilraja.wordpress.com
Date: October 13, 2009
URL: http://psenthilraja.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/who-brought-freedom-gandhi-or-netaji/
There is a story that the late Mao Zedong,
when asked his opinion about Napoleon as a leader replied: "How can I
say? He is too recent." Napoleon's career ended in the Battle of Waterloo
in 1815 and Mao died only in 1976. So what could Mao have meant when he said
that Napoleon was too recent? He meant that a certain amount of time has to
pass before we can view historical events and personalities objectively. Our
reading of recent events is bound to be colored by our closeness to them.
This truth was brought home to me a few years ago when I was visiting Penang
in Malaysia as the guest of some veterans of World War II, but first some
background.
In India, people are brought up on the story
that Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru with others receive grudging notice
if at all led a heroic struggle freeing India from the British rule. Miraculously,
the whole thing was accomplished without resort to violence, by the application
of a mighty spiritual force called *ahimsa* (non-violence) unleashed by the
Mahatma. If true it is a tribute not only to the power of Gandhi's (and Nehru's)
spiritual vision, but also a lasting tribute to the spiritual sensitivity
of the British rulers. Like the tiger in the children's poem (*govina kathe
*in Kannada), which killed itself rather than eat the calf, the British gave
up the empire and left.
This received a jolt during a recent trip
to Southeast Asia where I had occasion to visit some people who had served
with my late father during World War II. Their account of their experience
in the period from 1942 to 45 casts serious doubt on this beautiful story.
Here we are faced with a dilemma the conflict between what we read in history
books and what the people actually saw on the ground. The usual story is that
after some initial reverses the British defeated the Japanese. But those who
actually served there, now in their late 70s and 80s, remember it quite differently.
Uniformly, this is what I heard everywhere and from everyone.
When the Japanese attacked, the British ran
away. They were very clever. They had a wonderful life with bungalows and
butlers and cooks and all that, but as soon as the Japanese came, they ran
away. And once they got back to India, they sent Gurkhas, Sikhs, Marathas
and other Indians to fight the Japanese. They knew it was too dangerous for
them. That is how we got independence in Malaya. Malaysia was then called
Malaya and Singapore was its capital.
Not one of them remembered the British fighting
the Japanese only running away. They remember also Indian soldiers coming
and fighting; some of them stayed back in countries like Malaya (as it was
then called), Singapore and other places. One man, who as a youngster had
been my father's orderly during the War, invited me to his home in Penang
for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Singapore. What he told me took
my breath away.
That is why the British left India also. When
the war was over, all the Indian soldiers who had defeated the Japanese returned
to India, and the British got scared. They didn’t want to
fight the Indians who had just fought and defeated the Japanese. So they ran
away from India also. I tried to explain to him that Gandhiji's nonviolence
was the force that convinced the British to leave. But this man, not an intellectual
but a battle-hardened soldier with sound commonsense would have none of it.
If it was non-violence, why didn't they leave earlier? Gandhi and the nonviolence
were there before the war also. Did they have to wait for the Japanese to
come and teach them non-violence?
One may smile at this simple way of looking
at history, but as will be seen later, this revisionist view has good support.
The ‘authorized version with Gandhi and Nehru as central
figures continues to be taught in India because it benefits those in power.
It shows the British also in favorable light as a magnanimous and even spiritual
people, which of course they don't mind. But history shows a different picture.
The year 1942 was momentous. It was the year
in which the British Empire suffered a massive defeat at the hands of an Asiatic
people (Japanese); it was also the year in which Mahatma Gandhi launched his
famous but ill-fated Quit India Movement. Subhas Bose also entered the picture
at about that time, first in Germany and later in Southeast Asia. But first
it is necessary to get an idea of the momentous impact of the Japanese victory
on the psyche of the colonized people as well as on that of the colonizing
powers. What triggered it was the Fall of Singapore.
The fall of Singapore in 1942 heralded the
end of the British Empire and of European colonialism in general. Indian independence
came in 1947, but what really ended the Empire was the fall of Singapore.
This has received scant notice by Indian historians who remain trapped in
Eurocentric thinking, but there is ample evidence supporting it. Among Indian
historians, only R.C. Majumdar has seen its significance: the fall of Singapore
broke the spirit of Imperial Britain. As we shall soon see *British historians
have themselves admitted it.* Let us look at what really happened to the British
in 1942.
When the Japanese attacked Singapore in February
1942, its large and well-equipped British garrison surrendered without a fight.
These well-attended pukka sahib used to good living had little stomach for
war. For decades, the ruling authorities had avoided facing the truth that
they were not a fighting force. They had deluded themselves with resounding
slogans calling Singapore the "Bastion of the Empire","Impregnable
Fortress", "Gibraltar of the East" and such. None of it helped
when Singapore fell to a Japanese army less than a third the size of the defending
forces.
Yet, so far removed from reality were Singapore's
British residents, that even on the verge of surrender, a gunnery officer
was refused permission to mount guns on the golf links for defending the city.
He was told that he needed permission from the golf club committee. And the
golf club committee would not be meeting for at least a week, so he better
hold off!
In the fall of Singapore, its symbolic significance
was infinitely greater than the military defeat. *It destroyed the myth of
European superiority over the Asiatics once and for all.* Historian James
Leasor wrote in his Singapore, the battle that changed the world:
Dazed by the incredible superiority of the
Japanese, the defenders will to win had withered. The psychological damage
was even greater than the military defeat and this had been grotesque enough.
Under the lowering Singapore sky lit by the funeral pyres of the British Empire,
a door closed on centuries of white supremacy. Actually the Japanese had planned
it that way to break the sense of superiority exuded by the Europeans, by
the British in particular, in their dealings with the Asiatics. Leasor wrote:
At the start of the campaign, each Japanese
soldier had been issued with a pamphlet that set out Japan's reasons for fighting
the British and the Americans. Her [Japan’s] claim was that
she would liberate East Asia from white rule and oppression, for since “We
Japanese, as an Eastern people, have ourselves for long been classed alongside
the Chinese and the Indians as an inferior race, and treated as such, we must
at the very least, here in Asia, beat these Westerners to submission, that
they may change their arrogant and ill-mannered attitude.
The Japanese attack on Singapore accomplished
much more: it ended the British Empire to be followed swiftly by the end of
European imperialism itself. To return to the fall of Singapore, as with the
fall of Hong Kong a few weeks earlier, the only worthwhile resistance had
come from the Indian garrisons the Sikh and the Gurkha regiments. The prestige
and the mystique associated with the British Empire were shattered by these
ignominious defeats.
And this is how my gracious host in Penang
and his friends, men who had seen it at first hand, remember it. As they saw
it, the massive defeat destroyed the British morale. It was the specter of
the whole nightmare being reenacted in India, with nearly three million Indian
soldiers just returned from war, which made the British leave India. They
ran away, the old soldier kept telling me repeatedly.
I may point out that this is also the view
of many Indians who saw action in the warâ€" both in the Indian
Army and those who fought in Subhas Bose's INA. Indian soldiers saw that their
British officers were frightened to death of the Japanese, while they themselves
were prepared to fight them.
After the War, the British defeat in Singapore
was followed by the French defeat in Dien Bien Phu at the hands of Ho Chi
Min’s soldiers in Vietnam. This laid the groundwork for
the American defeat in all of Vietnam and their inglorious flight from Saigon.
No one today talks about the superiority of the White Race. The first nail
in coffin was driven by the Japanese in Malaya in 1942.
It was this changed perception, that the British
were just ordinary mortals like the rest that allowed Netaji Subhas Bose to
recruit Indians in Southeast Asia into the Indian National Army (Azad Hind
Fauz or the INA). Subhas Bose saw that the Indian armed forces were the prop
of the Empire not just in India but everywhere the British went. But Gandhi
and Nehru, preoccupied with their utopian dreams of nonviolence failed to
realize its significance. When the opportunity arose, Bose seized it to transform
the armed forces into a nationalist force, while Gandhi and Nehru started
the Quit India Movement which collapsed in a few weeks.
Before we look further, we need to ask: what
support do we have for this revisionist view, that Subhas Bose and the INA
brought freedom to India? The evidence is ample and impeccable. Several have
noted it, but the most distinguished historian to highlight Bose’s
contribution was the late R.C. Majumdar, one of modern India’s
greatest historians. In his monumental, three-volume *History of the Freedom
Movement in India* (Firma KLM, Calcutta) Majumdar provided the following extraordinary
evidence:
"It seldom falls to the lot of a historian
to have his views, differing radically from those generally accepted without
demur, confirmed by such an unimpeachable authority. *As far back as 1948
I wrote in an article that the contribution made by Netaji Subas Chandra Bose
towards the achievement of freedom in 1947 was no less, and perhaps, far more
important than that of Mahatma Gandhi's" The unimpeachable authority"
he cited happened to be Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister of Britain at the
time of India’s independence. Since this is of fundamental
importance, and Majumdar’s conclusion so greatly at variance
with the conventional history, it is worth placing it on record (Volume III,
pages 609 â€"10).
When B.P. Chakravarti was acting as Governor
of West Bengal, Lord Attlee visited India and stayed as his guest at the Raj
Bhavan for three days. Chakravarti asked Attlee about the real grounds for
granting independence to India. Specifically, his question was, when the Quit
India movement lay in shambles years before 1947, where was the need for the
British to leave in such a hurry. Attlee’s response is most
illuminating and important for history. Here is Governor Chakrabarti’s
account of what Attlee told him:
“In reply Attlee cited several
reasons, *the most important were the activities of Netaji Subhas Chandra
Bose which weakened the very foundation of the attachment of the Indian land
and naval forces to the British Government.* Towards the end, I asked Lord
Attlee about the extent to which the British decision to quit India was influenced
by Gandhi’s activities. On hearing this question Attlee’s
lips widened in a smile of disdain and he uttered, slowly, putting emphasis
on each single letter "mi-ni-mal". (Emphasis added.)
Another point worth noting: after the fall
of Singapore that ended the British Empire, the most dramatic national event
was the INA Trial at the Red Fort not any movement by Gandhi or Nehru. This
led to the mutiny of the naval ratings, which, more than anything helped the
British make up their minds to leave India in a hurry. They sensed that it
was only a matter of time before the mutiny spread to other parts of the armed
forces and the Government. None of this would have happened without Subhas
Bose and the INA.
The crucial point to note is that thanks to
Subhas Bose's activities, the Indian Armed Forces began to see themselves
as defenders of India rather than of the British Empire. This, more than anything
else, was what led to India’s freedom. This is also the
reason why the British Empire disappeared from the face of the earth within
an astonishingly short space of twenty years. Indian soldiers, who were the
main prop of the Empire, were no longer willing to fight to hold it together.
This is the essence of leadership.
This brings us back to Mao's half joking replyâ€"
that it takes time to get the proper historical perspective. It is now more
than sixty years since India became free. We can afford to look back and see
the real reasons for British leaving India in a hurry. To sum up, by the end
of the War, Gandhi was a spent force, and Subhas Bose was India’s
most popular leader.
Now, sixty years and more later it is time
to recognize the truth: first, it was the Fall of Singapore in 1942, not the
Quit India Movement that was the beginning of the end of the British Empire;
and finally, it was Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose more than anyone else who was
responsible for India's freedom in 1947.
