Author: Jay Bhattacharjee
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: February 22, 2002
The long arm of history, as recent
events have shown, is relentless in its pursuit of truth and accuracy.
However far dictators, tyrants and their defendants may seek to run, the
past and its records have a habit of catching up with them.
Take for example the recent disclosures
on the murder in 1961 of Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of independent
Congo by the combined forces of the Americans and the Belgians. For years,
the West assiduously propagated the thesis that Lumumba, a closet Communist,
was overthrown by his own army and killed by tribal and political rivals.
The poor man's legacy was hardly helped by the fact that he had been lionised
by Moscow and projected as a role model by the Soviet bloc. We now have
the recent disclosures in the Belgian Parliament that Lumumba had indeed
been assassinated by agents of the Belgian government and their American
allies (read the CIA). For a change, there has almost been an unprecedented
official mea culpa by the present Belgian Government for a dastardly act
by a predecessor regime forty one years ago.
Other examples of crucial events
that have shaped twentieth century history include the so-called Zinoviev
letter that cost the British Labour party so dearly in the 1920s. Despite
repeated assertions by independent observers that the letter was a forgery
by the Tories, the British establishment maintained the fiction of a great
Soviet conspiracy to plant the Red flag in Buckingham Palace. It took more
than four decades for the truth to emerge incontrovertibly-the whole exercise
had been planned and implemented by the British secret service and their
henchmen in the Conservative party.
A much more tragic and poignant
episode was the alleged Tukachevsky letter, a meticulously planned campaign
by the German secret service in the 1930s to convince Stalin that the Soviet
general staff was in collusion with the Nazis and plotting against Moscow.
Now, Joseph Stalin, the role model and intellectual predecessor for Messrs
Jyoti Basu, Harkishen Singh Surjeet, et al, was a notoriously suspicious
and distrusting megalomaniac who wanted to entrench his position in the
Moscow power structure. When the respected Czechoslovak President Dr Benes
forwarded to Stalin what he thought was evidence of treachery in the highest
rungs of the Soviet Army, he unwittingly helped the latter to unleash the
Great Purge. In one fell sweep, this decimated the armed forces of the
USSR and handed Nazi Germany its greatest unarmed victory.
Thousands of senior Soviet officers,
starting with Marshal Tukachevsky himself and key Generals and Colonels,
were dragged to face hastily-assembled firing squads. Many died chanting
the Internationale. When the blood-letting ended, it turned out that Stalin
had exterminated more Marxists than the trio of Hitler, Himmler and Kaltenbrunner
put together. The popular perception was that the whole thing was a plot
by forces that wanted to weaken the Soviet Union and the letter was a forgery.
However, the wily Georgian dictator's propaganda machine drowned out the
protests. It is only after the war that secret German archives clearly
showed that the operation was planned and implemented by the Abwehr and
the SD gang of Canaris and Heydrich, who duped Dr Benes to act as the conduit
to Stalin.
We may be seeing something like
this happening in our shores, though these are early days as yet. The recent
publication of Chandrashekhar Dasgupta's meticulously researched book,
War and Diplomacy in Kashmir, 1947-48 (Sage, 2002) has set the cat among
the pigeons. Dasgupta demonstrates clinically that the last British Viceroy
and the first Governor General of independent India, Louis Mountbatten,
aided and abetted by two successive British Commanders-in Chief of the
Indian Army, systematically stymied the efforts of the Indian Government
and its armed forces to repel the Pakistani invaders in Kashmir in 1947-48.
More on Dasgupta's findings later on, but it should be stressed here that
this writer would not be surprised to learn that damage-limitation exercises
have already been launched in Whitehall.
More importantly, if the Congress
party's high command here in New Delhi has any sense of history and self-
protection, the khadiwallahs should also be putting up their ramparts and
doing their homework. This is because the principal victim of the collateral
damage from Dasgupta's research could well be the image and reputation
of Jawaharlal Nehru, the party's hallowed patron saint. For the last fifty
odd years, successive generations of Indians have been fed the story from
primary school onwards that the country's freedom struggle was basically
conducted by Gandhi, Nehru and the Congress Party, with walk-on roles attributed
to Sardar Patel and a few others. It is a brave author who would admit
the existence of other movements and forces, such as the revolutionaries,
Netaji Subhas Bose and the INA. The guiding principles of the freedom struggle
have been assigned almost exclusively to those propagated by the Congress.
The court historians of post-independent
India helped the Congress in this perfidy, whereby major historical figures
and exemplary patriots were transformed into non- persons. This was "image
management" of the highest quality and fully justified Voltaire's dictum
that history is no more than accepted fiction. One cannot also avoid the
nagging feeling that the authorised Indian hacks were assisted by the British,
formally and informally. The departing colonial power badly wanted a moral
gloss to imperialism and colonialism-what better than a sanitised version
of the Indo-British interface, where everyone emerged smelling of roses?
We now have Dasgupta's book that
shows Nehru was duped and outwitted by Dickey Mountbatten. The logical
question is whether it was more than deception by the wily Brits. Was the
man a willing tool in the hands of the departing imperialists? The smoking
gun evidence on this will probably never be revealed. Dasgupta had access
to British official records for 1947-48 that have recently been declassified
and he has therefore been able to substantiate rumours on this subject
that have been doing the rounds for many decades. Nevertheless, Nehru as
a British mole? Both sides would have taken care to leave no trace of the
collaboration. However, the track-record of the man and his regime gives
us clues: (1) the worst factotums of the colonial rulers were never brought
to justice; (2) the Commonwealth farce was enacted in 1949- 50, by which
India became a Republic within that organisation and continues to recognise
the British monarch as its Head-a mind-boggling act of treachery and disingenuousness;
(3) the INA soldiers and the sailors in the Naval Mutiny were systematically
kept out of the armed forces after independence; and (4) the Navy and the
Air Force continued to have British chiefs until 1957 and 1954 respectively,
thereby providing Whitehall with total access to our defence records (and
also opportunities to pass off their discarded arsenal at outrageous prices).
For 55 years, the country has not
been given any answers to the questions that have been repeatedly posed
on the tainted legacy of Nehru as outlined above. At one stage, some scholars
did raise these uncomfortable queries but they were either sidelined or
absorbed into the establishment. People like the late Dr Ram Manohar Lohia
were simply brushed aside as mavericks. Will someone like Dasgupta now
attempt the daunting task of looking, de novo, at the entire subject of
the transfer of power from the white sahibs to their brown counterparts?
It will reveal cans of worms but it is an unavoidable catharsis. No self-respecting
people should live with doctored history books.
