BOSE OR GANDHI: Who Got India Her Freedom? by G D Bakshi (Author).

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BOSE OR GANDHI: Who Got India Her Freedom?

By Maj Gen (Dr) G D Bakshi SM, VSM (Retd)

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General Bakhshi is familiar from debates on Republic, with his patient manner and courtesy even to those who seem to deserve far less. But here, he astounds with this work that fills a gap in discourses of Indian history that younger India was unaware of existence of, despite its having been lived by their elders who were adults or even teens during WWII and its aftermath.

And he's very good at this, and not only because of honesty, but more.

Internet has familiarised us with key points - Attlee’s response to queries on his visit to India, for the most important part, and the reality of there having been uncertainty regarding the air crash that Netaji Subash Chandra Bose supposedly died in; official history allowed during six decades of congress and allies regimes pushed all of that under carpet if not locked in a basement closet, key lost.

But General Bakhshi not only lays it all spread in light, he has us see a whole, especially in the fourth chapter, unlike other doubles that have brought out vital parts.

And he writes naturally - he writes as he speaks, so one gets the feeling while reading that one can hear him. This tends to give not a concise argument as much as repetition sometimes, but then he surprises just when one may be a tad lulled, and springs a very coherent and complete picture of the situation as it was then, not generally mentioned by most other historians - establishment tending to avoid it, swept under the carpet, on the whole.

His brilliantly presented summation comes in chapter 10, after having examined evidence available in declassified documents of British government through chapters before.

He astounds even more in the next chapter, discussing concept of nation and facts thereof, after having denounced those that deny the very nationhood of India.

A myth, perpetrated perhaps during the six decades of congress and allies regimes, persists about military consisting of marionettes or robots who are incapable of thought, has persisted - despite the very illuminating conversations on Republic media that various anchors hold with various experienced military veterans, whom one is fascinated to hear due to their very brilliant and astute analysis of various situations, so much so, one is furious often with otherwise much loved anchors for interrupting them.

Reading this book destroys that myth. A mind that produces this work isn't just the experienced veteran who instantly knows answers and gives them to lay audience at leisure over a pipe reflectivity, but someone who can tear lies built up by supposedly scholars over decades, centuries, with evidence - and analyse further.

If anything, it's another area of nation's needs where he's served with excellence, matching his record in armed services.

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General Bakhshi credits Gandhi for being the first one to demand independence instead of petitioning for home rule.

Didn't Lokamanya Tilak do that, much before arrival of Gandhi? He was known for telling off British, "Its my birthright, and I WILL have it"?

"There were three distinct strands in the freedom struggle of India. The Anglophile Indian elite had begun the freedom struggle in a very effete way by appealing to Imperial Justice—pleading and putting up petitions and memoranda to the Queen Empress for a measure of autonomy or home rule. They considered themselves as loyal subjects of the Empire and petitioned the queen against their local colonial rulers. Even this request for Home Rule or Dominion status was turned down on racist grounds. India participated enthusiastically in the First World War, in the fond hope of earning British gratitude. What it got instead was the racist massacre of Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. This, just a year after the war, in which 1.3 million Indians had participated and some 72,000 had laid down their lives. This was a critical turning point in India’s Freedom Struggle.

"Mahatma Gandhi appeared on the scene at this stage and carried out a mass mobilisation of the Indian peasantry. This was a movement of non-cooperation with the British rulers. How could they rule the people of India without their consent? He asked the people of India to boycott British goods. This mass mobilisation shook the British. Gandhi however kept it non-violent, and the British soon found non-violence to be entirely within their tolerance thresholds. In fact, they even tacitly encouraged this strain of the freedom struggle. While practising democracy at home, they could not allow themselves to be seen as not encouraging it in their colonies.

"The third strand of this struggle was the violence of the Revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh and Chandra Shekhar Azad. This worried the British and they were ruthless in its suppression. What finally led to the eclipse of the British Empire in India, however, was the violence of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army (INA). Though it lost the battles of Imphal and Kohima, it won the War for India’s Independence by instigating massive armed rebellion in the Indian Armed Forces. The military men of the INA and the regular armed forces were however rapidly marginalised, by a set of collaborators and closet Anglophiles, as was Mahatma Gandhi."

Author has overlooked the long tradition that connects them to much older, righteous warriors for nation and self respect, chiefly in spirit if not political ideology - going back in time via Lokamanya Tilak and Sri Aurobindo, to Chapekar brothers and Surya Sen, Vasudev Balwant Phadke and Queen Laxmibai of Jhansi, Peshawas and Maratha Empire of Shivaji, Rana Pratap and Queen Padmini of Chittor Garh, Prithviraj Chauhan and even further, right back to Rama.

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Author proceeds to discuss various schools of thought about the concept of nation, and comes to democratic citizenship and equality amongst defining characteristics.

" ... What then really welds a modern nation together are three critical factors:

"Democratic Conception of Citizenship

"Extensive market for manufactured goods and services

"Advances in Communications

"Without these modern prerequisites, nation state formation is impossible, aver the scholars. Hence India was never a nation state before 1947."

But there are monarchies in Europe which obviously do not have this equality of citizens, so does UK not qualify as a nation?

" ... The magnificent spread of Buddhism across the whole of Asia by a saffron clad army of Indian monks is yet another feat of communication that would be difficult to replicate even in today’s era of the Internet and satellite communications."

"To sum up this discussion, therefore, ancient or modern, the following characteristics are needed for the formation of a nation state:

A self-designating name

A written history

A degree of cultural uniformity, often as a result of and sustained by religion

Legal Codes

An authoritative centre

The conception of a bounded territory

"On each of these criteria, ancient India qualifies as a nation. Its self-designating name was Bharat and later Hindustan (from the Arabic for Hindu based on Sindhu—the cradle river of the Indian civilisation). It had an extensive oral and written history in the form of the Vedas, the Puranas and the national epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which still exercise such an extensive hold upon the popular imagination. ... "

Sindhu being cradle is associated with Aryan invasion theory, and equally false; trusting indigenous knowledge of India, the very word Sindhu literally means ocean, and such an epithet for not the largest river of India is only factual going by India having witnessed vanishing of an ocean as Himalayan ranges rose out of the ocean, while the river flowed in place of where the ocean was.

Author has referred to Jambudweepa and interpreted it as Asia, but more likely it's another name for India before India hit Asia and Himalayan ranges rose out of the ocean that separated India from Asia.

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General Bakhshi asserts something that's, at best, hidden so far.

" ... To settle the question of who got us our freedom it would be essential to first examine the final push of the Congress towards freedom that took place in the Form of the Quit India Movement in 1942. This was the final and allegedly decisive phase of the peaceful freedom struggle of Gandhi. So, did it succeed? It would be essential to examine how it fared for that alone can help us to settle this historical debate in a logical fashion. The simple fact is that though it was Mahatma Gandhi who had initially forced Bose out of the National Congress and virtually forced him to leave India, towards the mid-point of the Second World War, both men had developed a sneaking admiration for one another. Bose had called Gandhi the Father of the Nation because of his undisputed role in graduating the freedom struggle in India from the old-style effete debating clubs of the original Congress to a mass-based grass-roots movement that Gandhi had spread to the villages. He had involved the Indian peasantry to make it a genuine grass-roots movement with mass participation. After Bose had left India, Gandhi openly admired his courage, will power and tenacity of purpose. As time went on, he increasingly began to veer towards Bose’s view that the British would not leave unless they were really forced to go. The tragic experience of World War I clearly indicated how ungrateful they could be after the war was won. Even Gandhi realised, as time went on, that World War II presented a rare and unique opportunity for India to make an all-out attempt to win her freedom. This presented a narrow window of time in which to act and this would last only as long as the war lasted."

Why in that case did Gandhi not make his thinking known publicly? It couldn't be that he was afraid of British, after 1947, even though India was still a Dominion! He could have simply declared he intended to speak to nation on radio, and announced that he wanted Netaji brought back, to be honoured!

So it could only have been ego in the way of doing the right thing, a bad choice, instead of admitting growth of consciousness!

But far more true is that the younger man was realist, and whatever his thinking, about Gandhi being wrong as a strategist of freedom struggle, he'd never given any disrespect; on the contrary, he'd simply found his way around and out, despite being maneuvered out of congress by the older man, that too so unceremoniously, and gone on to prove the truth of his own thinking - in action.

It's possible that he respected Gandhi, too, rightly or wrongly; but at the very least he'd never been less than courteous to the elder. He knew he was right, and he didn't need to use despicable tactics of manipulation, fraud or lack of courtesy. He simply carved his way to fight for independence of India.

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"Lord Louis Mountbatten had taken over from Field Marshal Wavell as India’s last Viceroy and later its first Governor General. He had, rather arbitrarily and whimsically, advanced the date of British withdrawal from India from the earlier target date of June 1948 to August 15, 1947 simply because that happened to be the anniversary of his South East Asia Command’s Victory over Japan. ... "

There are two separate parts, the hurry and the date. The hurry was because he didn't care for his almost regal position in India, and wanted to get back to his career, to achieve the position denied his father Battenberg in WWI due to the family having been German.

" ... This led to the holocaust of partition in which over 2 million Indians and Pakistanis were killed and some 14.5 million were uprooted and displaced. ... "

After Jinnah had ordered Direct Action Day, and it'd been executed in Calcutta in massacre of thousands of Hindus, followed by massacre of 150,000 Hindus in Noakhali, there's very little possibility that the partition massacres would have miraculously not taken place, without a crackdown by several foreign troops on duty, protecting minorities in each of the regions intended to become Pakistan.

" ... It saw the most massive mass migrations in human history. ... "

Wonder if stats were compiled regarding migrations, rather fleeing of residents, of ares in Europe ahead of nazi occupation? Those happened not only in France, Paris and other Northern French fleeing southwest as nazis advanced, but largely in regions East, especially Eastern Poland and contiguous regions, where people attempted to flee East as Germany attacked Russia. Nazi pilots dived down and shot them point blank, and victims could see the face of the pilot shooting, while victims were often old people, women, children and babies, with baby carriages or carts as only alternative to walking.

But numbers in India were eleven million Hindus massacred, and muslims to the tune of slightly over 400,000, as per Koenraad Elst, with Sikhs number in between. Possibly they match or exceed civilians in Europe victimised by nazis.

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In chapter six he mentions something not usually mentioned in context of pre-independence history, making Calcutta Direct Action Day seem like an aberration in a city quiet and harmonious until that point.

"4. Casey flew up to see me on Sunday afternoon and went back the next day. I had a long talk to him about the Calcutta riots. They seem to have been in two phases.

"The first was the procession of students which was stopped by the police; Casey describes it as a collection of quite hysterical young men, with whom it was impossible to reason, but who were not violent; they eventually dispersed, probably from sheer exhaustion, after some 15 hours shouting and demonstrating.

"The feature of the next phase was attacks on all forms of transport, large numbers of lorries and private cars being stopped and burnt, road blocks formed across many of the streets, and some of the railway lines stopped by crowds sitting on them.

"There was no obvious connection between the two phases, but there was certainly a good deal of organisation behind the second phase; it looks as if some of the extreme elements had taken advantage of the first phase to attack the transport system possibly as a dress rehearsal for something bigger later on; possibly in the hope that something big might develop of itself. This phase also ended as suddenly and unaccountably as it had begun.

"On top of all this was the strike of the Calcutta Corporation employees, which was purely an industrial dispute and had no connection with the riots, but naturally added to the difficulties and anxieties of the Government."

So, pretty much like the naxal disturbances of sixties to seventies, Calcutta was routinely disturbed by riots before August 1946, too.

Direct Action Day was only different in being a specifically ordered, communal pogrom, signalling future massacres of Hindus intended and executed as per Jinnah’s orders and more, and being perhaps first in the ordered category in comparatively modern times, but in reality a continuation of islamic butchering of Hindus over a millennium, restarted since Kerala riots after failure of Khilafat.

"Casey was impressed by the very strong anti-British feeling behind the whole demonstration, and considers the whole situation still very explosive and dangerous.

"The root cause of it all, he thinks and I agree, lies in the inflammatory speeches of the political leaders during the last month or two, working on the unstable minds of the youthful Bengali. So long as this violent speaking goes on, we shall have to expect outbreaks of this kind."

It's unclear if the said leaders were local or not, Congress or otherwise.

"Though one American was killed (burned alive in an ambulance) and a number injured, Casey does not think the Americans were in any way specially attacked; he says they behaved with admirable restraint, and carried out his requests to keep off the streets during the trouble as far as possible. Casey was not impressed by the methods or staff work of the police. He intends to hold an official enquiry on the firing, and to overhaul the police arrangements. He is sending one of his officers down to Bombay to study their procedure for dealing with crowds and disturbances. I think Casey himself handled the affair admirably, and that without him it might have developed more seriously."

Why did this fail quite so badly in August, just ten months later, which was not too long after this communication? Were the British deliberately helping Jinnah’s massacre of Bengali Hindus succeed? Was that according to instructions?

If so, was it a vengeance pogrom, revenge against the intellectual leadership in Bengal? Or was it far more, a subtle ruse to flush out Netaji from Russia, while British were still in power?

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"5. The need for a firm attitude about violence has been brought home to me by a recent intelligence report I have received.

"The following are some extracts from a single day’s report:

"In the course of one meeting at Nagpur, R. S. Ruikar threatened the British Government that if mercy was not shown to the I.N.A. personnel, Indians would not spare their last drop of blood in saving their lives and asked the people to hold themselves in readiness for a movement “more powerful and mightier than that of 1942.”

"“In Delhi, large handwritten posters in red ink recently appeared threatening death for ‘twenty English dogs’ for every I.N.A. man executed.” In the Central Provinces, the President of the Mahakoshal Provincial Congress Committee is reported to have stated privately that the movement which Congress now visualised, unless Gandhi gave a clear-cut directive to the contrary, would not only be of a violent character but would be reinforced by the co-operation of released I.N.A. personnel and other revolutionary elements trained in guerilla warfare; he declared another movement inevitable.

"6. The I.N.A. trials are in progress again, and it is becoming more and more clear that the distorted publicity which has attended them is doing a very great deal of harm to Government and constitutes a threat to the morale of the Indian Army. All parties have taken the same line though Congress are more vociferous than the others. It cannot fail to be disturbing to the Indian Army to find that the vocal part of the country at any rate has an entirely different set of values from that which the Indian Army has been taught to observe.

"There are undoubtedly many ex-prisoners of war who are extremely angry and resentful about this hero worship of traitors, but the great bulk of vocal opinion is the other way. One of the troubles in India is that the opinion that is heard is only that of a very small urban population which, though it is very far from being representative of the whole country, monopolises the press and the platform.

"One trouble is that the evidence against the accused in the present trial, at any rate on the first few days, has not been such as to horrify the normal Indian in any way. The Congress cry has been that these men only loved their country too well. It would have been much better if we had brought on first the trials in which the accused were alleged to be guilty of the grossest brutality to other Indians.

"But even when evidence of brutality comes out, as it has done lately, the Nationalist papers hide it unobtrusively on a back page and headline some sentence or phrase favourable to their thesis. The effect of the trials has been discussed in the last few days by police representatives from the Provinces and then by the Commander-in-Chief and G.H.Q."

It's not possible to imagine what could an Indian do to another (especially when the former was INA, thereby - by definition - fighting for freedom of India), that was worse than various atrocities perpetrated by Europeans against others - nazis against Jews, British against Indians (for example in Jallianwala Bagh), Portuguese in Goa, British against Australian natives, US against natives of that continent, Spain in Mexico and Peru ... ?

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"VICEROY FIELD MARSHAL VISCOUNT WAVELL’S REPORTS TO H. M. THE KING AND PRIME MINISTER MR. ATTLEE

"The reports are given here as they appeared in “Transfer of Power,” Volume 6, pages 713, 1054.

"I. FIELD MARSHAL VISCOUNT WAVELL TO H.M. THE KING GEORGE VI (EXTRACT) WAVELL PAPERS, PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE: H.M.THE KING, PP. 100-2 THE VICEROY’S HOUSE, NEW DELHI

"31 DECEMBER 1945"

This is slightly more elaborate description of same riots mentioned above.

"2. The troubles which I feared might be brought about by the intemperate speeches of Nehru and other Congress leaders, with their indiscriminate championship of the I.N.A. and glorification of the “martyrs” of August 1942, duly occurred in Calcutta in the last week of November, when serious rioting broke out which might easily have developed much more seriously still. It began with a students’ procession in favour of the I.N.A. which defied police orders; and ended four days later, suddenly and rather mysteriously, when the mob was almost out of hand, transport in Calcutta was practically paralysed, and the troops were standing by to take over from the Police. The tale of the casualties and damage shows how dangerous the situation had become: 33 killed (one an American lorry-driver burned to death, the remainder civilians); nearly 200 Police, Fire Brigade and soldiers (70 British, 37 American), and about 200 civilians injured; 150 military or police vehicles and a large number of civilian cars destroyed or damaged. Casey handled the situation admirably, but the Police staff work and tactics showed obvious weaknesses."

Following is interesting in current context.

"3. These riots proved a turning-point in the immediate political situation, and caused at least a temporary detente. The leaders realised that the violence of their speeches were [was] likely to cause outbreaks of violence a result which had been obvious to everyone else for some time; and that the authorities were quite prepared and determined to put down such outbreaks with a firm hand—a purpose which was reinforced by the statements in Parliament and by a speech I made at Calcutta. Gandhi, who had been apparently hibernating for some time, now took a hand, and at one reasserted his influence over Congress. He is believed to have issued orders that violence and incitements to violence are to be avoided, until after the elections at any rate. Although the speeches of Nehru and Co. and the statements in the Nationalist Press would still be termed rank sedition and provocation of rebellion in most countries, they have lately been moderate compared with those of a month or two ago."

So Nehru was accused of seditious conduct by the last but one Viceroy, just not thrown in jail, much less tortured or worse? This, despite clear indication that his - Jawaharlal Nehru’s - speeches did incite a riot that had violent consequences, unlike the recent ridiculous application of sedition laws slapped against a (subsequently cancelled) declaration of intended recital of a Hindu mantra, only because it was Hindu?

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"4. Gandhi has had a series of conversations with Casey. They began with a natural wish on Casey’s part to meet Gandhi when he came to Bengal, and have continued at the request of the old man, who seems to enjoy talking at large to Casey. Casey gave me a detailed account of his last conversation; it ranged from such domestic subjects as the drunken habits of one of his sons, the soothing effect to being massaged with mustard oil and lemon, and the economic advantages of home spinning, to the wrongs done to India by Warren Hastings and Clive and the evils that would follow from Pakistan. He said of Pakistan that His Majesty’s Government must make up its mind between those who had always opposed us (Congress) but who now wanted the right thing, a united India, and those who had helped us, the Muslims, but wanted a wrong thing, a divided India. Gandhi had said very much the same to me at our last interview at Simla, six months ago."

Why did Gandhi imagine British would agree about right and wrong, or care if they did, as long as West was hellbent on destroying USSR at any cost, including letting hell lose throughout the world?

And why did he talk about the son whose life and fragile being he, an extremely bad father, destroyed by repeated actively inflicted stopping of any possible way the son could have found a path for himself, a path not dominated by Gandhi?

Munchhausen by proxy?

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"I had a 40 minutes talk with Gandhi myself three weeks ago, in which he was quite friendly but rather vague and woolly, giving me a long dissertation on the eventual conquest of the world by his doctrine of non-violence. Immediately afterwards he had a talk with Arthur Smith, to whom he sang a hymn of hate against the British and all their works, ranging from the Mutiny to the Simla Conference last summer. He is an odd mixture of benevolence (outward) and malevolence (inward)."

That last bit is callous from its writer, Wavell, even if he's correct in evaluating Gandhi - after all, anyone reciting history of British atrocities against India is only being as factual as a holocaust survival memoir, or a historical account of islamic atrocities against India and Hindus!

A "hymn of hate" label would be factual only if the history weren't! As it is, it's the writer, Wavell, describing him thus, that comes across as condescending racist, and that's without taking Gandhi's stature into account, political or otherwise.

And here's more evidence, even undeniable proof, of a condescending racism, and accruing stupidity thereby, where Wavell next says -

" ... I should put the composition of his character as 70% extremely astute politicism, with a fixed dislike of the British and determination to rid India of them; 15% saint and 15% charlatan. I am always pretty clear about the first of these percentages, but my estimate of the second and third proportions changes frequently."

And yet he genuflected every Sunday, or took his hat off at any rate, to another Asian whom his racist ancestors had crucified with exactly the same stupid condescending racism, before they made a God out of him, and then proceeded to deny his Jewish ancestry!

Wavell fails to see that in Gandhi was the best friend British could ever find but kicked at, instead, over and over, with no apology at any time. If his saintliness was only fifteen percent or less, rest wasn't hatred of British, it was some part - say a quarter - a longing he couldn't entirely overcome, another quarter a politician who strategists, and a large part that aspired to transformation into a higher human.

He failed to see that his Indian roots had secret to a humanity already far higher than anything of England or Britain, or Europe or anywhere outside India.

Else he'd have recogised Subhash Chandra Bose for the hero that India did.

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"II. FIELD MARSHAL VISCOUNT WAVELL TO MR. ATTLEE (VIA INDIA OFFICE)

"NEW DELHI, 24 February 1946 4.50 pm

"Received: 24 February, 1.25 pm MOST IMMEDIATE

"Following personal for Prime Minister from Viceroy.

"1. Full information of events has been telegraphed home from here and Bombay and there seems no use in my recapitulating them. Naval mutiny is now under control and, I hope, ended. But rioting by mobs in Bombay is serious and situation is still unstable. It is early yet to attempt appreciation but following represents my judgement up to date."

Again, he refuses to see that British racism, or Indian love and loyalty for India, might be root cause of the naval mutiny.

"2. Primary cause of whole trouble is of (sic) speeches by Congress leaders since September last. As I have warned them publicly and privately on many occasions, the preaching of violence to an excitable people can only result eventually in disastrous violence, and idea that it can be controlled by words as easily as it is excited by words is an illusion. I am pretty sure that the top leaders of Congress had nothing to do with inciting this mutiny and did not wish it. Gandhi has put out good statement condemning violence. But I think some of smaller Congress fry had a good deal to do with it and probably also Communist agitators."

If a few speeches by small fry was all it took, well, it'd have happened while there was time to save lives of Bhagat Singh and his group.

"3. Commander-in-Chief thinks, and I agree, that events do not indicate any inherent rottenness in R.I.N. R.I.N. has not same background as army, proportion of experienced officers and petty officers is very small owing to rapid expansion during war, and number of young and excitable men have been worked on by agitators from inside and outside. There may have been service grievances but I do not think they were serious. Spirit is still probably good if men are well handled. I am afraid that example of the Royal Air Force, who got away with what was really a mutiny, has some responsibility for present situation."

That's probably exactly what Pontius Pilate reported to Rome - "There may have been service grievances but I do not think they were serious."!

"4. I think that personnel of the R.I.A.F. attached to R.A.F. have probably more serious grievances from service point of view than R.I.N. They have, as you know, only become responsibility of the C.-in-C. India very lately and their conditions of service are being examined urgently.

"5. Welfare of army and any legitimate grievances have been under constant review of C. and authorities, I think I can safely say, for whole period of war and since it. I do not believe there is any really serious material (corrupt group) [?cause] for agitation, but unless Indian soldier is paid at same rates as British, which is not possible, agitators may always allege racial discrimination."

He seriously didn't see the racism in that, his own writing and attitude? Of course not, British caste system was still ironclad then. Still does retain most of its barbed wire. Accept one in between rejecting two, and blame the ones thrown out, get rid of them one way or another.

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"It was Bose who saw this with astonishing clarity. The effete non-violent movement could continue forever without achieving any concrete results. It could sputter on ineffectually for decades. The British success in India was one of Nativisation. They had used an Indian army of natives to establish and maintain their empire in India. The key centre of gravity of the empire was the loyalty of the native sepoy to the Raj. If this was subverted, the Raj would come to an immediate and inglorious end. Gandhi initially had Bose hounded out of the Congress for his rebellion. But Bose was right. The most opportune time for launching a violent liberation movement was the war itself. Britain now had powerful enemies prepared to help such a violent movement to emerge in India. The Japanese had given this serious thought and ultimately helped to create the INA. Just two years after driving Bose out, Gandhi veered very close to the views of Bose, especially as to timings. The saint could still not bring himself around to endorse his violent methods. Gandhi forced the Congress to launch the final Quit India Movement even while the war was on. Loyalists of the empire like Nehru and Azad differed with Gandhi but were overruled. The non-violent movement was snuffed out by the British who mobilised 57 white battalions to do this. The Congress leadership was rounded up and jailed and blanked out entirely from the print and radio media of that era using draconian wartime censorship of the news. In terms of timing, had the Japanese Army and the INA attacked then (in 1942-43) they would have made mincemeat of the empire in India.

"For once the traditionally bold Japanese military hierarchy had lost its nerve and dithered fatally. When they did get down to attacking India in 1944, it was a classic case of too little, too late. The miracle is that despite the odds they almost pulled it off. The battles of Imphal-Kohima were one of the most bitterly fought battles of that war. But in the end it culminated in a major defeat and misery for the combined Japanese-INA forces. As we have seen, precisely as Bose had predicted , the INA lost the battles but won the war for Indian independence. We have seen in detail just how. The outcome of the Indian war for independence, Bose had said, would be independent of the outcome of the Second World War. That was precisely how it came about. Bose thus proved to be one of the great strategic thinkers and practioners of that era. His insight was remarkable for its penetration into the essence of the problem and his anlaysis always proved to be objective and firmly rooted in reality. The solutions he advocated delivered concrete results."

"Both Bose and Gandhi were highly charismatic leaders with a deep insight into the Indian psyche. Gandhi was a great organiser who created an egalitarian, rural, mass-based movement for freedom in India. However in terms of achieving outcomes, this movement failed to deliver till Bose intervened and redirected it into the classical violent channels. The modern nation state is premised upon the monopoly of violence and Bose created the instrumentalities for a violent overthrow of the empire in the form of the INA. Its use by itself galvanised India and awoke its dormant sense of self. It was Bose and his violent methods that ultimately liberated India in 1947 itself—just two years after the Second World War which the British had finally won. The war left Britain exhausted and spent and drained of the will to maintain its empire, especially in the face of massive armed rebellion. Bose’s stellar contribution was to make that threat become very real and credible. The INA trials shook the empire in India. The mutinies that followed in February 1946 sounded the death knell of that empire. In the end, the same Armies that had subjugated the Indian people, helped to get them their freedom. Let us not forget it was the Indian army that had revolted in 1857 as also in 1946 (Royal Indian Navy). The pity was that the British succeeded in transferring power to their handpicked set of AngloPhile brown sahibs who remained beholden to the Raj for a good half century after the British had left."

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"The Congress party had elected Sardar Patel as the first Prime Minister of free India. However in a surprising act of wilfulness, Gandhi ensured that the mantle was given to Nehru—an avowed Anglophile who was so very close to Mountbatten and his wife. Nehru clearly had a problem of political legitimacy. The voting had gone in Sardar Patel’s favour. But even more than Patel, Nehru was wrestling with the Ghost of Bose. The whole nation knew that India had finally won its freedom only because of Bose and the INA, 26,000 of whom had laid down their lives. Such a scale of casualties hardly justified the fiction of an entirely non-violent movement for freedom. Both the departing British empire and the new Nehruvian dispensation, now worked energetically to craft a brand new narrative—India had won its freedom solely and only due to the non- violent Freedom Movement of the Nehru-Gandhi dispensation. Force or violence had simply no role to play in getting India her freedom. The British empire also tom-tommed the fiction of a non-violent struggle so that the remaining colonies in Africa would emulate this brilliant new model. As a sad outcome, the freedom of the African colonies was inordinately delayed by a couple of decades. The British Raj now acquired a new-found halo of liberalism and benevolence that masked its true exploitative and rapacious character."

In perspective, this lie was responsible for China swallowing Tibet without fear of intervention from India, and the final humiliation of India due to Nehru taking this lie seriously and fooling himself about Gandhian politics, attempting to raise an image of India and of himself that was vulnerable to just such a humiliation.

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"Dedicated

To Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose

and

All Ranks past and present of

The Indian National Army

Whose enormous sacrifices made us free.

We chose however

to carve not a line

and raise not a stone,

in their sacred memory."

That's in process of correction since 2014.

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Contents

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Acknowledgement

Prologue: Defining The Civilisational Context of The Debate

1.Who Got Us Our Freedom?

2.An Overview of The Freedom Struggle

3.The Abject Failure of the Quit India Movement of Mahatma Gandhi

4.The Clement Attlee-Chakrabarty Dialogue

5.Conclusive Evidence: The Commander-in-Chief Gen (Later Fd Mshl) Claude Auchinleck’s Reports to The Viceroy

6.Conclusive Evidence: The Viceroy Fd Mshl Viscount Wavell’s Correspondence

7.Reports of the Provincial Governors

8.Intelligence Bureau’s Report on INA Trials

9.Endgame in London

10.A Summation: Rectifying History

11.Epilogue: Nation State and Nationalism in India

Appendix

Bibliography

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REVIEW

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Prologue: Defining The Civilisational Context of The Debate

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" ... No other nation in the world has faced such a concerted assault upon its identity and sense of nationhood and self, than India. ... These had originally started in the seventh century AD itself, with the invasions of the Hindu kingdoms of Afghanistan and Sindh by the Arab armies. The little-known fact of history is that, for three centuries, the Hindu Kingdoms of Kabul and Zabul had held off the Arab Invaders. In fact the all-conquering Arab Armies suffered their first major defeat in Hindu Afghanistan (and have since been talking of the unfinished Gazwa-e-Hind—the final battle for the conquest of India, which will happen at the end of time). The Arab invasion of Sindh was halted by the Gujjar-Pratiharas on the borders of Rajasthan, contained and prevented from advancing any further for the next two centuries.

"The ramparts of India finally fell when the Afghan Hindus were converted to Islam and mounted a series of raids on North India to loot its fabulous wealth. These started in the tenth century AD as bloody raids for plunder, gold and women and once the fact of India’s lack of unity, pacific nature and military weakness were thoroughly exposed, came the wars of conquest. ... Thus even while North India fell to Afghans, Mongols, Mughals and, much later, Persian invaders, the Cholas of the South were making naval forays and spreading Indian culture and values and its arts and architecture to large parts of South East Asia."

"Few historians, however, highlight the remarkable fact that for over 400 years, i.e., from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, India was ruled by Muslim invaders. Yet over 80% of the Indian population remained Hindu. This is a stark contrast with the equally ancient and flourishing civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Central Asia and Iran which were converted en masse to Islam. There is not a trace of their original indigenous culture left today. The Parsis in India are all that remains of the flourishing Persian civilisation of Iran. How did this miracle happen? India proved to be a weak state but was a strong society. Thus once the Hindu states in India were militarily overrun, Indian society deliberately splintered itself into a plethora of Jatis, varna and caste groups which kept their flocks together by the severe threat of social boycott and excommunication. ... The Hindu political states were destroyed by invading Muslim armies but the natives held themselves together in the face of untold persecution by banding together in Jat and Biradari clusters at the local level. This prevented comprehensive penetration of Hindu Society by the proselytising attempts of Islam. Despite conquest by military force, Islam was not able to convert the entire mass of the huge Hindu population to Islam. The sheer contrast with what happened in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Central Asia and Iran could not be more marked."

It was more than that. Islam forbade any institutions of education other than their own, so the Indian Ashrama system where students went to live with teacher to learn, were outlawed. Penalty being massacres, this risk was too much.

So education of children was restricted to what families could impart, and castes unable to mix at Ashrama, as for example in Mahabharata Krishna had a friend Sudama from early years, or Drona had been a mate of great king Drupada of Paanchaala. Thus separation of castes came about, socially.

But on the other hand this kept alive arts, crafts and other knowledge of India, preserved and flourishing through millennia despite invaders wreaking havoc. This was very unlike Persian history where, within a century of Arab conquest, script and literacy was lost, Arabs having not only massacred hundreds of thousands but burnt all libraries. The hordes of islamic invaders did all that in India too, but ancient knowledge survived despite it all.

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"The British came to India in the sixteenth century when the Mughal Empire was in its heyday with Jehangir and Shah Jahan ruling in great opulence and splendour. The Mughal Empire was then generating some 40% of the world’s GDP. The British came as petty traders to sell silver and buy back Indian spices and hand woven cloth. Then came Aurangzeb who undid the secular-liberal consensus on the basis of which Akbar had founded the Mughal Empire. He reintroduced the hated Jaziya tax and started mindless wars of conquest in South India to further expand the Mughal Empire. The temporal spread in spatial terms, was simply too much to control. The Mughal Empire suffered an economic collapse because of Aurangzeb’s mindless wars. Afghanistan slipped from the grasp of the Mughal empire but what was even more telling was the massive revolts of the Hindus against the tyrannical repression of Aurangzeb. These had gravely threatened the Hindu identity per se and, faced with genocide, they revolted. These revolts were led by Shivaji Maratha in the South and the Sikhs of Guru Gobind Singh in the North. In the East an Assamese General called Lachit Burpukhan decisively checked any Mughal advance to the East and saved Assam and the North East from falling prey to the Mughals. Within one century, the mighty Mughal Empire, which once encompassed the whole of South Asia, had been torn apart. Thus it was not the British who saved the Hindus from Muslim persecution in India but rather it were the Hindu revolts that had comprehensively destroyed the Mughal empire, well before the British began their wars of conquest."

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" ... No single power had arisen in India which could truly as yet, step into the shoes of the Mughal empire. The Marathas had conquered large parts of Central India, the peninsular and even Western India. The Sikhs conquered most of North-Western India up to the borders of Afghanistan and even conquered parts of Afghanistan on the Southern banks of the Indus (NWFP, and FATA). Dogra Generals of the Sikh Empire of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (Generals Gulab Singh and Zorawar Singh) conquered Ladakh, Baltistan and then invaded Tibet itself. What we were witnessing was a Hindu military renaissance."

"Into this warring cauldron of states in India, stepped the East India Company and other European powers. In true Machiavellian style they played one power off against the other—the Marathas against the Nizam; the Sikhs against the Purbayias (Easterners) of modern-day UP, Bihar and Bengal and so on. The British success lay in nativisation. They recruited local Indian sepoys, trained them on European lines to create first-rate infantry units that could fire in disciplined rhythm that could defeat any Mughal-style cavalry charge. ... The British played one ethnicity based state in India against the other. They fought successive wars against the Marathas, the Nizam and Tipu Sultan and then the Sikhs. They used the Poorbiyas to defeat the Sikhs and then, when the Poorbiyas revolted en masse against their British masters for their proselytising zeal, they used the Sikhs and the hill tribes against them to brutally suppress the revolt of 1857."

" ... The 1857 Revolt had left the British truly shaken. It cured them of their proselytising zeal. They realised that any attempts to convert by force or fraud threatened to unleash wars of Identity per se in India. What really perturbed them however was the fact that all the diverse races, castes and creeds of India had united in an attempt to throw the hated British out. The British were really the non-self, that was refusing to merge into the Indian civilisation, and in fact, the British were threatening deep-rooted Indian identities based on religion. This threat to Hindu and Muslim identities based on greased cartridges, almost blew the empire apart. The greatest British concern after the 1857 uprising therefore was how to ensure that the disparate and fragmented Indian population remained divided and never, ever came together again to stage such a massive and widespread rebellion. ... Dara Shikoh had the Upanishads translated into Persian and before him Akbar had tried to formulate a new synthesis of faiths in India by his Deen-e-Elahi. The very arrogant Foreignness of British rule in India, their racial claims of superiority, really helped to initiate the rise and revival on the national self in India. The whole of India had united against the very Foreignness of British rule. The Indian self had begun to crystallise only in relation to a British non-self."

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" ... Thus Dr. Mithi Mukherjee writes: If the British Empire had to survive in India … it had to destroy and dismantle all sources of Indian unity and identity—cultural, political and historical; and render the very idea of India as meaningless. ... Torn by internal conflict, it was claimed that India was in desperate need of a neutral and impartial power at the helm of the state to secure justice and order (or justice as order). Given that Indian society was deeply divided into communities in conflict with each other, only an alien, foreign power could be trusted to be neutral and impartial.”"

"Thus the British answer to its problems of mitigating the foreignness of its rule was not the Mughal idea of assimilation of Indian culture and ethos to blend and not exacerbate identities that would grate, but to blend rather seamlessly. ... "

Mughal is the Persianisation of the term Mongol, and after the initial burning of cities and massacres by Chingiz Khan and co, when the Mongols set out to administer, they sought to bring about a harmonious social atmosphere in their rule, and this blending was a part thereof; Kublai Khan for example was converted by his mother to one faith while other members of the family were similarly converted to other, diverse faiths; and wives of the brothers belonged to diverse faiths too. So while one member of a family was Buddhist, another Nestorian, a third might convert to Islam, and so on.

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" ... The British however devised the ideology of imperial justice. They claimed India was no nation. it was just a squabbling and vicious mosaic of multiple identities forever at war with itself. India was a land of multiple identities. ... Their rather aggressive initial attempts at proselytisation backfired in the revolt of 1857. Thereafter their ardour for Christian proselytization cooled distinctly. Attempts at religious conversion were now largely confined to remote tribal areas (where they were rather successful—especially in the North East)."

" ... As Prof. Mtihi Mukherjee writes: “The British ratified caste by means of various colonial instruments such as district manuals, Gazettes, imperial surveys and finally the Census of 1872; and made Varna, the hierarchical ordering of castes into four groups as the central idea behind classification of Indian society.” She adds, “The census administration was driven by the ideological need to naturalise the absence of national unity and then institutionalise it by integrating it into routine administrative decisions and policies.”"

"Sir John Seeley was the author of the first caste-based census in India in 1872. He rubbed it in further by saying, “Indians do not have the capacity to develop an idea of nationality, let alone rule themselves.” He ascribed it primarily to the institution of caste. “So long as a regime of castes persists, it is difficult to see how the sentiments of unity and solidarity can penetrate and inspire all classes of the community.” This polarisation of caste was begun as the pursuit of social justice and was the primary colonial mechanism for splintering and dividing the Indian population, of which the Hindus then constituted well over 80%. ... "

What they never said, thereby propagating the biggest lie, is that caste as a concept exists in Europe - hence the word, which is Anglo-German, not Indian, and means box in German; fact is few organised civilisations are devoid of castes, except this. The basis of caste in India is very different from that elsewhere.

English, and European, castes amounted to titles - royalty, nobility, aristocracy, landed gentry, merchant, and finally, professionals such as doctors, was upper ladder, while the lower rungs were similar with less amounts of possessions. Moreover race and religion was part of caste too, as was gender.

Vocation or profession determining caste was and is the major difference between caste in India and those elsewhere.

British rulers extended English caste system to fit their regime in India, threw out and abused Indian caste distemper and put Hindus at bottom of English caste system for India; top levels were still the top rungs of English caste system, then came other European and similar - whites from US, Canada et al - followed by Anglo-Indian, Eurasians and those converted by missionaries, in that order.

Changing nomenclature to class doesn't change reality of the fact that it in fact is caste, as known in Europe.

Moreover, India always had interested marriages, even in Mahabharata. But Battenbergs were put at an extremely low table during wedding festivities in Germany by cousin Willie, despite his grandmother having accepted them as part of family, because of a morganatic marriage. Archduke Ferdinand similarly had been not called prince, for the same reason, a morganatic marriage, despite being the heir to Austria-Hungary, until he was shot dead in Sarajevo, sparking off WWI.

If this isn't caste system, it's merely a matter of a different label covering it for convenience of abusing India.

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" ... British tried energetically to prod the Sikhs into becoming a separate religion by way of promoting only Kesh Dharies and not Nam Dharies to be recruited for the Army. ... "

"The British turned the concept of divide and rule into a highly sophisticated art form. Thus, after caste, they now decided to deepen Indian religion-based faultlines by providing community-based electorates. Thus the Muslims were the first to get a separate electorate, followed by the Christians and Sikhs and then it was given to the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. ... The British now most aggressively championed every Muslim cause and manoeuvred to so deepen the Hindu-Muslim Faultline that it finally resulted in the tragic Partition of India. The British had most cleverly played upon and fanned the Muslim fears of being subsumed by a vast Hindu majority."

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"All the ills that plague nation state formation in India today stem from one basic foundational problem. The British were ultimately forced out of India not by Mahtama Gandhi and Nehru’s non-violent freedom struggle but rather starkly by the INA that Bose had formed with Japanese help. He had mounted an invasion of India along with the Japanese armies. Tragically this invasion failed because it had been launched too late—when America had intervened on the side of the Allies and tilted the scales with its huge industrial base. Air superiority had now shifted to the allies and they used it to good effect to counter the highly successful Japanese tactics of infiltration and encirclement. Despite this it was a close fought battle in Imphal-Kohima and the Japanese almost pulled it off. The monsoons destroyed the logistical support of their offensive, forcing them into a costly and painful retreat. After the war the victorious British were in no mood to relent. They in fact decided upon the equivalent of another psychological Jallianwala Bagh by staging the trials of INA Officers at the historic Red Fort—the same iconic Fort where the last Mughal Emperor of India had been tried. The trial was to be highly publicised to terrorise and overawe the Indian Army Personnel so that the Ghost of Bose and his INA could be exorcised forever. Bose had been right—the Centre of Gravity of the British Raj had been the steadfast loyalty of the native Indian Sepoy to the Raj. The INA trials were staged to ensure the Sepoy remained so loyal. It backfired very badly and had the exact opposite effect. The entire country was enraged and riots broke out in all major cities in November 1945—in the immediate aftermath of the trials. The Colonial dispensation was shaken to the roots by the fury and intensity of these riots. What was worse was the ominous impact it had on the loyalty of the native troops. The whole country now saw the INA as true patriots and the Indian sepoys realised they had clearly been on the wrong side in the war.

"The Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief in New Delhi, Fd Mshls Wavell and Auchinleck, realised the intensity of the emotions unleashed and the gravity of the situation. So did the Governors in the provinces. British troops were drained and spent. They were desperately tired after six years of war and truly homesick. They were being sent back. There were 2.5 million combat hardened Indian soldiers in India then, who were being demobilised. Should they have revolted against the empire, the handful of British troops would have been in no position to quell such an uprising. There was in fact panic in Lutyens, New Delhi and desperate contingency plans were drawn up to face such an emergency and evacuate some 90,000 Europeans and their families. Initially the Raj Imperialists in London felt their functionaries In Delhi had lost their nerves, and they were yet in no mood to throw in the towel. Then in February 1946 came the widespread mutiny in the Royal Indian Navy. Some 20,000 sailors on 79 Ships and many shore establishments took part. This was the last straw that broke the camel’s back in London. They realised with a shock that Wavell and Auchinleck were old India hands and were not being alarmist. What they had warned against had indeed come to pass. Just one day after the Naval mutiny the British leadership in London threw in the towel. Pethick-Lawrence announced that he and Stafford Cripps and A. V. Alexander would go to India for final negotiations.

"That was the end of the Raj. So the historical fact is that India got its freedom not because of the long-winded and largely ineffectual Non-violent Movement but by the actual and implied violence of Bose and his INA. ... Power, however, did not go to Bose or the trenchantly anti-British INA but to the people who had virtually collaborated with the British. While others fought and laid down their lives, these Congress leaders waited patiently on the sidelines to grab the fruits of power. This was a largely venal and self-serving elite who had not been baptised by fire or tested in an armed struggle. Forgotten in this pacific hoopla and self- congratulations were some 26,000 INA soldiers who had laid down their lives to free the country. The amazing fact is that, of the 60,000 INA, some 26,000 had laid down their lives. It was an enormous scale of suffering and sacrifice to lose 43% of the entire force. Yet The court Historians have the temerity to call the Indian Freedom Struggle an entitrely Non-violent affair. However, the 14,000 or so INA Boys who were repatriated from POW Camps were not taken back into the Indian Army. In fact they were treated as traitors and denied their wartime pensions. The pity is even 70 years after Independence, they still are. They are not allowed to take part in the Republic Day parade—even as veterans. What has been rejected is the very basic Nationalist ideology of Bose and the INA."

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" ... The Indian Constitution is basically a reprint of the British India Act of 1935 and wholly retains the colonial ethos via its replacement of “Imperial Justice” by “Social Justice.” Its basic premise is that India is not, and never was, a nation state before 1947. It is a mosaic of constantly warring and squabbling castes, communities and creeds. The main task of the Indian Government, à la the colonial regime, is to arbitrate between these competing castes and creeds in a just and fair manner, hence the overriding emphasis on the principle of Social Justice in the Indian Constitution. It has deftly replaced the colonial concept of Imperial Justice. The former bootlickers of the British have ensured that no attempt should ever be made to homogenise the Indian population and all the cultural differences must be maintained in their purity .The emphasis is less on unity and far more on preserving diversity. ... Today 50% of the Indian population comes under the ambit of caste-based reservations and the clamour is only to widen it further. The Marathas, the Jats, the Gujjars are all up in arms today. The tragic fact is that the minority of “Indians “ in India is in serious decline. The idea of India is under concerted assault by the coalition of castes and creeds. ... "Author extrapolates now from what was done by Netaji in Germany and in INA.

" ... A Govt led by Bose would have seriously contested this colonial narrative and made a concerted attempt to alter the very nature and ethos of the nation state in India. It would have been reinvented in a radical new form. There was a need for a basic Paradigm Shift from the colonial narrative based on an India of competing castes and creeds. Had a genuinely nationalist state taken charge in India after independence, its first priority would have been to deepen the idea of India by downplaying strongly the plethora of caste and creed identities and homogenising the state. Bose was a Realist. He wanted to obliterate all faultlines of caste and creed. He had done so in the INA by doing away with the Jati and Ethnicity based Regiments of the British Indian army and homogenised all INA units on the all-India all-class model."

" ... Bose wanted to Industrialise india and make it a major Military power, a significant force on the global arena. Nehru actually wanted to disband the Indian army. ... Fortunately, Patel a realist, prevented Nehru from having his way. India has since had to fight five wars and still faces grave internal and external challenges. In true Gandhian fashion today, the Indian state refuses to fight Pakistan or China, even when its basic national interests are challenged. Given the tragic history of 10 centuries of invasions, this is a recipe for civilisational disaster. We lost those wars and were enslaved—precisely because of our lack of interest in matters military. We will have to revive the legacy of Bose to militarise ourselves, to defend ourselves and not subordinate the state in India to some universalist human rights principles, which the powerful states of the world (like America, China and Russia) today violate with impunity whenever it suits their core national interests. The Indian civilisational state had been subjected to virtually 10 centuries of defeat and humiliation. Just one century of such humiliation had prompted China to Militarise and reinvent itself in a far more homogeneous and coherent form. Today China is the second largest military and economic power in the world and well on its way to perhaps becoming the most powerful state on the planet—a Superpower in the true sense of the word. ... The colonial destruction of the very Idea of India, remains complete and total. We have not been able to rebuild what the British had so thoroughly destroyed. What we needed was a strong state to protect the people of India from external invasions and internal disorders. Today we have a nation state that claims to be committed to the defence of the idea of India but has hesitated to act in a decisive manner against any of our external and internal enemies. It continues to trumpet the pacific and war-avoiding legacy of Mahatma Gandhi and not the strong Nationalism of Bose and his emphasis not on the soft power of ahimsa but on the hard power of military force. Bose was a realist. Today we have chosen to stay mired in a dream world of non-violence and ahimsa, when the world around us grows more violent by the day. For a country that has been invaded, subjugated, destroyed, looted and raped for 10 centuries , non-violence is a manifestation of abject cowardice masquerading as high principle. Let us not forget Mahatma Gandhi himself had decried such cowardice."

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" ... We may not militarise in the Germanic sense, but the very least we need is to defend ourselves with vigour and ensure that all such wars to defend India do not take place on Indian soil à la Panipat all over again. Take a look at J&K—that is precisely what is happening there today. We are fighting in a wholly defensive, reactive format confined entirely to Consequence-Management on our own side of the Border. Bose would have made India militarily very strong. He was the only leader of the Freedom Struggle who understood the military idiom. The other political rulers of India know very little of military matters and have not bothered to learn. They have used civil and police bureaucracies to muzzle the military in India and marginalise it from all decision making. We have repeatedly paid the price for it but we simply refuse to learn."

" ... Even Ambedkar, the framer of our Constitution, had wanted caste-based reservations to be a temporary phenomena. The present breed of Politicians in India, Congress or otherwise, want to freeze caste-based reservations in perpetuity, for the next 10,000 years perhaps. ... "

True. But now he points at something obvious, never mentioned in open discourse.

" ... One fails to understand the Leftist discourse and diatribes against Brahmins and so-called upper class elites. If Muslims ruled India from virtually the tenth century onwards, how were the Brahmins and upper-class people the real power wielders and brokers? They were the most persecuted of the lot in Muslim-ruled states and have been out of power as social groups virtually for the past 800 years. ... Any sensible state will promote merit and not ensure it is driven out to other countries. That is the surest way to ensure a civilisational disaster. So far our educated elite were eagerly lapped up by other states—notably America and Europe. With protectionism on the rise this is not likely, not any longer. We have a huge youth bulge today and an alarming shortage of jobs. In such a mileu we have unruly agitations for more and more caste-based reservations. The Jats, the Marathas, the Gujjars, the Patels etc., are all clamouring for reservations on the plea of backwardness. What kind of anomaly do we wish to create? A state based on 80 or 90 per cent reservations? What does that do to the hapless 20% that will be left out of this reservation empire? Presumably for ever. As a civilisation we have actualised Communism to its ultimate degree. We have succeeded in creating a Communism of Caste. It is a most inefficient form of Government which has been uprooted from Russia, China and all East European states. Even China has transformed its economy by liberalising trade and turning capitalist with a vengeance. Our politicians still wish to thrive on the Colonial model of divide and rule based on vote banks and the arithmetic of caste. The sole issue in our elections is caste. It is a pathetic failure of our colonial era elite to outgrow that system. ... "

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" ... The main contention of this book is that, in actual fact, it was Bose and his INA that truly drove out the British in 1947. Left to non-violence alone, freedom would have come to us in India somewhere in the 1980s or 1990s, just as it had come to South Africa only in April 1994 because it had relied on non-violence alone. The tragedy was that Bose and his INA did not take charge of a free India. They liberated it but were edged out by a self-serving Congress elite that were quite wedded to the colonial past. The British actually handed over power to an Anglophile band of quislings and collaborators of the Raj who loyally continued to keep India mired in its colonial past. They started with the a priori British assumption that India was not a nation but a competing cauldron of Castes and Creeds. The Government of India’s sole function was to adjudicate between these caste and community groupings in a just and fair manner. Hence the Indian Constitution’s emphasis on Social Justice, in place of the Colonial concept of Imperial Justice."

" ... What the post-colonial state in India needed was a Pardigm shift. What it got instead, was a new elite who kept it wedded to the narratives of the empire. Between pre- and post-colonial India there was very little difference in basic ideology—Social Justice had replaced Imperial Justice and India is still a competing and squabbling cauldron of caste and creed. ... "

" ... 21 Oct 2018, is the 75th Anniversary of the formation of the Hukumate Azad Hind Govt in exile by Netaji Subhas Bose in Singapore (1943). This was recognised by 12 countries, including the then Soviet Union. Netaji then was the first head of State and Commander in Chief of a Free Indian Govt in exile. ... "

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May 05, 2022 - May 05, 2022

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1. Who Got Us Our Freedom?

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"This book is an attempt to rescue the history of our Freedom Struggle from some highly motivated colonial and post-colonial myth making that is patently false and tendentious and that seeks to glorify the “benign” nature of colonial rule in India and keep us forever in its psychological thrall. Most educated Indians tend to view it as an era of emancipation of sorts in our history that served to unite a disparate and ever squabbling people into a cohesive and governable nation state. This was the colonial narrative that had so patently and successfully been imposed on our people. Unfortunately it is still believed by a bulk of our educated population. As long as we do not cast away these psychological crutches, we shall never actualise our full potential as a great civilisational state that is heir to 8,000 years of a glorious history."

Much, much longer, surely?

" ... The simple fact is that there has been an orchestrated attempt, to falsify our recent history and impart to it a pernicious spin. The entire role of Netaji Subhash Bose and his INA has been more or less effaced from our history books which have been turned into hagiographies for a dynastic leadership. ... "

"The sad fact is that the empire, even as it was forced to pack its bags and leave, methodically handed over the reins of power to a set of anglophile elite, who were handpicked to keep us in everlasting thrall and beholden to the empire, a part of the British Commonwealth (a useless anachronism in this day and age) and to begin with just a Dominion of the empire and not really an independent nation state. Pakistan, the other dominion carved out of India, had the decency to select one of its own—Mohammad Ali Jinnah as its first Governor General. We indulgently and affectionately appointed Lord Mountbatten—the last British Viceroy as our First Governor General, so overwhelming was the affection of our political elite—especially Nehru—for the British Raj. The pity is that the British had created a set of brown-skinned Englishmen who were cast in their own image and steeped in Macaulay’s Colonial education and mindset. These brown-skinned elite would strive very hard to see that we remained loyal to the tenets of the Raj. Britain had conquered India with an army of brown-skinned native sepoys. Its psychological sway and dominance would be perpetuated post- independence by another army of brown-skinned anglophiles and intellectuals who would describe themselves as leftist-liberal intellectuals. These are the new set of native sepoys that carry the burden of empire and ensure that we do not deviate from the history and grand narratives that the British masters had written down for us."

" ... Thus the very preamble of the Indian Constitution begins with Social Justice. Why this primacy to social justice? Why not to the principles of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality? ... Nehru had been hand-picked by the Raj, which presumably impelled Gandhi to anoint him as the first Prime Minister of India over the administratively far more competent Sardar Patel, who was the choice of the Congress Party per se."

" ... The Indian IB had detailed dossiers on many of the political leaders of the new dispensation. So they retained an inordinate amount of influence over the new dispensation. The first head of the IB (B. N. Mullick) became an Edgar Hoover of sorts. He remained the head of the IB for almost 13 years. The Mi-5 left a Liaison Office in New Delhi. Amazingly the Indian IB continued to report to the MI5 in London about the movements of Netaji’s kin till almost the end of the decade of the 1960s. Was this with the knowledge and approval of Nehru? Did he know what was going on behind his back, or was it with his express knowledge and approval? ... "

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"“De di hame azaadi bina kharag bina dhaal

"Sabarmati ke sant tune kar diya kamaal.”"

"This lyric is an unabashed insult to the 26,000 martyrs of the INA. The INA had an overall strength of some 60,000. Of these, as per the official INA history, some 26,000 laid down their lives. This amounts to 43% of the Force that was martyred. It is an awe-inspiring scale of casualties and sacrifice and it is an unmitigated insult to all those martyrs to call the Indian Freedom Struggle as entirely peaceful and non-violent. ... Why did the Nehru regime spend so much time and energy in crafting a pacific narrative for India? It seemingly harkened back to the times of the Buddha and Ashoka to lay exaggerated claims to a legacy of pacifism and non-violence. Nehru tried to paint himself as another Gautam Buddha come to rid the world of its scourge of war and violence. Why this exaggerated emphasis on a legacy of pacifism that was at obvious variance with much of our historical experience. India’s main epics —the Ramayana and the Mahabharata—are all about war and righteous war or just war. India was first unified by military force by the Mauryan Empire of Chandragupta who was guided by the hard realism and realpolitik of Kautilya. ... Indian pacifism of the later Ashokan period, in fact, cost it dearly as from the tenth century onwards India succumbed to a series of invasions from West Asia and Central Asia which led to a horrific bloodbath amounting to genocide. India was subjugated for 800 years thereafter by foreigners. India had a dire need to militarise and defend itself—not preach non-violence to a very violent world.

"The reasons for this policy option were more rooted in Nehru’s quest for political legitimacy which was badly threatened by Bose and the violence of the INA which had in reality freed India. The convoluted narrative of an entirely peaceful and non-violent freedom struggle was a deliberately manufactured myth. The British spread it to paint a shining sunset picture of their 200 years of rapacious colonial rule, which they now tried to present in very benevolent and liberal colours. The Nehruvian dispensation did it to present themselves as the true liberators of India who had won her Independence without firing a shot. Twenty-six thousand INA soldiers had been martyred in the Indian struggle for Freedom yet Nehru had the nerve to call it an entirely peaceful struggle. He was fighting with the Ghost of Bose and his INA. But a deeper look suggests something far more serious afoot.

" ... The Americans imposed a pacific culture and constitution on both Germany and Japan. Today these countries are major economic powers, but they remained thoroughly demilitarised and defanged. Not so well known is the fact that another country that the British virtually demilitarised and defanged was India. They simply imposed upon it a Pacific Political leadership with a very exaggerated notion of the efficacy of soft power of Ahimsa (non-violence) as opposed to hard power. The deliberate British design was to leave but instal a pacific Indian leadership that believed in the soft power of Buddhism more than in the hard power of a credible military. The vast military potential of India had become evident to the whole world during World War I and II. India had generated massive armies of 1.3 million and 2.5 million respectively in these two wars. By the time the British left they had reduced the Indian Army from 2.5 million to a pathetic 350,000 which they then divided between the two warring Dominions. How dangerous this was has now been proved by the four wars India had to fight after independence. India’s actual security needs have necessitated a new army of 1.3 million men."

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"As India began to rearm and expand its armed forces in the wake of the 1962 disaster, the self-styled Field Marshal Ayub Khan of Pakistan sensed his last chance to kick in this tottering republic and seize Kashmir. He even dreamt of driving his Patton tanks into New Delhi. A thoroughly chastised Indian political establishment now listened attentively to the advice of its professional military chief. Pakistan’s desperate gamble to grab Kashmir by force backfired badly. It led to an escalatory spiral that saw India launch two Corps-sized counteroffensives across the International Border (IB) directed at the key Pakistani cities of Lahore and Sialkot. Pakistan was forced to recoil from Chhamb and fight desperately to save its own existence."

" ... when Pakistan once again provoked India by pushing out 10 million refugees into India after a general crackdown in East Pakistan, India reacted in a ruthless manner. It launched a massive tri-services campaign to liberate Bangladesh and resettle the refugees. In fourteen action packed days, India won a decisive military victory. It broke Pakistan into two, marched on an enemy capital and enforced regime change. It resulted in the largest mass surrender of forces post the Second World War. Some 93,000 Pakistani troops surrendered in Dacca. India had shaken off the slough of pacifism and won one of its greatest military victories in its entire civilisational history.

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"It was just that the Empire found Gandhi’s philosophy of pacifism most convenient. Without Gandhi actually knowing it, the British subtly helped to propel him to the forefront of India’s Public Awareness. The empire was happy that the Indian struggle for independence was being kept peaceful and non-violent by Gandhi who truly abhorred violence. It is just that the highly manipulative colonial administration subtly tried to prevent a violent overthrow of the Empire in India by directing all protests into non-violent channels that would make it wholly manageable. It painted the Raj in liberal and angelic colours, enabling them to deal with the non-violent agitation with ease. The Raj found non-violence entirely manageable and hence they tacitly encouraged it.

"They built up the Gandhi persona into a larger than life figure in South Asia also for the consumption of other colonies in Asia and Africa. They tacitly encouraged his pacific philosophy and ensured it put a lid on all violent protests and wars. Sadly, the strategists of the Raj subtly used and exploited the Gandhian philosophy. This form of protest was entirely manageable and they could have sustained themselves in the face of such protests for decades. Had it been left entirely to the non-violent protests and civil disobedience of Gandhi and Nehru, the Raj would have continued and gone on well into the 1980s and perhaps even beyond. This is not a speculation or conjecture. The peaceful Gandhian-style agitation of Nelson Mandela delayed the South African independence till April 1994—almost towards the end of the twentieth century. It was only the very real threat of armed violence and a military threat to the empire that forced the British to pack up their bags and quit India in 1947 itself.

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"Bose had most astutely understood that the centre of gravity of the Raj was the loyalty of sepoys of the British Indian Army to the colonial regime. The British success lay in nativisation. They had used an Army of natives (trained on European lines) to subjugate their own people. When this loyalty unravelled, the British had no option but to leave. It was Bose therefore who catalysed an early exit of the Raj and dealt it an effective body blow that precipitated its hasty withdrawal."

"I would, however, like to dwell a bit more on the issue of how Britain deliberately pushed the newborn state of India towards Pacifism by imposing on it a leadership that laid exaggerated claims upon a legacy of Non-Violence. Was there a deliberate strategic design to prevent the emergence of a new centre of power in Asia? At the end of World War II India had fielded the largest all-volunteer army in the history of the world. At 2.5 million men what was significant was that this Army had been recruited without any conscription (unlike in Europe, America and the USSR). This army had proved to be professionally robust and reliable. By 1943, British senior commanders had clearly started indicating their preference for Indian divisions and units over British military units that were showing clear signs of war-weariness and fatigue. Indian troops were hardy and Spartan, needed much less logistical support and were tenacious in combat. On both sides in Burma, it was primarily Indian troops who had performed very well in actual combat. The British were rather keen to disarm India before they went away. They slashed the Indian Army by 85% to leave a rump force. They left behind a pacific regime that abhorred violence and hated the Armed Forces with a venom and virulence that was surprising. Just like Japan had been pacified and turned into a toothless state after the Second World War. It was forced to adopt pacifism as state policy so that it would never threaten the USA or Europe again; similarly India was defanged before the British left. They demobilised the 2.5 million strong Indian Army into a rump force of some 350,000 men that was then divided between India and Pakistan. ... Post-World War II the USA had taken care to demilitarise Japan and impose a pacific constitution on it to ensure it would never be a threat again to the USA. The British did better, they simply disbanded India’s massive and combat hardened army of 2.5 million men after the War and left behind a set of rulers who had made a fetish out of pacifism (to try and gain legitimacy vis-à-vis Bose, a leader who had fought for India’s freedom by violent means and was the key catalyst for their decision to quit India.) ... Pandit Nehru hated the military and had in fact told the First British Chief of Independent India’s Army, that he did not need armed force in India—the police forces would suffice! The look of shock and incredulity on the British General Sir Roy Bucher’s face should have been preserved for posterity."

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"Post-Patel, the Indian Nation state under Nehru turned with a redoubled vigour to establish a manufactured National Narrative of itself as an exceptional state based not on hard power but a soft power narrative of Ahimsa, moral force and persuasion as opposed to military coercion, compellence and actual use of hard power. India was now part of the Westphalian system of nation states premised upon hard power. India’s contrived narrative however said it was a state with a huge difference. It was formed on the basis of soft power of Satyagraha which had driven out the British. Unfortunately, this was not based on empirical historical facts. The British had left because of the military and hard power challenge of the INA and its ability to instigate armed rebellion amongst 2.5 million trained men of the demobilised British Indian Army. If these had rebelled in mass, the battle-weary British were simply in no state to deal with such a massive armed revolt in India. The Ghost of the INA was capable of initiating precisely such an armed rebellion. That is what made the British quit. They felt they were perfectly capable of dealing with the non-violent movement. It was only the possibility of large-scale violence by 2.5 million demobilised soldiers that impelled the British not to get bogged down in a military morass and cut their costs and leave, when they did. Let us now analyse this issue in a sequential manner."

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May 05, 2022 - May 05, 2022

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2. An Overview of The Freedom Struggle

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"The somewhat disconcerting historical fact, however, is that the British did not grant independence to India in 1947. They carried out a transfer of power to an Anglophile coterie of lawyers in the Indian National Congress led by Nehru. For the first three years India remained a Dominion of the Empire and became a Republic only in 1950. In hindsight, we can see that its autonomy and autarchy remained subject to subtle controls and constraints created by an Intelligence service and civil bureaucracy that surprisingly retained elements of loyalty to the Raj which had given them their privileged positions. ... "

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"Aurangzeb had destroyed the secular consensus on which Akbar had built and then taken the Mughal Empire to such great heights. Akbar had monetised the economy on the silver standard and rationalised the taxation regime. He had established matrimonial alliances with the Rajput Princes and co-opted some of them as generals in the Mughal Army. Aurangzeb, however, reintroduced the hated Jazia tax and intensified persecution of the Hindus and Sikhs. He completely unravelled the secular consensus put in place by Akbar (who had called India his Homeland). This led to the revolts of the Sikhs, the Marathas and the Ahoms in Assam. These revolts had torn apart the Mughal Empire, well before the British established their sway. Into this vacuum, the British East India Company stepped in innocuously. It recruited Indian sepoys, drilled them on European lines and soon created a cost-effective Infantry-based Army that helped it conquer virtually the whole of India, starting from the three coastal bridgeheads of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. The East India Company was a commercial and mercantile enterprise and intent not upon good governance but the systematic loot of the colonised land and its people. It was also characterised by racial arrogance and deeply ingrained white supremacy attitudes. They destroyed the local crafts and industry to push their mass manufactured products. They cut off the hands of the weavers who used to weave the very fine Muslin cloth of Dacca. Later they forced the locals to cultivate opium for sale to China. Cumulatively, these actions spread great resentment and outrage which finally resulted in the great mutiny of 1857 amongst the sepoy ranks of East India Company’s Presidency armies. ... This spark soon mutated into a major popular uprising all over North India. Over a period of time, some 80,000 Indian soldiers rebelled. Had they all rebelled together, or had they had competent leadership, the British Empire in India would have come to a swift and inglorious end. The British, however, quelled this uprising with brutal force, but it shook them to their roots. The British subsequently declared the Poorabiya (Eastern) troops of UP, Bihar and Bengal, with the help of which they had conquered the bulk of India, as non-martial and stopped their recruitment into the British Indian Army. The entire recruiting bias was shifted to the Punjab—to the Sikh and Punjabi Musalman troops who had largely remained loyal to the Raj. Also, a large number of Gurkha and hill troops regiments, like Kumaonis, Garhwalis and Dogras were now recruited to keep the people of the Indo-Gangetic plains under check. The new Indian army was raised on segmented ethnic lines to ensure that they would never subscribe to the idea of India. Their primary attempt thereafter was to sanitise their British Indian Army and ensure that it remained loyal to the Raj. That is why its entire recruitment focus was diverted to the Punjab and the Hill tribes (Gurkhas, Garhwalis, Kumaonis). The heavy emphasis on a Regimental System of motivation served the colonial design of accentuating local, ethnic and linguistic identities and preventing the crystallisation of a “Pan-Indian” identity that the nationalists were so desperately trying to forge. ... "

" ... polarisation of caste was begun as the pursuit of social justice and was the primary colonial mechanism for splintering and dividing the Indian population, of which the Hindus then constituted some 80%."

" ... Muslims were the first to get a separate electorate, and then the Christians, the Sikhs and also the Subaltern Castes (Dalits). Risley was a great proponent of separate electorates based upon religion and caste to thoroughly divide the Indian population."

" ... The great pity is that, post-independence, politics in India sought to revive the divisions and faultlines of caste and creed as a primary mechanism for mobilising voters. To secure narrow vote banks, based on promises of affirmative action for select caste groups, the Indian elections were turned into a referendum of segmented mobilisations based on caste. This segmented mobilisation created a virtual “communism of caste” that militated against merit and equity, and deeply splintered the Indian psyche once more in the post-colonial period."

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" ... The Freedom Movement was begun by this Anglophile club of Indian lawyers, petitioning and pleading the monarch as a small group of educated elite, on behalf of the subject Indian people. Their goal was home rule and they could never envision the idea of complete freedom.

"Thus the Congress had been formed in 1885 by Allan Octavian Hume, an Englishman, and W. C. Bonnerjee, its first President, as a kind of an effete debating society where the natives would be taught the fundamentals of a guided democracy of sorts. Legally they drew inspiration from the trial of Warren Hastings when the crown in England had interceded on behalf of her subjects to deal with an errant administration in India. So all appeals of this effete Club of rich Indian Lawyers were addressed to her Royal Majesty the Queen against the local administration and its perceived misrule. There was no question of asking for freedom or ever questioning the power of the British monarch. The furthest they would go is Home Rule. They would thus address petitions to her royal highness, beseeching her benevolence to set right the wrongs perpetuated by her local, mindless minions. These petitions were couched in such slavish and ingratiating language that it would make the skin of any self-respecting people crawl. ... "

"The British success in completely splintering the Indian population was evident during the years of the First World War, when there was no rebellion in India even as the bulk of the British Indian Army was deployed overseas. British Intelligence (the highly professional, IB) had thoroughly penetrated the Ghadar Movement of revolutionaries based in Canada and USA and foiled all their ambitious plots to stir an uprising in India during the war. A branch of the Ghadarites had planned to march on India via the East (as the INA would do during the Second World War). India had contributed some 1.3 million Indian soldiers and 146 million pounds to the war effort. Some 72,000 Indian soldiers laid down their lives and 11 received the Victoria Cross—the highest gallantry award in the empire."

" ... These troops served overseas as part of the British Indian Army. They were organised in Indian divisions as corporate entities. They fought as equals and were lionised in Europe. They heard the slogans of liberty, fraternity and equality, and saw their colonial masters in dire straits in the trenches of France and Flanders. They fought and prevailed against the European soldiers (Germans, Austrians and Turks). It was a transformative experience for some 1.3 million troops from the Punjab and Northern parts of India. The least they expected from the British at the end of this war was gratitude and perhaps some form of home rule. The response was one of callous racism. In 1919, what they got was the massacre of Jallianwala Bagh."

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General Bakhshi credits Gandhi for being the first one to demand independence instead of petitioning for home rule.

Didn't Lokamanya Tilak do that, much before arrival of Gandhi?

He was known for telling off British, "Its my birthright, and I WILL have it"?

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" ... It is now evident, from hindsight, that the British tacitly encouraged this non-violent, persuasive form of protest because they were convinced that it was not going to basically endanger their colonial rule. The extensive press coverage given to Mahatma Gandhi and his non-violent freedom movement based on peaceful demonstrations, fasts and dharnas, was designed to release the pent up energy of popular dissatisfaction with colonial rule but at the same time, prevent it from turning very violent. That violence would have endangered the colonial dispensation. Non-violence did not, and hence it was tolerated. It only served to establish the liberal credentials of British rule, its levels of enlightenment and actually reinforced its legitimacy to rule a very heterogeneous population where the natives, they averred, were not capable of ruling themselves."

"The third strand in the Indian movement for independence was led by Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and his INA and the earlier revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad, Rajguru, etc. Bose was convinced that non-violence was completely within the tolerance thresholds of the Empire. He very correctly identified the loyalty of Indian sepoys as the Key Centre of Gravity of the Colonial Empire. The only Indian in the National Congress who could really challenge the overriding authority of the Mahatma was Subhash Chandra Bose. He was a realist. He clearly foresaw that non-violence was absolutely within the tolerance thresholds of the colonial regime. This could mount media and psychological pressure but never of an order which would really compel the British to leave. ... "

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"World War II had started in 1939. This time India had contributed a staggering 2.5 million men —the largest all-volunteer Army in the history of the world—an Army raised without conscription. Unwittingly, it was this that really deepened the idea of India. Once again large corporate bodies of Indian soldiers fought overseas as Indian divisions, thus unwittingly strengthening the idea of India as a pan-Indian identity beyond the narrow confines of caste and creed. The steady Indianisation of the officers’ corps deepened this idea of India even further, and also sharpened the bitterness against racism in the ranks of the Army and its officers’ messes and clubs. Gymkhana and other upper crust clubs in India in those days had boards at the entrance which proclaimed, “Indians and dogs not allowed.” It was this racism that would cost the British their empire.

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"Bose differed radically from Gandhi. For him, the war presented a golden opportunity to reach out to the enemies of Britain, to Germany and Japan, and seek their help to free India. Gandhi opposed this realist mode of thought. Bose was completely marginalised in the Congress. Gandhi ensured that he did not become President of the Congress for a second term. Single-handedly, however, Bose escaped to Germany and there raised the Indische Legion (Indian Legion)—a brigade size force formed from the Indian prisoners of war. He was dismayed however by Hitler’s racism. Meanwhile, the Japanese had gained spectacular success in the Asia-Pacific theatre. They had raised an Indian National Army from the prisoners of war they held. They were having problems managing it and they asked the Germans for Bose. The Germans took 13 long months to transfer him.

"Finally, Bose undertook a perilous voyage by Sea in a German U-boat. Off the course of Madagascar, Bose transferred to a Japanese submarine and reached Japan. He deeply impressed Prime Minister Tojo and the top Japanese leadership with his transparent sincerity. He established the Provisional Government of Azad Hind and declared War on Britain. He expanded the INA to a respectable size of 1,500 officers and 60,000 men, and organised them in three divisions. Some 26,000 of these perished in the battles of Imphal and Kohima and the subsequent retreat through Burma. The INA lost the battles but won the War for Independence. After the war, in a misplaced gesture of triumphalism, the British put on trial 9 INA officers at the iconic Red Fort of Delhi. The intent was to rub salt into the Indian wounds. It enraged the people of India. Worse, it triggered widespread mutinies in the Royal Indian Navy, the Royal Indian Air Force and many units of the British Indian Army. The British were truly shaken to their core. Some 2.5 million men of the British Indian Army were then being demobilised post World War II, and they were angry and enraged. The British saw the writing on the wall. Their white troops were tired, war-weary and homesick. They had no stomach for taking on some 2.5 million armed men of the Indian Army or large parts thereof. They decided to quit with grace and left within two years after the end of World War II. The sun had finally set on the British Empire."

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" ... Nehru now crafted a deliberate Narrative of State for India. To downplay the violent resistance of INA and the revolt of the Indian Armed Forces that had finally secured independence, Nehru propagated the patent falsehood that India had secured her independence entirely by non-violent means and methods. ... This was patently incorrect as it refused to factor in the pivotal role of the INA and the subsequent mutinies it had instigated. Nevertheless, in his bid to marginalise Bose, Nehru strenuously built up this narrative of state and went to inordinate lengths to ingrain it in the national psyche. In keeping with the Indian states allegedly pacific origins, he claimed that India did not need Armed Forces, that only police forces would suffice. He refused to rehabilitate the INA personnel and denied them their wartime pensions."

" ... All Westphalian nation states are based on a monopoly of hard power. Disputes between nations are still resolved by the use of force. As a lawyer, Nehru now elevated the imperial concept of justice and ascribed its preservation to the newly formed United Nations Organisation (UNO), and felt that it would need lawyers like him to plead and petition the new Global Body of supranational justice. Armed Forces had no role whatsoever. ... It was Patel’s assertive use of the instruments of military force that really served to unify India and make it a cohesive and governable entity."

" ... Patel unfortunately died early and Nehru soon had his way. Nehru arrogated to himself the role of peacemaker of the planet. This construct was initially fashionable in a war-weary world, and for a time allowed India to punch much above her weight in the various world fora. Neutrality was elevated to the level of dogma—in terms of Non-Alignment. India sent peacekeeping missions to all conflict spots of the world. India adopted a highly preachy and moralist tone in its international discourse as it touted the values of Ahimsa and Satyagraha to an increasingly violent world. Nehru ensconced himself as the new global messiah of peace and non-violence. The whole of Bollywood was now pressed into service for an information warfare offensive of impressive proportions. Film after film being churned out of Bollywood extolled India as a kind of a haven of universal peace and harmony, designed to bring peace and solicitude to a warring world. Nehru was built up as a great world statesman preaching peace to a constantly warring world.

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"In 1956, the military coup happened in Pakistan. This made Nehru paranoid. He now completely marginalised the military and used the bureaucracy and Intelligence services to cut it to size. Its Generals were pushed down in the order of precedence and marginalised from all decision-making process. Nehru treated the military contemptuously, as the last outpost of the Raj, and tried to tame it by eroding its professionalism and promoting sycophants and relations to key positions. Worst of all, he completely starved it of resources. India reduced its defence expenditure to just around one per cent of its GDP. This soft power mindset led to the disaster of 1962, when China taught India a humiliating lesson in realpolitik. Nehru turned hysterical and sought western military intervention. It was only a tactical defeat but the spectacle of collapse in the soft state was most unedifying and disgraceful. Nehru, with his inordinate emphasis on soft power, had created a very weak state, incapable of defending itself or using military force to effect critical outcomes in terms of national security. Such weakness could imperil its independent existence. It was a state that deliberately chose not to think in strategical or National security terms. The initial defence of the India-China border was assigned to the Police forces and the attempt was to build the Police as some sort of counterpoise to the untrustworthy military."

"The 1962 debacle did occasion a significant course correction in India. Nehru died heartbroken but his successors had learnt a bitter lesson in realism. The Indian Armed Forces were rapidly expanded and modernised. The 1965 War caught them half-way in their modernisation process. However, it did give them very valuable hands-on professional experience. Russia stepped in, in a major way thereafter, to subsidise the Indian military build-up. They provided India the cutting-edge military technology of that era. By 1971, India had arrived as a strong regional power. It broke Pakistan into two and formed a new nation state with the force of arms. The Bangladesh war was a decisive tri-service blitzkrieg that saw a march on an enemy capital, mass surrender of armies (93,000 prisoners of war) and enforced regime change. For the first time after the Second World War, a new nation had been created by the force of arms. By 1974 Indira Gandhi had tested a nuclear weapon. India had arrived on the world stage as a major military power."

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"Indira Gandhi returned to power and, with Soviet assistance, greatly strengthened the Indian Armed Forces. She was an ardent nationalist and had used Pakistan as the hostile other to generate a nationalist consolidation. The Western powers felt threatened by her muscular nationalism. The Afghan War had started and Pakistan had become a key frontline state for the CIA’s jihad against the Soviet Army. The Sikh terrorist movement for Khalistan was instigated in the Punjab, to keep India preoccupied and enable Pakistan’s army to focus on Afghanistan. All the communities that had been given separate electorates by the British, to give salience to their separate identities, were fully exploited in the post-colonial phase by the foreign intelligence organisations to instigate insurgencies/local rebellions in India. Indira Gandhi was a charismatic and nationalist leader who was making India a strong regional power with growing ambitions. The West was distinctly unhappy with her muscular brand of nationalism. They were alarmed over the ruthless way in which she had broken Pakistan into two and then exploded a peaceful nuclear device. It is no secret that in the 1980s Indira Gandhi was spoiling for a fight with Pakistan to pay it back for instigating terror in the Punjab."

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"The Bharatiya Janata party now started a Hindu majoritarian mobilisation with the Ayodhya Ram Temple movement. To counter it, the then Prime Minister, V. P. Singh, took a leaf straight out of the colonial armoury of divisive instruments. He dusted out caste to deeply fracture and splinter the Hindu community and prevent its consolidation as a vote bank. He justified it as the sole way to promote justice between castes and creeds and thereby secure secularism. The social justice card of the colonial era was now taken out by the political leadership of post-colonial India, and a second fracturing programme to splinter the pan-Indian identity was now unleashed after 1857, this time by the Indians themselves. The entire state machinery was pressed in to sharpen caste identities and promise indiscriminate affirmative action on the basis of caste and creed markers. Economic price tags were now put on identity markers now by the device of reservation. In a bizarre move, 50% of the Indian population was brought into the ambit of caste-based reservations. The entire nationalist project of the freedom struggle, to carve out a pan-Indian identity beyond caste and creed, was thus virtually destroyed."

" ... Romila Thapar, a prime courtier of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, emerged as the chief theoretician of this new ideology of social justice and equity based on the politics of caste. This Queen of caste proclaimed that there was no religion like Hinduism, only a conglomeration of jatis and castes. To prevent a consolidation of the majority of Indian population, the colonial card of caste had been invoked with a splintering intent that was odious and surprising in the lengths to which its proponents might have gone.

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"The second Oil Shock of 1990 meanwhile completely derailed the Indian economy. The then Prime Minister, P.V. Narsimha Rao, was now forced to rapidly liberalise the Indian economy and dismantle the license-permit Raj to enable the private sector in India to take its economy to the next level. This unleashed the entrepreneurial energies of India’s corporate sector. This was also the stage in which the Ayodhya Ram temple agitation peaked. It was the BJP’s counter to the bid to fracture the Hindu vote along the faultlines of caste and somehow consolidate a majoritarian vote bank to counter the use of the minorities as a captive vote bank."

" ... Sonia’s National Advisory Council (NAC) of Leftist-Liberal intellectuals goaded her to policies that would keep the bulk of Indians hopelessly poor and dependent solely on the doles and freebies tossed by the new Empress of India. India had revived the colonial discourse with a new vehemence that was astonishing. How could a free nation regress so thoroughly to the colonial modes of governance? This unleashed a tyranny of short-term agendas, based on buying captive vote-banks through freebies, doles and targeted affirmative action based on caste/identity markers. Accentuating these tendencies were Sonia’s possible subterranean support to agendas of proselytisation aimed at converting large segments of the neglected tribal populations, who were consciously prevented from modernising and entering the national mainstream. This spate of freebies coupled with the Oil Shock of 2013 derailed the Indian economy once again, for the third time in succession, much on the lines that a profligate welfare state had derailed the Greek economy."

" ... The social justice discourse was doing its bit to splinter the Hindu vote into a multiplicity of caste segments and thereby marginalise the majority community of the country entirely by reducing it to competing and hostile caste alignments. Pushed beyond a point, this marginalisation alarmed and angered the Hindu majority. From around 2008-13, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and its affiliate organisations attempted to create a right wing consolidation—a revival of nationalism as it were. The image of Bharat Mata seated on a lion now began to emerge in most street corners of mofussil towns of North India. The build-up to 2014 had begun. A hard right Hindu Government finally emerged from these elections with an overwhelming majority in parliament."

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" ... It is important for us to recognise that the Colonial empire did not grant India independence. They “transferred power” to a coterie of Anglophile lawyers who continued with the ideology of imperial justice as equity by enshrining Justice as the cornerstone virtually of the Indian Constitution. The Indian Constitution was largely a codification of the British India Act of 1935. Its cornerstone remained the fact that India was such a heterogeneous mixture of warring castes and creeds that some external agency was needed to ensure justice and equity between its feuding communities. This role was performed by the British Queen Empress in the Colonial period. It was taken over by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty in the post-colonial period. Whenever oil shocks destabilised the Indian political economy, the Ruling Nehru Gandhi dynasty was overthrown with the help of Gandhian style mass movements like the ones led by JP in the 1970s and by Anna Hazare in 2013-14, as also the RSS inspired upsurge of Right Wing Nationalism that culminated in the Modi victory of 2014. Those are the patterns that emerge from an analysis of our recent pre- and post-colonial history."

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May 05, 2022 - May 06, 2022.

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3. The Abject Failure of the Quit India Movement of Mahatma Gandhi

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General Bakhshi asserts something that's, at best, hidden so far.

So it could only have been ego in the way of doing the right thing, a bad choice, instead of admitting growth of consciousness!

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"We now see a distinct and disturbing polarisation within the Congress. Even as Mahatma Gandhi veered around to Bose’s view of a now or never chance to win freedom, Nehru was increasingly inclined to go along with the British. In fact, he went so far as to proclaim that if Bose was to come to India with the Japanese invading armies he would personally go forward to fight him. This was noted by the astute British and after the Quit India Movement they began an all-out attempt to completely marginalise Gandhi and rely more and more on Nehru. By the time of independence, the marginalisation of the Mahatma was sadly total and complete. ... "

No, he was still very useful, and used, for manipulation - a prominent example being the 55 crore matter. Any time Mountbatten needed to turn around decisions of government of India, he persuaded Gandhi that the moral way according to Gandhi's own preaching was opposite. If the government didn't agree, Mountbatten could rely on Gandhi to fast! That always worked.

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"To placate the Americans who were pressurising Britain to make up with the Congress, Churchill had sent the Cripps Mission in early April 1942 with a virtual plan for the partition of India. This was rejected by the Congress. Secretary of State L. S. Amery felt that Nehru and Azad would break with Gandhi and help the British in their war against Japan, despite the Congress’s rejection of the Cripps proposals in April 1942. In fact, Nehru had told a meeting at Guwahati on April 24, 1942 that he would “fight Mr. Subhash Bose and his party along with Japan, if he comes to India.” Azad was noticing a clear hardening of Mahatma Gandhi’s position and how he was veering around completely to Netaji’s point of view on how India should fight for its freedom.

"Gandhi now openly admired Bose’s courage in escaping to Germany. Gandhi felt the time had come to “Do or Die.” Despite reservations expressed by Nehru, Azad and others, he insisted on launching the Quit India Movement. In fact, Gandhiji’s draft resolution sent to the Congress Working Committee had demanded immediate cessation of British Rule in India. This was precisely the position that Bose had urged him to take in his last meeting in the Wardha session in 1940. Miffed by Gandhi’s new found truculence, the British had apparently been working on Nehru. Amery, the British Secretary of State had in fact said, “There is reasonable hope that the Congress led by Nehru will at any rate try to help in its own curious fashion in opposing Japanese aggression” (Sitanshu Das, p. 520). Nehru and Azad however initially quailed at such a level of collaboration. They were still in awe of Gandhiji and finally they went along with him to launch the Quit India Movement in August 1942. Clearly Nehru was in no position then to strike out on his own and defy Gandhiji at this juncture.

"The August 4, 1942 the Congress Working Committee (CWC) Resolution was forced to take a hardline position. It asked for immediate cessation of British Rule in India. Churchill was furious. As Bose had noted, restlessness was spreading in India. The CWC could not have continued with the policy of drift after the British War Cabinet refused to improve upon the Cripps proposal which the Congress had rejected. So, the Quit India Movement was launched. Gandhi was arrested and his last message was, “We get our Freedom or we Die (Karo ya Maro).”

"Churchill was livid. He was always full of venom against the “beastly Indians and their beastly religion.” He told the British Cabinet, “We must not sell India to the Hindu priesthood and the Congress caucus.” Churchill in fact was ready to lose India temporarily to the Axis invaders rather than concede dominion status to “non-white” India. It is noteworthy that Nehru, Azad, Rajagopalachari, Sarojini Naidu, Syed Muhammad and Asif Ali—all members of the CWC had expressed reservations about the Quit India Resolution. Because of Mahatma Gandhi’s prestige and stature, however, they were forced to go along. The British displayed no qualms or reservations, however, in crushing this movement as brutally as they could. Gandhiji’s fasts were now of no avail. Churchill hated him anyway and was not bothered if he passed away in prison.

"In August 1942, to suppress the Quit India Movement of Mahatma Gandhi, the British used a total of eight Brigades with some fifty-seven and a half battalions for a period of 6 to 8 weeks. These were all-white troops of British or allied extraction. Viceroy Linlithgow reported to Churchill that “this was the most serious rebellion since 1857, the gravity of which we have so far concealed from the world due to reasons of military security.” ... "

This has not been part of general knowledge in school curriculum, and if it's taught at specialisation levels of history, it's kept a secret amongst all the thousands of those who studied it. Why did government of India keep it a secret? After independence there was no reason to do so.

" ... To aid this revolt, Bose had sent gold, US dollars, radio sets and arms to India. ... "

That's kept even more secret! And here's why.

" ... Talwar and his gang of traitors, however, left most of these at the Soviet Embassy in Kabul. This was not given to the associates of Bose and the money was divided between Talwar and the Kirti/CPI workers (Sitanshu Das). ... "

And, what one gathers after reading from several books, is that Talwar had been caught by British and turned.

"The Quit India Movement thus entirely petered out. All the Congress leadership was clapped in jail and draconian wartime censorship ensured that the Freedom Movement was completely deprived of the oxygen of media publicity. Within two months, it was all over for the Quit India Movement of the Congress, bar the shouting. The British had been brutal and ruthless and the Non-Violent Movement collapsed entirely in the face of such draconian and repressive measures. In the face of a brutal and determined military power non-violence had unfortunately failed entirely for it is primarily directed at a status quo regime with some humanist and liberal values. As an American military writer put it recently, faced with a Stalinist kind of ruthless repression, “Gandhi dies” before a firing squad or in a brutal Gulag."

Hitler had in fact said this, in advice to a representative of British government who'd come to meet him, after having been Viceroy; shoot Gandhi and two hundred Indians, he instructed, and if that's not enough, two hundred more, and so on, until it works.

But Dyer had done just that, to ordinary civilians, and been rewarded by England. So Brits weren't exactly unfamiliar with the option.

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"So, does the Gandhian form of mass mobilisation and non-violent protest lack efficacy? The simple fact is that in the post-war period Gandhian methods were followed by Martin Luther King in the United States itself with considerable success. The counterpoint is that the USA is a liberal democracy. Would this have worked in Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany? Such mass mobilisations and non-violent protests however were repeated later in Eastern Europe via a series of Spring revolutions. Then we had the coloured revolutions in Europe and Central Asia and elsewhere, and then of course came the Arab Spring. In all these cases the ruling regimes were relatively not as tyrannical and ruthless and a collapse of the political economies of these countries had weakened the ruling dispensations and had led to widespread disaffection and unrest. and not just the masses but the police, military and other security agencies as well, were fairly demoralised. ... "

But author bypasses the Chinese students by thousands facing tanks in Tiananmen Square. What's the number mowed down? Thousands? Ten thousand? Hundred thousand?

" ... In recent times, Information Technology has facilitated mass mobilisation at a hitherto unprecedented pace. Internet and text messages can generate huge “Flash mobs” in a matter of days and hours. But how lasting are these effects? The Arab Spring in Egypt has since been reversed and the Army is back in charge. The jury however is still out on this larger issue. The historical fact is all African nations that adopted the non-violent methods for their Freedom Struggle only got their liberation from 1960-1970 onwards and even later. Nelson Mandela’s South Africa finally got its freedom only as late as April 1994. Had Bose not acted as he did, even India would have gotten its independence some 30-40 years after it finally did secure it in 1947 by the threat of military violence."

" ... Let us not forget that in Churchill’s time , India was faced with a rather ruthless regime that was at war, and had not batted an eyelid as 3 million Indians died of starvation, even as it destroyed all boats and country craft in the riverine terrain of what is now Bangladesh to prevent a Japanese invasion via the sea. It had also used some eight brigades of white troops to brutally suppress Mahatma Gandhi’s Quit India movement. This was not a dispensation that would understand the language of Non-violence."

"The Gandhi who came out of prison in 1944 seemed to be a broken man. Largely broken in health and spirit. He had undertaken fasts in prison and Churchill had menacingly said let him die. With wartime censorship in place they were confident they could handle the civil unrest that would follow Gandhi’s death. They had after all just used the 57 white battalions to very good effect to crush whatever unrest that had followed. There was no second-tier Congress leadership that could guide a mass scale civilian unrest. Bose was making his broadcasts from Tokyo to guide the Indian people on the techniques of sabotage and subversion but his clandestine radio broadcasts had been banned and were not readily available to the mass of the Indian public. Sadly, all of Bose’s attempts to smuggle in weapons and explosives and gold, etc., had been betrayed by double agents like Talwar. The Quit India movement had largely petered out."

Netaji went all the way from Calcutta to Kabul to Berlin via Moscow, garnered support in Berlin and Rome, went by submarine to Tokyo via Madagascar, gathered funds and ammunition and weapons and sent them to India, convincing thousands of Indians and others to help, purely on strength of his persona - and this bunch back in India couldn't put in place a secure system of receiving help?

Bhagat Singh had done better, as had Ghadar party.

"However, even then, had the Japanese attacked in the summer of 1942 or even after the monsoons or even in 1943, they would have cut through like a knife through butter. The bulk of the British and white troops were involved in internal security duties inside India. Japan still had the edge in air power and naval power. By 1944 the tide had turned decisively with US intervention. The British had rebuilt a massive new Indian army. US support had given them air and naval superiority. By 1944 when the Japanese-INA offensive was launched it was a tragic case of too little too late. Despite the odds the Japanese almost pulled it off and the battles of Imphal-Kohima were the hardest fought battles of the British empire. ... "

Netaji did plant the flag in India.

" ... By the monsoon of 1944, however, the danger was past. The Japanese logistical system collapsed in the monsoons and soon they and the INA were in a miserable retreat. The only thing that saved them from annihilation was just the formidable reputation of the Japanese Army. The British now felt confident that they could now release the incarcerated Congress leadership."

"Dr Kalyan Kumar De in his inimitable book, Netaji Subhash: Liberator of Indian Subcontinent has carried out invaluable research into the British Transfer of Power archives. He has uncovered a veritable treasure trove of excellent historical documents that clearly highlight with the help of authentic documentary evidence, that it was not the non- violent struggle of the Congress but the INA trials which had unleashed a wave of violence all over India and shaken the loyalty of the British Indian armed forces to the Raj that forced the British to panic and leave. As confirmatory evidence for the Failure of the Quit India movement, he has cited the statements of Mahatma Gandhi immediately after his release from jail in 1944. He repeatedly cites instances of Mahatma Gandhi saying that he had no more legal authority to carry on with the Quit India Movement and could not ask anyone to continue with the non-cooperation movement. In other words, the Quit India Movement was all over. This was the most tacit admission of defeat from the top leader of the Quit India Movement himself and is the final epitaph about the sad but abject failure of this non-violent movement. In the face of ruthless military action it just petered out and collapsed. The power of state coercion prevailed and the non-violent movement collapsed altogether. ... "

Far more relevant, Attlee responded to queries when on a visit to India, and candidly admitted that British had to flee due to effect of Netaji Subash Chandra Bose and INA on India.

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"Interview to Press, Panchgani, July 13, 1944

"“What no one can do in the name of the Congress is mass civil disobedience, which was never started and which, as I have said, I cannot at the present moment, even in my personal capacity, start.” This is a clear acknowledgement of defeat. Gandhi was most unwilling to ask for a resumption of the civil disobedience movement and after his release from jail strenuously denied any plans to relaunch it. He offered complex legal sounding arguments as to how he had, by virtue of his arrest, lost all authority and would have to have the views of the CWC before he could do or say anything at all. The Quit India Movement was largely over."

" ... The entire Quit India Movement—the grand finale as it were of the non-violent struggle—had fizzled out without a whimper. If there is any doubt whatsoever of abject defeat it should be cleared by the last part of the statement of Mahatma Gandhi in 1944:

"“The second thing that I should like done on the forthcoming 9th of August is for those who have gone underground to discover themselves. They can do so by informing the authorities of their movements and whereabouts or by simply and naturally doing their work in the open without any attempt to evade or elude the police. To go underground is to elude the police.” This proclaims the end of all resistance to the British Colonial power and coming out of hiding and virtually surrendering to the Police. These slew of statements concede complete defeat and failure of the Brave Quit India Movement that has been tom-tommed as the last decisive charge of the non-violent brigade that really pushed out the British. All these statements do not suggest any victory.

"They are sadly admissions of total failure and an abject sense of loss and control."

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May 06, 2022 - May 06, 2022.

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4. The Clement Attlee-Chakrabarty Dialogue

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" ... Was it the cumulative pressure generated by decades of a pacific and non-violent Civil Disobedience Movement in India and the cumulative weight of the long and tortuous negotiations process? That is what Bipin Chandra and other court historians would have us believe. Or was it plain and simple the threat of a major military revolt instigated by the mass emotions aroused by the trial of INA officers? What finally worked? Hard power, the threat of a military revolt, or the soft power of non-violence and persuasion? ... The key British decision makers can be listed as under:

"Lord Clement Attlee, Prime Minister of Great Britain from August 1945 to 1950. Along with him were Lord Pethick-Lawrence (Secretary of State for India and Burma) and Sir Stafford Cripps (President of the Board of Trade) in London.

"The Viceroy of India, Field Marshal Viscount Lord Wavell (at the time of the INA trials and Naval mutiny)

"The last Viceroy of India, Lord Louis Mountbatten (however, the decision to free India had been taken by the time he was appointed. It was his task to implement that decision and actualise time frames).

"Commander-in-Chief India, General (later, Field Marshal) Claude Auchinleck and his superiors in the Imperial General Staff in London. Communications between them would provide the vital input about the military impact of the INA and subsequent mutinies in the Royal Indian Navy, Air Force and some units of the British Indian Army. This would be the most critical and decisive input.

"The British Governors of the Indian Provinces and their reports to the Viceroy on the internal situation in the wake of the INA trials also provide clear insights in to the decision-making process and the ground situation in various states in the wake of the INA trials and the naval mutiny.

"Another valuable source of information are the reports of the Intelligence Bureau whose primary task was to monitor the internal security situation and threats thereto."

"The key and pivotal decision maker, however, remains the British Prime Minister of that era, Lord Clement Attlee. Even the then British Monarch King George was bound to act on his advice. ... "

" ... On July 26, Churchill, conceding defeat in the general elections, advised the King to ask Attlee to form a Government. Early in August 1945, Clement Attlee had taken charge.

"The worst person in the Attlee Cabinet, Nehru felt, was Sir Stafford Cripps. Early in 1942, Cripps had brought Indians an offer (the famous Cripps Offer) of Dominion Status at the end of the war and participation in an All-India Government meanwhile. Subsequent negotiations had failed over defence. The British had insisted that defence remains their responsibility. Cripps had publicly blamed the Congress Party for this failure."

Considering his achievements in this respect, British weren't entirely incorrect in not trusting him with defense of India!

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"When Attlee had been officiating PM in the wartime coalition government for a while, he had on August 9, 1942, approved the arrests and proscription of the Congress Party. Thereafter Attlee’s remarks had dwelt less on the necessity of bringing independence to the subcontinent than on the difficulty of doing so ... George V had promised “to press on with the “development of My Colonial Empire and the welfare of its people.” That was the tone and tenor of the Attlee Government when it took charge in 1945. The Labour Party did not have a clear mandate for decisive change. Though the general elections had given it a majority of almost 150 seats in the House of Commons, at the polls it had received only 2 million more votes than the Conservatives. Attlee had won primarily on the basis of his domestic programme. In the realm of Colonial and Foreign Policy, Labour would be more conservative than the Conservatives themselves."

" ... to fault the thesis of the Court Historians, that because of the continual non-violent struggle of the Congress over the past several decades, a kind of momentum towards freedom had been built up and what was germane or critical, was simply the process of negotiations, which Gandhi and Nehru seemed to lead. ... "

That's the version taught for over six decades.

" ...This is very far from the truth. The Congress Party’s last charge, the Quit India Movement of 1942, had unfortunately petered out completely. The British had totally weathered this storm and they felt they were on top of the situation. They were absolutely in no mood to make any concessions/compromises about India’s freedom.

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"On August 13, 1945, Japan had surrendered. The provincial governments declared two to three days of holiday. The most joyous, however, were the Americans and British servicemen, eager to go home. War weariness was the primary sentiment. On August 23, 1945, the Domei News Agency of Japan announced the death of Bose in an air crash. Picked up instantly, it had created a stir right across the subcontinent. Schools closed, markets shut; in Bombay, the cotton mills stopped working; in Ahmedabad, there was a general “Hartal,” writes Fay.

"Attlee, meanwhile, had selected Pethick-Lawrence as his Secretary of State for India. He was old, amiable and did not rub Indians the wrong way. Lord Wavell was immensely relieved. With the surrender of Japan, normal political life in the subcontinent could not be postponed indefinitely. The sudden surrender of Japan forced the issue by depriving Delhi of the postponement rationale. Hence on August 21, 1945, Wavell had given notice for the Central and Provincial elections, the first since 1937. On August 22, the Congress Party’s proscription was ended, to enable it to participate in these elections. The party was in disarray, as it had to now collect its workers and reopen its offices. ... its top leadership had emerged from prison, virtually broken in spirit and with all fight seemingly knocked out of them. It needed an issue to galvanise itself and the Indian masses. Luckily for the Congress, the ghost of Bose seemed to rekindle the freedom struggle with a major bang. The issue was provided by Bose and his INA. It put life back into a virtually moribund Congress. It was the ghost of Bose who rejuvenated the Congress and the Freedom Struggle. R. F. Mudie, the Home Member of Viceroy’s Executive Council had written about Bose, “The Bengali’s influence over the INA was substantial. It affects all races, castes and communities. Men admired him for organising India’s First ‘National Army’ and for so conducting himself and that the Japanese were forced to treat Indians as allies. In the eyes of many, he stood on a level with Gandhi.

"Nehru had initially opposed the launch of the 1942 Quit India Movement (as had most CWC members). They had virtually been bulldozed by Gandhi into launching this crusade. The simple fact is that by then the views of Bose and Gandhi had begun to coincide markedly. Gandhi realised, in retrospect, that Bose had been absolutely right. This was India’s last and desperate chance to attain freedom. It was now or never. It was “Do or Die.” The Congress Party had thereafter launched its final non-violent crusade. The British had used unabashed violence to crush this popular uprising. To avoid any chances of peaceful agitations, they had used five divisions or some 57 Battalions of white troops. That had crushed the Quit India Movement. This last charge had left the Mahatma psychologically exhausted and spent. He almost died in prison. This was perhaps when the British worked on Nehru in prison. When they released him, they were sure he was going to be reasonable. After all, he had initially opposed the launch of the Quit India Movement during the war and he had threatened to march against Bose if he invaded India along with the Japanese. He was perhaps the most anglicised of all Indian leaders.

"Out of jail, Nehru and the Congress were soon pushed by the rising tide of anger and angst over the death of Netaji and the trials of the INA. A storm was rising all over India and the Congress leaders including Nehru were simply lifted by this rising tide of resentment and anger. The return of the INA prisoners had started in July 1945 itself. After the war ended, this process was speeded up. The British were making a serious mistake. In hindsight, they may have decided to leave them in Burma and Malaya. But they brought them back in shiploads to Chittagong and Calcutta. From here they were sent to camps in Jhingugacha and Nilganj (near Calcutta), to Kirkee (outside Pune) and Bahadurgarh (close to Delhi), to Attock and Multan in the Punjab (now in Pakistan). At Bahadurgarh, the men of the Indische Legion were brought in. “Blacks” and those required to depose against them were concentrated in the Red Fort in Delhi.

"By early September 1945, some 7,000 INA men had reached India. By early November, this had risen to 12,000. Some 3,000 had been allowed to rejoin their families. By December 1945, releases were averaging more than 600 a week. The INA men were getting reinjected into the national bloodstream. Stories of their glorious struggles were now proliferating all across the land, along with much embellishment. The INA POW cages were arousing public curiosity and anger. “These thousands, spreading all over the country,” said Nehru to Krishna Menon, “will make a difference, perhaps a great difference, for they are hard as nails and very anti-British.” Events were building up for a repeat of 1857.

"The violence that broke out all over India in the wake of the INA trials was simply unprecedented. In Delhi, in Calcutta, in Mumbai and Karachi the crowds poured out into the streets. Over a lakh of people surged out in Calcutta. Police firing simply failed to stop them. The crowds would stop for a few seconds then simply surge forward again. In all his years the Mahatma had never been able to mobilise such large-scale and extremely agitated mobs. The very scale of the rioting left the British dazed and petrified. The most worrisome was the sullen and ominous mood in the Indian military units. The British were terrified of the storm that was building up in South Asia. Was it heading for another 1857 style mutiny? If so, where were the white British troops to quell such an uprising? At the very least it needed five British Divisions. But most of them had been sent back to England for demobilisation. The American and British troops were homesick and simply war weary. They were in no mood to attempt a second re-conquest of India, this time in the face of 25 lakh combat hardened Indian soldiers who had done so well in the war and were right then being demobilised.

"Unprecedentedly, the INA trials were very public, to strike terror into the hearts of the armed forces. Due to the sympathy toward Netaji and the INA in general, there was an instant and large outpouring of passion and patriotism in Indians. It was almost like an explosion. These stories were being shared via wireless sets and through media in general on the ships, where the sailors who were discriminated against got inspired to revolt. The British claimed that the causes for the subsequent Naval mutiny were entirely local and Hygiene factors based, i.e., the bad quality of food, the thinness of the dal and bad accommodation, etc. That however was just the tip of the iceberg of anger and humiliation at racial slurs that had accumulated over the years. Just as the greased cartridges were not the actual but merely the precipitating causes of the 1857 uprising, food, etc., seemed to be the triggering cause of the 1946 revolt. But it had been brewing for long and could be clearly traced back to the intense resentment born of the INA trials.

"The INA trials had inflamed the Indian soldiers, sailors and airmen of the British Indian Armed Forces. The first to revolt were the sailors of the Royal Indian Navy. It was a massive and widespread rebellion. At its peak some 20,000 sailors on 78 ships and 20 shore establishments had revolted. They had pulled down the Union Jack and hoisted in its stead, the tri-colour Congress Flag. They had refused to obey their British officers, chased them out and manhandled them. They had marched through the streets of Mumbai and Karachi with portraits of Netaji, shouting the INA slogans of “Jai Hind” and “Chalo Dilli.” The revolt had occurred first in the Royal Indian Navy, an All India, All-Class Service. It spread next to the Royal Indian Air Force (also all-Indian, all-class based). Mostly it was the signallers who could communicate with diverse units, who spearheaded this agitation. They had spread on wireless the news of the INA trials and generally coordinated the revolt. The British were petrified. This was the spectre that had been haunting them so far, of a dam about to burst.

"Auchinleck now warned his Army commanders that they could no longer rely on the soldiers of the Indian Army. He warned the Government in London to hastily announce a date for the British departure. Both the soldiers , Wavell and Auchinleck, were now crystal clear, it was all over for the Raj. The sheet anchor for its continuance, its very centre of gravity, was the loyalty of the Indian sepoy to the Raj. With this in serious doubt, they were clear that it was curtains for the empire. Did they want to go with grace or did they want a very messy and bloody exit? For this time the Congress leaders had been able to bail the British out. They had talked the naval mutineers into surrendering. The key question was, for how long?"

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”Just twelve days before the Indian Naval Mutiny (which started on February 18, 1946), 600 members, including officers of the Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF) camp situated close by on Bombay’s Marine Drive, had gone on a hunger strike as a protest against a racial insult by the Camp Commander. The revolt in the Navy soon spread to the ranks of the Royal Indian Air Force. Indian airmen at many airbases went on strike. They too refused to obey their British officers and shouted pro-INA slogans in Karachi and other cities.

"The last straw that broke the camel’s back however was the spread of this armed revolt finally to the Indian Army, the real source of the strength of the Raj in India. On the quiet morning of February 26, 1946, as an aftermath of the naval mutiny, some 120 army men of the “J” company of the Signals Training Centre (STC), Jabalpur, defied their British superiors and broke free from their barracks. Part of a radio-signalling unit, they were sick and tired of the racist abuse heaped on them by their paranoid British counterparts. There was complete commotion for some days.

"Meanwhile Lord Pethick-Lawrence made a momentous declaration in the House of Lords on February 19, 1946 (just a day after the start of the naval mutiny) in which he announced the decision of the British government to send a special mission, consisting of himself, Sir Stafford Cripps and A. V. Alexander to resolve the constitutional deadlock in India. This was the beginning of the end, the first nail in the coffin of the empire. Meanwhile British General Staff had begun serious planning to cope with wider mutinies and unrest in the army. Some of the declassified documents of the British Indian Army of that period make chilling reading. Sample these:

"If, however, the Indian Armed Forces did not remain loyal … we would be faced with the necessity of providing five British divisions for India, with the consequent abandonment of commitments in other areas hitherto regarded as inescapable, serious effects on our import and export programmes and worldwide repercussions on the release scheme. The only alternative to this would be ignominious withdrawal from the whole of India. Five British divisions incidentally were just not available. Most divisions were being hurriedly shipped back home because the soldiers were desperately homesick."

"The Report by the Chiefs of Staff is an important document that brings to light several important points connected with India’s independence. It clearly brings out the fact that the British Government was seriously considering the option of creating Pakistan in June 1946, not because of the lack of agreement with the political parties—this was still being negotiated by the Cabinet Mission—but due to the threat of disaffection in the Indian armed forces. At a point in time it was being considered that all British forces and families would first concentrate in Pakistan and then be shipped/flown out. This option was ruled out only because it did not serve British strategic interests. The disparity in the outlook of British officials in London and Delhi is also clearly visible; for the former, Britain’s long-term strategic interest dictated continuation of British rule, while those closer to the scene of action, such as Wavell and Auchinleck, realised that it was time to go. Had the Indian armed forces remained loyal or had there been enough British divisions to keep them in check, the British would never have left India.

"Early in September 1946 ... Wavell could see that the situation was steadily deteriorating, and unless a clear policy was announced, India could slide into anarchy. After consulting the Governors and the C-in-C, he estimated that the British could hold on for not more than 18 months. The Secretary of State, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, did not agree with Wavell’s appreciation. He felt that it was still possible to hold on to India, and proposed further European recruitment to augment British troops in India. By this time, serious communal riots had broken out in East Bengal and in the Punjab, resulting in sizeable casualties among Hindus as well as Muslims. ... "

General Bakhshi is sticking to the Congress regimes imposed seeming equivalence that actually falsified history, but it might be that he couldn't legally delineate facts - Calcutta massacre, ordered by Jinnah, was of thousands of Hindus, numbers estimated between 3 to 10 thousands; subsequent Noakhali massacres of 150,000 Hindus were only matched by massacres Hindus across Northwest.

" ... A new Interim Government headed by Jawaharlal Nehru had been installed at Delhi, with Sardar Baldev Singh as the Defence member. In a letter dated September 12 to Auchinleck, who had recently been appointed a Field Marshal, Nehru discussed the withdrawal of British forces from India; pulling out Indian troops from the Netherlands East Indies and Iraq; and the future of the Indian Army. In a broadcast to the Armed Forces on October 9, Baldev Singh announced the setting up of a committee to accelerate the pace of nationalisation. In view of these developments, Pethick-Lawrence’s proposal to raise additional European troops for India appeared surreal.

"Wavell sent a strongly worded note to the Secretary of State on October 23, in which he reiterated his demand for a firm declaration of the policy of the British Government. His plan, he wrote, was based on two main assumptions:

"The object was to transfer power to India without undue delay and with the minimum of disorder and bloodshed; to secure the interests of the Minorities and to provide for the safety of the 90,000 Europeans in India;

"The power of the British Government in India was weakening daily, and could not be sustained beyond 18 months. Using exceptionally strong language, Wavell made it clear that as the man on the spot, it was his responsibility to advise the Government of the action to be taken to achieve these objects. “If HMG consider that my advice shows lack of balance and judgment, or that I have lost my nerve, it is of course their duty to inform me of this and to replace me,” he wrote.

"“But they take a very grave responsibility upon themselves if they simply neglect my advice.” Wavell ended by emphasising that they “must have an emergency plan in readiness; and if it is agreed that we cannot hope to control events for longer than 18 months from now, we shall have to make up our minds and make a definite pronouncement at least in the first half of 1947. While I agree that we should not leave India till we have exhausted every possible means of securing a constitutional settlement, we can make no contribution to a settlement once we have lost all power of control.”"

" ... Some Cabinet Ministers such as Bevin and Alexander, who were imperialists at heart, balked at the prospect of a stark announcement of the ending of the British Raj. Prime Minister Attlee also felt strongly that the British should not relinquish control until at least a constitutional settlement had been reached. Since the chances of reaching an amicable settlement appeared dismal, Attlee’s views seemed illusory. After a series of meetings, the India and Burma Committee decided to recommend that March 32, 1948 should be announced as the date by which the British would hand over power in India. Wavell pressed for a firm announcement in this regard by the British Government. Attlee replied to Wavell on December 21, 1946, giving the impression that his proposal had been by and large accepted.

"Though the freedom movement had developed considerable momentum by the time the war ended, the assumption that it would have achieved independence on its own would be erroneous. With the vast resources at their disposal, it would not have been difficult for the British authorities in India to muzzle the movement, as they had done in 1930 and 1942. The only reason for them not being able to resort to such measures after 1945 was the uncertain dependability of the Army. Had the Indian soldier remained staunch, or adequate British forces been available, it is most unlikely that freedom would have come in 1947. If nothing else, it would have been delayed by 10 to 15 years.

"The redoubtable Lt Gen Sinha, was one of the first Indian officers to be posted at the most prestigious Military Operations (MO) Directorate in Delhi in 1947. This was hitherto manned only by British officers. The outgoing British officer he was taking charge from handed over the keys of the Top Secret documents to him and left in a great hurry, as it were. Therein Gen Sinha saw two Top Secret files meant for British officers only. One was a Contingency Plan to fly in British troops to deal with any mutiny in the Indian armed Forces. This called for flying in some five British divisions to quell such an uprising. The problem really was where were these five divisions? I had learnt this first-hand from Gen Sinha himself, a few months before he passed away.

"Operation Gondola

"The second was Op Gondola—a plan to evacuate British civil and military personnel from India in the event of a major armed uprising. This gives the clearest insight into the state of mind of the British and the real reason why they left in such a tearing hurry in 1947."

" ... This led to the holocaust of partition in which over 2 million Indians and Pakistanis were killed and some 14.5 million were uprooted and displaced. ... "

" ... It saw the most massive mass migrations in human history. ... "

................................................................................................

General Bakhshi quotes from several sources here.

" ... Chief Justice P.B. Chakraborty of Calcutta High Court, who had also served as the acting Governor of West Bengal in India, disclosed the following in a letter addressed to the publisher of Dr. R.C. Majumdar’s book, A History of Bengal. The Chief Justice wrote:

"“You have fulfilled a noble task by persuading Dr. Majumdar to write this history of Bengal and publishing it ... In the preface of the book Dr. Majumdar has written that he could not accept the thesis that Indian independence was brought about solely, or predominantly by the non-violent civil disobedience movement of Gandhi.

"“When I was the acting Governor, Lord Attlee, who had given us independence by withdrawing the British rule from India, spent two days in the Governor’s palace at Calcutta during his tour of India. At that time I had a prolonged discussion with him regarding the real factors that had led the British to quit India. My direct question to him was that since Gandhi’s ‘Quit India’ movement had tapered off quite some time ago and in 1947 no such new compelling situation had arisen that would necessitate a hasty British departure, why did they have to leave?

"“In his reply Attlee cited several reasons, the principal among them being the erosion of loyalty to the British Crown among the Indian Army and Navy personnel as a result of the military activities of Netaji. Toward the end of our discussion I asked Attlee what was the extent of Gandhi’s influence upon the British decision to quit India. Hearing this question, Attlee’s lips became twisted in a sarcastic smile as he slowly chewed out the word, ‘m-i-n-i-m-a-l!’” [46]"

"Bhora concludes: “When the new version of the history of the Twentieth Century India, and especially the episode of the country’s unique struggle for independence comes to be written, it will no doubt single out but one person who made the most significant and outstanding contribution among all his compatriots toward the emancipation of his motherland from the shackles of an alien bondage. During World War II this man strode across two continents like a colossus, and the footsteps of his army of liberation reverberated through the forests and plains of Europe and the jungles and mountains of Asia. His armed assaults shook the very foundations of the British Empire.

"His name was Subhas Chandra Bose.”"

"This assesment is echoed by Dr Balashib Ambedkar, the framer of India’s Constitution and its first Law Minister. Babasaheb would not have been surprised with Sir Attlee’s admission, for he had foreseen it. He told the BBC in 1955 that from his “own analysis” he had concluded that “two things led the Labour party to take this decision” [to free India]. Ambedkar continued: “The national army that was raised by Subhas Chandra Bose. The British had been ruling the country in the firm belief that whatever may happen in the country or whatever the politicians do, they will never be able to change the loyalty of soldiers. That was one prop on which they were carrying on the administration. And that was completely dashed to pieces. They found that soldiers could be seduced to form a party—a battalion to blow off the British.”"

"Bohra writes: “This ‘unimpeachable’ truth will come as a shock to most Indians brought up to believe that the Congress movement driven by the ‘spiritual force’ of Mahatma Gandhi forced the British to leave India. But both the evidence and the logic of history are against this beautiful but childish fantasy; it was the fear of mutiny by the Indian armed forces—and not any ‘spiritual force’—that forced the issue of freedom. The British saw that the sooner they left India the better for themselves, for, at the end of the war, India had some three million men under arms.”

"Majumdar had reached the same conclusion years ago."

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May 06, 2022 - May 06, 2022.

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5. Conclusive Evidence: The Commander-in-Chief Gen (Later Fd Mshl) Claude Auchinleck’s Reports to The Viceroy

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General Bakhshi, havingg explained the importance and relevance of the military, goes on -

" ... Dr Kalyan De has rendered yeoman service in digging out these reports from the British Archives about the transfer of power in India. Because of their very seminal importance I have decided to cite these documents in full rather than just quoting relevant extracts. The reports cited in this chapter have been extracted from The Transfer of Power, Vol. 6, pp. 530 and 939. The first is Gen Auchinleck’s letter to Fd Mshl Viscount Wavell dated November 24, 1945"

He quotes several documents.

A letter from Field Marshal Auchinleck to Viceroy Wavell, quoted by author, speaks of effect of commuting sentences against Shah Nawaz Khan, Sehgal and Dhillon, three main accused whose trials were held at Red Fort.

"(a) On the general public, moderate as well as extremist, Muslim as well as Hindu.

"Pleasure and intense relief born of the conviction that confirmation of the sentences would have resulted in violent internal conflict.

"This feeling does not, in my opinion, spring universally from the idea that the convicted officers were trying to rid India of the British and, therefore, to be applauded, whatever crimes they might commit, but from a generally genuine feeling that they were patriots and nationalists and that, therefore, even if they were misled they should be treated with clemency, as true sons of India. In this connection, it should be remembered, I think, that every Indian worthy of the name is today a “Nationalist,” though this does not mean that he is necessarily “anti-British.” All the same, where India and her independence are concerned, there are no “pro-British” Indians."

"(b) On the Indian officers of the Indian Army.

"Except for a few recovered prisoners of war who have suffered much at the hands of their fellow countrymen who joined the so-called “I.N.A.,” the vast majority, almost without exception, however much they may like and respect the British, are glad and relieved because of the result of the trial. Most of them admit the gravity of the offence and do not condone it, but practically all are sure that 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, probably on communal lines.

"The more senior and intelligent undoubtedly realise the implications of our having established in principle the seriousness of the crime of forsaking one’s allegiance and the wisdom of meeting it with a heavy punishment such as “Cashiering” which carries with it the stigma of disgrace.

"They realise that if their future is to be at all secure, discipline and loyalty must be maintained, but they, too, are Nationalists and their feelings are much the same as those of the public at large."

"(c) On the V.C.Os, and rank and file of the Indian Army.

"The great majority are, I think, pleased that leniency has been shown for a variety of reasons. Many of them have relations and friends from the same villages amongst the “I.N.A.” Many think that, as the war is over, bygones should be bygones and a fresh start made.

"Others are genuinely nationalistic in outlook and have been affected by agitation and propaganda. The great majority feel, I think, that the whole episode is unpleasant and discreditable to them as a class and to the Army as a whole, and would wish it forgotten and decently buried as soon as possible.

"Under all this, there is, I think, an uneasy feeling as to the future and doubt as to whether their interests will be as well watched in the days to come as they have been in the past.

"(d) On the British officers of the Indian Army.

"As I hope already said, the effect on many British officers has been bad, and has led to public criticism which has not been in accordance with the traditional loyalty I am entitled to expect. To these officers, perhaps not always very perceptive or imaginative, an officer is an officer, whether he be Indian or British, and they make no allowance for birth or political aspirations or upbringing, nor do they begin to realise the great political stresses and strains now affecting this country. They are unable to differentiate between the British and Indian points of view.

"Moreover, they forget, if they ever knew, the great bitterness bred in the minds of many Indian officers in the early days of “Indianisation” by the discrimination, often very real, exercised against them, and the discourteous, contemptuous treatment meted out to them by many British officers who should have known better."

"3. I would like you also to consider and to impress on others, especially those British officers who have been upset by the result of the first “I.N.A.” trial, the effect of the capitulation of Singapore on the Indian troops involved in it, from amongst whom the “I.N.A.” was subsequently formed.

"Those who have served for many years with Indian troops, as I have done, have always recognised that the loyalty of our men was really to the officers of the regiment or unit, and that although there may have been some abstract sentiments of loyalty and patriotism to the Government and to the King, the men’s allegiance for all practical purposes was focused on the regiment, and particularly on the regimental officers, on whom they depended for the[ir] welfare, advancement and future prospects.

"In these officers their faith and trust was almost childlike, as events have proved time and time again. It is true to say that in almost every case of serious discontent or indiscipline, and there have been remarkably few of them, which has occurred in the past fifty years, the cause could be traced to indifferent officers and bad man-management."

"It is quite wrong to adopt the attitude that because these men had taken service in a British controlled Indian Army that therefore their loyalties must be the same as those of British soldiers. As I have tried to explain, they had no real loyalty or patriotism towards Britain as Britain, not as we understand loyalty."

"The policy of segregation of Indian officers into separate units, the differential treatment in respect of pay and terms of service as compared with the British officer, and the prejudice and lack of manners of some—by no means all—British officers and their wives, all went to produce a very deep and bitter feeling of racial discrimination in the minds of the most intelligent and progressive of the Indian officers, who were naturally nationalists, keen to see India standing on her own legs and not to be ruled from Whitehall for ever.

"It is no use shutting one’s eyes to the fact that any Indian officer worth his salt is a Nationalist, though this does not mean, as I have said before, that he is necessarily anti-British. If he is anti-British this is as often as not due to his faulty handling and treatment by his British officer comrades. It is essential for the preservation of future unity that this fact should be fully understood by all British officers.

"No Indian officer must be regarded as suspect and disloyal merely because he is what is called a “Nationalist,” or in other words, a good Indian!"

"In taking the decision to show clemency, the whole circumstances past, present and future had to be considered and was (were] so considered most carefully and over a long period.

"The overriding object is to maintain the stability, reliability and efficiency of the Indian Army so that it may remain in the future a trustworthy weapon for use in the defence of India and, we hope, of the Commonwealth as a whole.

"It was essential to establish the principle that falseness to his allegiance is a crime which cannot be countenanced in any officer under whatever Government he may be serving. By confirming the finding of the Court and the sentence of “Cashiering” which carries with it the highest degree of disgrace to an officer, we have done this. To have added imprisonment to this sentence would not in any way have helped to emphasise the principle we were concerned to preserve.

"On the other hand, 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. To have taken this risk would have been seriously to jeopardise our object.

"Always keeping before one the difference in outlook between British and Indian, which I have tried to explain in this letter, I decided, therefore, that, in the interests of the future of both India and Britain and because of the unprecedented circumstances of the case, the only proper course to pursue was to confirm the finding and so establish the principle but to show clemency in respect of the sentence."

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Author comments.

" ... Fd Mshl Auchinleck clearly acknowledged that the British had invited this disloyalty by their very unfair and racial treatment to all Indian Officers. These racial slurs of the British officers and ladies towards the Indian officers had badly vitiated race relations in the army and other services. The more educated the Indian officers and men, the more keenly were these slurs felt. Every Indian Officer he stated flatly is now a nationalist. Any attempt to execute the INA under-trials would have had serious internal security ramifications."

" ... One can see the sea change that the INA trials have wrought upon the internal security scenario in such a short time frame. It is vital and crucial for understanding the state of mind and siege mentality that had set into the minds of the British High Command in India. It is a military appreciation of the Internal Security situation by the Commander-in-Chief as of November 24, 1945. They were distinctly unnerved by the ferocity of the riots and agitations that broke out in all towns of India immediately in the wake of the INA trials. The British were absolutely stunned by these and moreover the rising hostility and sullenness of the Indian troops in the wake of this uprising was a cause for alarm and virtual panic. They could simply not count on the continued reliability of Indian troops if called upon to act against their own citizens. This report gives a crystal clear indication of those rising levels of panic in the British military high command in India. This report in fact gives details of worst-case scenarios and contingency planning including for evacuation of British personnel and their families in case of breakout of large-scale mutinies and unrest in Indian Units. British units and families were to concentrate near airports for ease of evacuation by air. Exact number of aircraft needed for operations were computed. This is no expression of opinion. This is an exact and empirical document about the scale and intensity of impact post the INA trials.

"They were expecting serious signs of unrest as early as in February 1946 and these estimates turned out to be fairly accurate given the Naval mutiny that followed. It is noteworthy that the senior political leadership in London still hoped to be able to hang on to their empire in India but the military men on the spot—both Auchinleck and Wavell were clear that they had little hope of doing so and that they had at best 18 months to quit with grace. Both these men were not novices, they were old and seasoned India hands.

"The appreciation clearly states: “that in case the Indian armed forces as a whole cease to be reliable, the British Armed forces now available would not be able to control the internal situation or to protect essential communications, nor would any piecemeal reinforcement of these forces be of much avail.

"“To regain control of the situation and to restore essential communications within the country, nothing short of an organised campaign for the reconquest of India is likely to suffice.”"

"The appreciation concludes flatly: We must be prepared to deal with well organised revolution next Spring, and the possibility of a serious, but less well organised rising at any time during the coming winter. Such was the impact of the INA trials. ... The report is produced verbatim on the following pages and is a most invaluable document for study and analysis by historians. This is the single most credible and authentic piece of evidence of the impact of the INA of Bose on the British decision to finally quit and depart in a tearing hurry after their major victory in the Second World War. This is a clinching document and primary evidence to settle that historical debate forever."

" ... The Military appreciation leaves nothing to the imagination and candidly highlights the fact that Indian Soldiers can no longer be relied upon to act against their own countrymen and should that happen, the British troops then available in India would be wholly inadequate to control the situation. Even piecemeal reinforcements of White troops would be of no avail. It would virtually need five British divisions to mount a campaign for the re-conquest of India. So dire was the situation perceived to be. The simple fact was that the British troops were desperately homesick and just anxious to get back home. They were in no mood to fight 2.5 million armed Indian soldiers who had just seen extensive combat in the war in almost every theatre. Those five British divisions were just NOT available."

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"COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF GENERAL AUCHINLECK’S REPORTS TO CHIEFS OF STAFF COMMITTEE AND THEIR REPORTS"

"DATED 24 NOVEMBER 1945"

"1. Communal trouble is possible any time before during or after the elections. It seems more than likely that there may be serious communal strife between Hindus and Musalmans as a result of the elections."

" ... After elections Congress may take part in the constitution making assembly which would give a breathing space of unpredictable length, or they may demand transference of power and proceed to direct action if refused. If Congress intend to take direct action in any event we must assume that they will between now and April perfect plans for widespread simultaneous anti-Government action.

"2. It is a reasonable assumption, therefore, that widespread trouble either communal or anti-government or both is to be expected in the late Spring and may occur before then, but if so will be less organised, and therefore less serious.

"(a) Congress will have learned from the 1942 disturbances how easily rail, road and telephone communications can be disrupted and the paralysing effect of such disruption, particularly on the rapid reinforcement of civil forces in outlying areas; they will also have realised the error they made in not stirring up the rural population simultaneously with their attacks on communications.

"(b) There are now large quantities of unlicensed arms throughout India and there will be many ex I.N.A. men to use them, if they feel so inclined. There will also be a considerable number of ordinary demobilised soldiers in towns and villages, many of whom may be persuaded to support Congress. All these men are trained in the use of weapons, and members of the I.N.A. have some training in the technique of anti-British leadership."

"The principal danger areas are likely to lie in the United Provinces, Bihar and Bengal, but trouble must also be expected in the Punjab, the Central Provinces and Bombay, but is less likely perhaps in Madras."

"Taking into account the demands there are likely to be from all over India for transport aircraft for the movement of reserves, evacuation and concentration of threatened civilians, transportation of food, ammunition, stores and P.O.L., and the clearing of casualties, it is necessary that all transport aircraft that may be in India when widespread trouble starts should be immediately placed at my disposal.

"Assuming that the number of transport aircraft in India does not fall below the figure given above, I estimate that I should require not less than five additional transport squadrons to deal with major widespread disturbances."

................................................................................................

"CONCLUSIONS

"11. We must be prepared to deal with well organised revolution next Spring, and the possibility of a serious, but less well organised rising at any time during the coming winter.

"We must also be ready to deal with widespread and bitter intercommunal strife which might put a severe strain on the reliability of the Indian Armed Forces should they be called on to act against their own co-religionists.

"12. The reliability and spirit of the Indian Forces including the police will best be secured by a firm and explicit declaration by His Majesty’s Government to the effect that, while they maintain their intention to grant self-government to India by constitutional methods:

"(i) any armed insurrection will be put down, by force if necessary and the leaders punished.

"(ii) Government servants will be supported to the full.

"(iii) The police and troops acting in the execution of their duty will be protected at the time and thereafter.It is realised that (iii) is open to the criticism that, in view of the declared intention of His Majesty’s Government to grant self-government to India, the promise of protection cannot be guaranteed. But if the present situation develops into a general armed rebellion which has to be suppressed by force, the chances of Congress extremists gaining political power in India will inevitably be postponed for a number of years.

"13. In the absence of a firm declaration the loyalty of the Indian Forces is likely progressively to deteriorate as time passes and Congress and other bodies intensify their anti-British campaign.

"14. Provided the Indian Forces, including the police, remain loyal, India has sufficient British and Indian Forces available to deal with widespread internal disturbance unless this coincides with Afghan aggression or a major rising of the tribes of the North-West Frontier.

"15. Transport aircraft now available will not suffice in an extreme emergency.

"16. If the Indian Forces as a whole cease to be reliable, the British Armed Forces now available are not likely to be able to control the internal situation or to protect essential communications, nor would any piecemeal reinforcement of these forces be of much avail.

"To regain control of the situation and to restore essential communications within the country, nothing short of an organised campaign for the reconquest of India is likely to suffice.

"It is not possible now to compute the air and land forces required for such a campaign, but they would inevitably be very large as, if the Indian Armed Forces are not prepared to support Government, they will almost inevitably actively oppose it. Further, such active opposition is not likely to be confined to India alone. Disaffection will inevitably spread to Indian troops now being employed by His Majesty’s Government in overseas theatres such as Burma, Malaya, Java and the Middle East with serious repercussions on the attitude of the peoples of those countries. Afghanistan also may well throw in her lot with the Frontier tribes and the Mussalmans of North Western India."

"17. The situation in India is, therefore, extremely delicate.

"If there is a widespread revolt against the Government everything will depend upon the reliability of the Indian Armed Forces. This depends upon political more than upon military factors and it is essential that our political action both in India and in the neighbouring countries where Indian troops are employed, should in no way give opportunities for political agitation to subvert the loyalty to Government of the Indian Armed Forces. Our action in Java and French Indo-China is already being represented as European repression of national risings of Eastern peoples. If this is made a major political issue as is likely, it may have a serious effect upon the loyalty of the Indian Armed Forces. It is certainly very undesirable that any further Indian troops should be sent to these or other similar countries. The reliability of the Indian Armed Forces is also likely to deteriorate if Government shows any lack of confidence in them."

In this context one is reminded of depiction by Amitav Ghosh, of resentment and worse against Indian soldiers in British employ used in Asia by the locals in these countries.

"Should the situation so deteriorate that we cannot rely upon the Indian Armed Forces, I may have to ask His Majesty’s Government to send to India as many British formations as can be made available.

"In these circumstances very early despatch would be essential, as, to be effective, these reinforcements would have to arrive before the forces of violence gain control.

"I request, therefore, that plans may be prepared for the despatch to India of such British Formations as could be made available in the event of a serious emergency, and that I may be informed of the possible strength of these reinforcements and of the approximate period which would elapse between the request for their despatch and their arrival in Indian ports.

"It is essential that any preparations or actual moves in this connection should be made under the guise of a plan to replace Indian Formations in the South East Asian Command by British Formations, using India as a staging base in order to complete their organisation and equipment. Too much importance cannot be paid to this aspect of the situation as it is absolutely essential to do or say nothing which might aggravate the present extremely delicate situation, and I trust that this will be firmly impressed on all authorities concerned, both military and civilian."

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"III. GENERAL AUCHINLECK TO CHIEFS OF STAFF (VIA DIRECTOR OF INTELLIGENCE, INDIA AND CABINET OFFICES)"

" ... Congress praise of men of so-called Indian National Army as true patriots and extravagant anti-Government abuse are reaching men through civilian contacts if not also directly. Almost all units wherever stationed in India report that men are becoming aware of this propaganda. The uneducated and ignorant are bewildered or at best indifferent. The more intelligent are beginning to wonder where their interests lie. So far there are no repeat no real indications that troops intend to abandon their allegiance to Government or would disobey orders given by their officers. If however morale were to deteriorate gravely owing to continued propaganda and some units mutinied news would spread rapidly and mutiny might become general even if in some cases half-hearted.

"6. Even if in these circumstances some units remain prepared to fight for Government against their own people it is impossible to foretell which these units might be and therefore where they would be located. It is likely that Gurkha units may be less affected than others as all their officers are British but Gurkhas are Hindus and not necessarily immune to Congress propaganda. I consider therefore that it is necessary to plan on the two extremes and that the data are too imponderable to enable me to plan usefully for any intermediate stage."

"8. Congress now show signs of realising that any serious deterioration in the discipline and obedience to authority of the Indian Armed Forces would not be in their own interest should they assume power and that it would be better to try first to gain this power by constitutional means rather than by insurrection. At the moment therefore it seems likely that there will be no repeat no widespread disturbances organised by existing political leaders before April 1946, that they are improbable before. Situation however is liable to sudden changes and is naturally being kept under constant review."

................................................................................................

"IV. GENERAL AUCHINLECK TO CHIEFS OF STAFF (VIA DIRECTOR OF INTELLIGENCE, INDIA AND CABINET OFFICES)

"22 DECEMBER 1945, 2.47 pm Received: 23 December; 12.21 pm

"1. Gradual introduction now of British infantry and possibly artillery units would certainly be a logical sequel to Government’s declared intention to support its loyal servants, and apparent changed attitude of Congress may create favourable opportunity. But we are not dealing with logic so much as with ill will of political leaders who are prepared to discard truth for political ends and who have means of spreading propaganda verbally by agents. This is very difficult to counter amongst largely illiterate people by presentation of truth in Press even if Press were willing to help by giving necessary publicity. If, for example, Congress took line that arrival of British troops was due to distrust of Indian units and British troops were intended to disarm Indian troops and coerce Indian people we should precipitate trouble rather than prevent it.

"2. If British troops are sent before disturbances begin they must be preceded by thorough deception plan. I should welcome visit by deception expert but must emphasise that plan must be political rather than military and must be acceptable to Indian Armed Forces and Indian people. Possible line might be that British troops were en route to NEI to relieve Indian troops."

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"V. GENERAL AUCHINLECK TO FIELD MARSHAL VISCOUNT ALANBROOKE

"14 February 1946

"MOST IMMEDIATE

"TOP SECRET"

" ... In addition to the above possibilities of anti-Government action there is the equally if not more serious possibility of a religious war on a large scale and covering the greater part of India between Hindus and Moslems.

"This contingency is becoming more dangerous as time goes on and should it arise will be extremely difficult to meet as it is more than likely that it will be impossible to rely on either the Police or the Indian Armed Forces to take action for the restoration of law and order if this means firing on their own co-religionists.

"This means that British troops alone would be available to restore the situation and certainly result in turning communal strife into anti-Government action by both parties.

"In this event we would again be faced by the risk of the India[n] Armed Forces throwing in their lot with the insurgent elements as there is little doubt that the rank and file of these forces would have been badly shaken and disturbed by the initial communal strife.

"THIRD, It can be realised therefore that if the worst comes to the worst British troops will be the only stable element in the country and that unless the essential key points can be held with reasonable certainty the maintenance of these troops may well become impossible.

"These key points are in my opinion the capital Delhi whence alone control can be exercised and the four chief ports Bombay Karachi Calcutta and Madras.

"FIFTH, In the circumstances and especially in view of the complete uncertainty as to the political outcome of the present most confused situation in India it is impossible for me to say that the immediate despatch of three British Brigade Groups to India is essential.

"I can and do say that as an insurance their despatch would be desirable in order to minimise any risk there may be of loss of control of the key points mention(ed) in my Fourth [Third] above.""

So they foresaw much of it, planned action, but simply ran away, instead, when massacres began?

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May 06, 2022 - May 07, 2022.

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6. Conclusive Evidence: The Viceroy Fd Mshl Viscount Wavell’s Correspondence

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"Another most critical decision maker of the empire was the Viceroy Fd Mshl Viscount Archibald Wavell—a great military Commander who had earned fame in the North Africa theatre. Wavell was the Viceroy of India from 1943 to 1947. It is noteworthy that before he had been moved out to take charge of the Middle East Theatre of war he had been Commander-in-Chief India. As such he knew India very well. Fd marshal Claude Auchinleck had served most of his military career in India and was Commander-in-Chief India from 1943 to 1947. These then were the most experienced India hands who were serving together in India at the time of independence. They were men who knew the Indian army very well and had practically grown with this army. They were sensitive to the major changes taking place in this army—changes that had been catalysed by the impact of Bose and his INA. The INA trials designed to overawe the Indian army had backfired badly. These two experienced Generals had to deal with this impact and they showed great maturity and tact. This is reflected in their correspondence and reports. The letter below talks of the reports on the post INA trial riots especially in Calcutta where transport infrastructure was attacked. It talks of not using Indian troops to quell revolts against the Dutch in the Java and French indo-China. He clearly mentions that he fully endorses Auchinleck’s appreciation of the situation.

................................................................................................

"VICEROY FIELD MARSHAL VISCOUNT WAVELL’S REPORT

SECRETARY OF STATE LORD PETHICK-LAWRENCE"

"The report is given here as it appeared in “Transfer of Power,” Volume 6, page 552.

"I. FIELD MARSHAL VISCOUNT WAVELL TO

"LORD PETHICK-LAWRENCE

"THE VICEROY’S HOUSE, NEW DELHI,

"27 NOVEMBER 1945

"PRIVATE AND SECRET

"Thank you for your letter of the 16th November.

"Since you wrote we have exchanged telegrams about the political situation, and I have had to say that I do not entirely agree with the suggestions that have been made for reducing the tension. Perhaps your most important suggestion was that I should see Gandhi.

"The difficulty is that even if this did good with the Congress, it would immediately do corresponding harm with the Muslims and tend to redouble their suspicions. Also Gandhi and Congress would at once try to make a bargain and would use my approach as propaganda. I feel I should try to keep on an absolutely even keel for the time being and do nothing which suggests a tendency either to give way to threats of the Congress or to encourage the intransigence of the Muslim League.

"As for the proposal that Nehru and Jinnah should go to London I think the chief objection to it is that there is really no chance whatever of their accepting it. The Muslim League could not possibly manage the elections without Jinnah, and Jinnah would consider that if he and Nehru both went, the Muslim League would lose everything whereas the Congress would lose one of a number of efficient electioneering politicians. Also, Nehru is so angry with Jinnah for his behaviour at Simla that he would not be likely to be amenable in discussions with him even in London, apart from the fact that he is committed to a no compromise policy and could not afford to look as though he was going back on it during the elections. This last point of course applies to Jinnah equally. And of course Nehru is not the official head of Congress, as would be pointed out to us."

Here he mentions something not usually mentioned in context of pre-independence history, making Calcutta Direct Action Day seem like an aberration in a city quiet and harmonious until that point.