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Saturday, July 16, 2011

[chottala.com] Saluting a secular freedom fighter by S. N. M. Abdi [bdnews24.com]



 

 N. M. Abdi
Of Netaji, partition of the subcontinent and more.

S. N. M. Abdi

Saluting a secular freedom fighter

July 14, 2011

bose

There would have been no Bangladesh — or for that matter Pakistan — if Subhash Chandra Bose had his way. Before nationalist Bangladeshis explode in anger, let me quickly explain!

A new book on the independence hero venerated by millions of Bengalis as Netaji, or The Leader, says that he was vehemently against the partition of British India and wanted Hindus and Muslims to share power equitably in an undivided post-colonial nation.

According to the author, Sugato Bose, who also happens to be Netaji's grandnephew, Netaji would have been so generous to Muslims that there would have been no need to divide India. The noted historian writes in "His Majesty's Opponent – Subhash Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against Empire" that Hindu-Muslim unity and the unity of India were equally dear to Mahatma Gandhi and Bose despite their political differences. But Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel were not on the same page as Gandhi and Bose resulting in partition of the sub-continent.

At the book launch last week, Sugato said that Netaji's "major emphasis in public political life was to unite the various religious communities of India and to be very generous to the minorities especially the Muslims. And that I think is extremely important to emphasise in contemporary India."

Netaji's stature was no less than Nehru's – India's first prime minister. If he had not clashed with Gandhi and slipped out of India in 1941, he would have had a major say in pre-independence confabulations with the British. Sugato and many others believe that if Netaji had not gone into exile and remained in the political mainstream, he and Jinnah could have together averted partition and we would be happily living today in a country stretching from Khyber to Chittagong.

Significantly, Netaji resigned from the Indian Civil Service to fight for independence. He shone in the Congress Party becoming its president in 1938 before clashing with Gandhi on a number of issues. When Netaji was compelled to resign in 1939 instead of becoming president for a second term, poet Rabindranath Tagore hailed him as "Deshonayak" and predicted that his "temporary defeat will turn into a permanent victory".

According to Sugato, "Gandhi was the quintessential patriarch. He wanted those he adopted as his sons in the political sphere to obey and Bose was a little too rebellious leading to a real conflict with Gandhi in 1939". The crux of the matter is that unlike Gandhi, Bose wanted to take the British head on. He had serious reservations about the policy of non-violence and thought of an armed uprising. Escaping from house arrest in Calcutta in January 1941, Bose secretly met Adolf Hitler in Germany and sought his help to free India from British rule. When the Nazi leader declined, he turned to the Japanese.

Travelling in submarines, he arrived in Singapore via Tokyo, where with Japanese help, he raised the Indian National Army (INA) comprising mainly Indian soldiers of the British army who were captured by the Japanese in Singapore. The INA advanced to north-eastern India but the British ultimately crushed the ill-equipped, ragtag INA without much ado. The defeated troops were driven back into Burma, thousands dying of dysentery, malnutrition or malaria on the way.

Bose himself was reportedly killed on August 18, 1945 aboard a Japanese bomber which crashed seconds after take-off from a military air base at Taipei en route to Moscow. But even today, 66 years after Bose vanished, All India Forward Bloc, the political party founded by Bose, and millions of ordinary Indians, particularly in West Bengal, refuse to believe that he perished in the crash.

Historian Sitnanshu Das believes that after losing the war, the Japanese probably faked the air crash so that their generals and ally, Bose, could disappear without the Allies hunting them. Sitnanshu says that Bose tried to make his way back to India via Russia. But he was caught and thrown into jail when he entered Russia. And by the time Moscow realised that Bose was in their custody, Russians were not willing to admit that they had imprisoned him and left him to die in jail.

Whatever the case may have been, there is no doubting Netaji's secularism. He went out of his way to make Muslims feel secure and wanted. His INA was a perfect example of Hindu-Muslim unity. Sugato says that Netaji was so secular that he kept his own religious faith very private.

The new book reveals for the first time that in his private life Netaji "was a brave devotee of the 'divine mother' — the supreme being or God manifesting himself in the form of the divine mother. That is very much part of the Bengali cultural milieu. Before his escape from India, he sent Sisir Kumar Bose (Sugato's father) and a sister of his to offer puja at the Dakhineshwar Kali temple. In southeast Asia, he would go to the meditation room of the Ramakrishnan Mission and obviously pray or meditate and come out feeling rejuvenated. But he never mentioned all of this in public because in his political life his primary goal was to unite all religious communities of India.

As S. A. Ayer, Netaji's minister of publicity in the government-in-exile, pointed out that he never spoke of his God; "he lived Him."

An honest to God secularist would have surely saved the sub-continent from being partitioned against the backdrop of mass killings and the exodus of victims. But alas!

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S. N. M. Abdi is a consulting editor, writer, columnist and broadcaster from India.

S. N. M. Abdi (7)

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4 Responses to " Saluting a secular freedom fighter "

  1. sajjad on July 15, 2011 at 10:04 pm

    Yes, he was a true Bangalee who did not surrender, went to war and perhaps the best son of Bengal in a thousand years.

    But why raise this lost dream of the undivided Bengal now?

  2. russel ahmed on July 15, 2011 at 9:28 pm

    It makes me curious to read the article. Thanks for post. Because history tells the truth of secularism.

    I have seen the movie on Bose, but I'm yet to read a book on him.

  3. Kamrul on July 14, 2011 at 11:34 pm

    Very well written article. Although, this is not particularly surprising as his elder brother, Sarat Chandra Bose, helped draft an early proposal for an independent Bengal (including Bihar and Orissa) in cooperation with Suhrawardy, pointing to a strong secular ideology prevalent within their family.

  4. Golam Arshad on July 14, 2011 at 10:02 pm

    Great piece! Had Subhash Bose prevailed, India would have never had been partitioned. He was the real ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity!!



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