By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Enter Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose

The heady days of Gandhi's great campaigns of the Depression era appeared to be over but, in the summer of 1940 Bose began a movement to demolish an obelisk erected to commemorate those who died while incarcerated by prince Siraj-ud Daulah. At a stroke, Bose was able to outflank conservatives like Gandhi and Nehru of the ruling party by lauding the long-dead Siraj-ud Daulah as a great Muslim Bengali patriot. Ministers agreed to demolish the monument, but the governor caused a delay. Subhas Bose decided to force the issue by organizing a huge demonstration, the Bengal Legislative Assembly went into spasm, and Bose was arrested. Congressmen arguing that the Black Hole story was invented by the colonialists (Assembly debate reported in Amrita Bazaar Patrika Newspaper Calcutta, 16 July 1940), while the inflamed British Calcutta press accused Bose of being a stooge of Hitler.

Shortly after the British allowed him to return to his home, on the night of 16 January 1941 Subhas and his young nephew, Sisir Kumar Bose, quietly left the family house in the family car. Bose passed through Moscow, and arrived in Berlin. Upon his visit the Germans decided to give Bose charge of a unit called Hitler's Indian Legion. This was a group of anti-colonial Indian prisoners of war captured by German forces in the western desert. Subhas Bose now had his army.

Meanwhile in India, politics spluttered on with its characteristic passion, despite the constraints of war. The country's natural conservatives pledged support, the Maharaja of Dumraon, for instance, put out a statement claiming that an unlikely group, which he called the 'Rajputs of Bengal', was wholeheartedly in support of the war effort. In Calcutta, by contrast, the embattled members of Subhas Bose's Forward Bloc continued their defiance. Members of the Bose family remained under surveillance following Subhas's escape the previous year. In early September 1941, one of Subhas's brothers, Satish Chandra, and his son were convicted by the Alipore district magistrate of kidnapping a police watcher.

Although Bose's supporters were quite clear of their direction, most nationalists were still uncertain of what stance to take. They continued to pledge their loyalty to the Allies while demanding self-rule from the British government. Mrs Sarojini Naidu, `the nightingale of India', expressed her admiration for the British people `from Mr Winston Churchill down to the youngest child of Britain' (Leader Newspaper, Allahabad, 3 September 1941). M. R. Jayakar, from the Hindu right, said that India, should not have been drawn into the war, but now, with the Japanese in Thailand and the Italians in the Western Desert, it had no choice but to play its full part. The long-established pattern of Hindu-Muslim political rivalry seethed just beneath the surface. Both sides could see that there was something to be gained by being supportive of the war effort. The main Hindu organization, the Hindu Mahasabha, contemplated setting up a volunteer force to place at the service of the viceroy as a symbol of the resolution of the `Hindu nation'.

The Atlantic Charter, announced by Churchill and Roosevelt on 14 August, galvanized the nationalist imagination in India as it did in many parts of the world. The Charter proclaimed the right of all peoples to political liberty. But if the Allies were fighting for the self-determination of peoples in Europe, why was it that the right of self-determination was not extended to Europe's Asian colonies? Why, asked the Indian press. were more Indian officers not being enlisted?
It was quite obvious that Indians were essential to the war effort. The floodgates of competitive claims were opened up.
Representatives of the Sikhs pointed to the fact that hundreds of thousands of Sikhs were gallantly serving with the British armies. Why did they not have a reserved seat on the viceroy's Executive Council?  Leader Newspaper, Allahabad, 11 September 1941).

B. R. Ambedkar, leader of the `untouchables' or Harijans, argued that India's untouchables were doubly victims, once for their race and again for their caste (Leader, 13 September 1941).The viceroy should concede the right of unrestricted enlistment in the Indian army to untouchables, if the democratic pretensions of the Atlantic Charter were to mean anything. These, the poorest of the poor, were discriminated against in the army as in civilian life and were usually consigned to menial tasks as camp or hospital orderlies. Harijans, the `children of God', were endowed with fighting qualities like any other group, Ambedkar insisted.

The government of India needed to strike a rapid propaganda counterblow. To do this it chose the unlikely figure of Dr Percival Spear, the scholarly and bespectacled historian who after the war wrote the very popular Penguin History of India. Spear was an Anglican Christian who had worked in St Stephen's College, Delhi. Through his mentor, C. F. Andrews, an intimate associate of the Mahatma, Spear was in close touch with many moderate nationalists. He was now working for the information and propaganda branch of the government of India. In September, Spear published a series of articles in the Leader titled `Development of New Ideas through Danger and Suffering'. He warmed to his theme that Hitler was a blessing in disguise. The world, including India, would be redeemed through suffering. The Atlantic Charter was less important, he said, than the solemn promises made by the British on India's future. Those promises would be honoured, but only after India, that `deeply religious country', had joined the Allies to fight evil. (Dr Percival Spear, `The development of new ideas through danger and suffering', Leader, 23 September 1941.) This can have done little more than irritate Indian nationalists.

As the monsoon of 1941 slackened and petered out, India stood uneasily perched between peace and war. The Calcutta races went ahead with particular splendour that year. The Aga Khan had a fine stable of racehorses and the betting was fierce, almost in defiance of the threat of war. New films like Holiday in Bombay played at the picture houses alongside Gone with the Wind. European high society - went on as ever with whist and bridge at the hotels and a fine new chef at the Bengal Club. Soothing words were heard from high places. Du Cooper, a senior British minister, toured the region. In Singapore he stated that the Allies were `overwhelmingly superior' in the Pacific." The Japanese would never attack the Fortress City and bring down the wrath of the rest of the world on her head. He added, with rather greater prescience, that the East and the Pacific were soon destined to play a larger role in world affairs than the West and the Atlantic.
All the same, the Indian newspapers ruminated uneasily as the Japanese moved deeper into Indo-China and Thailand. Their concern was fed by stories and letters received from Indian communities stretched across the whole of Southeast and East Asia. `Japan is coming nearer', said a headline in the Leader. There were other straws in the wind. Indians looked with dismay on the politics of Burma. The ministry there had introduced a strict rice-control policy and Bengal in particular was dangerously dependent on Burmese rice imports. That same ministry was also moving to limit Indian immigration. Indians were outraged. They were ready to fight to defend Burma. They had `developed' Burma and now they were to be excluded. Yet much public comment continued to focus on the death of Rabindranath Tagore, the great novelist, poet, nationalist and first Asian winner of the Nobel prize for literature.
There was a palpable sense that an era was coming to its end.

While the Japanese end 1941, gave no thought to how they would defend the perimeter of the huge area they were intending to conquer, the British appeared equally unprepared. India was the only significant source of British military power in the East and Indian armies were to play a disproportionate role in the fighting in Burma and Malaya.

Yet as Eric Stokes, later historian of the Rai, who served with a mountain artillery regiment, reported that throughout the war India Command's fortnightly situation appreciations conventionally began with an account of operations on the North West Frontier in which British officers pursued shadowy mullahs over the hills and frustrated the plots of obscure tribal insurgents. Stokes felt that the Faqir of Ipi, a Muslim rebel and long-time thorn in the imperial flesh, seemed to loom as large in their minds as Tojo and Hitler even when the Japanese stood at the gates of India. (Eric Stokes to his sister, 21 May 1945, Stokes Papers, Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge.)

And although most of the officials who contributed to Dorman-Smith's academic seminar in Simla made the assumption that British prestige in the East would ultimately be restored, in the monsoon season of 1942 that seemed a forlorn hope.

In 1941, as the Imperial Japanese Army swept across Asia and the Pacific, no country seemed able to defend itself against its rapid and brutal aggression. China in particular was the target of increasing Japanese invasion and occupation until it no longer had any active seaports under its control. To give themselves an artery to trade with the outside world, more than 200,000 Chinese laboureres cut a 700 mile overland route - the Burma Road - from the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming to Lashio, Burma, in less than a year. Lashio was connected by rail to the Burmese port of Rangoon, and through this tenuous system the Chinese people were kept briefly supplied with goods from the outside world. But by early 1942, even the Burma Road was severed.

Another influence was the failure of Sir Stafford Cripps's mission to win over moderate Congressmen into a wartime government of Indian national unity under the British crown. As a high-minded and independent socialist, Cripps was quite close in many of his views to the thought of Jawaharlal Nehru and the more self-consciously modern of the leaders of the Indian National Congress."( ) Like Nehru, Cripps believed that the world's real divisions were not those of race and religion, but of class. Eventually, the working classes of the world would claim their inheritance, but in the meantime the war against fascism must be won. Churchill, of course, had little time for Indians and saw political debate with them as a waste of time. In the early months of 1942, more and more dependent on American aid and pressed by the British Labour Party and even the Chinese, Churchill, too, had to make some serious concessions. Cripps was sent to India to try to broker a deal. He arrived there on 22 March 1942, at the very moment that British Asia seemed finally to be foundering.

Cripps judged that Indian participation in the central executive bodies of the government of India should be greatly increased, and to all intents and purpose poses he was prepared to give India de facto dominion status, like Canada or Australia. With this the Americans agreed, informed by President Roosevelt's man, in Delhi, Colonel Louis Johnson, who arrived in India two weeks after Cripps and threw himself into the discussion. At first there seemed real hope of a settlement, but by 10 April negotiations were dead in the water.

Indian nationalists and some British radicals then and ever since have indicted Churchill's behind-the-curtain wrecking for its failure. Officials at the time blamed Congress for demanding too much. There was no question, they said, that the defence of British India could be handed over to a responsible Indian minister during the crisis of a world war. All other ministries could go to Indian representatives in a cabinet chaired by the viceroy, but the war ministry was not up for grabs. Muslims, for their part, blamed Congress for rejecting the deal because Leo Amery, the secretary of state for India, had apparently offered the Muslim League some kind of right to secede from the Indian Union, if not to form an actual `Pakistan', within this scheme. The most authoritative recent study has decisively disproved the `Churchill factor'." ( )Churchill, like the viceroy Linlithgow, hated the emerging deal, but he did not sabotage it at this point. The fundamental problem was simply lack of trust on both sides. The British had led the Congress up the garden path too often. Congress did not trust Cripps's private engagement to get rid of Linlithgow if a deal was struck. Nor did they trust the British to let Indian ministers get on with the job. They were understandably deeply uneasy with the veto over the whole process that Amery seemed to have given to the Muslim League. The British, for their part, simply did not believe that Indian ministers would have the will to win a war which many Indians believed was not in India's interests. On 6 April, while a dejected Cripps, his friendship with Nehru in tatters, was still in India, the first Japanese bombs were falling near Calcutta.

By this time the Congress rank and file was dangerously angry. The leadership still vacillated about whether or not to announce a full-scale campaign of civil disobedience. The British got hold of Congress Working Committee papers.96 These revealed agonized debates among different groups. Gandhi, who was not at the meeting, wanted to call on the British to leave immediately.

The Indians of the Japanese Empire followed these events anxiously. There were large meetings in Malaya, Medan, Shanghai and elsewhere to attack British treatment of Congress and the hypocrisy of the Atlantic Charter. And on 12 August 1942. an estimated 125,000 people gathered at Farrer Park in Singapore to hear Rash Behari Bose announce: `Mahatmaji, Nehru, Azad and other leaders are arrested. The real fight for Indian freedom has begun."( )

By that time of course all Europeans in Singapore (and many Chinese) had disappeared entirely from view. Early 1942 prisoners of war in Singapore, still had been seen on various works projects in the town. And the International Red Cross Committee received the first list of prisoners from Singapore only in November 1942. By May 1943 Australia had been notified of only 3,000, or one-seventh, of its POWs. The fate of the Japanese in India threw a shadow over the whole business, and the British believed, with some justification, that the ill-treatment of Allied prisoners of war was a reprisal for this. By December 1942, there were 2,115 Japanese internees, the vast majority from Singapore, in Purana Quila camp outside Delhi. They were housed in tents that gave little protection from the cold in winter, or from temperatures that rose to 12o degrees in summer. The Japanese government protested that the food and the cooking, washing and sanitation facilities were inadequate. The British dismissed this: the Japanese were `notoriously unable to cope with extremes of heat or cold'. (`Treatment of Japanese internees in India', 1z December 1942, F09,6/ 477, PRO.)`According to Asiatic standards', officials observed, the rations were `adequate for proper nourishment'.( R. N. Gilchrist to under secretary of state, Foreign Office, 19 October, 1942, ibid)

But the predominantly middle-class Japanese internees found them insufficient and unpalatable. By the end of 1942- the Indian government was `shocked' to discover that io6 of them had died (5 5 men, 42- women and 9 children), some of beriberi. This was higher than the 29 deaths amongst all European civilian internees in Changi in the same period.

By mid 1942, the Indian Independence League had at its conference in Bangkok in May 1942, taken the political initiative to unify the scattered leadership of the overseas Indians in East and Southeast Asia. Their dependence on the Japanese was vividly demonstrated by the Japanese having brought them together; an original conference on 28 March had been postponed because of a shortage of transport. (A. M. Nair, An Indian freedom fighter in Japan: memoirs o f A. M. Nair,New Delhi, 1985)

But at an Indian Independence League rally in Singapore’s Farrer Park in August, one of the platform speakers, the Singapore journalist K. P. K. Menon however was met with what he termed a “rising tide of uncontrolled anger sweeping over the large crowd”. This was because there was no speech in Tamil, the language of most of the Indian workers in Singapore and Malaya. He was forced to issue an embarrassing apology (in English) in the newspapers, and pledge his commitment to the Tamil language. Was the Indian Independence League, the Syonan Times asked, a mere ‘hot-air merchant association'? (Singapore Syonan Times, 14 July 1942-, 21 August 1942)

The Indian League also posed an acute dilemma for the Ceylonese community, who were concentrated in government employment or worked as clerks and managers. Although the Buddhist Ceylonese had been initially treated gently by the Japanese, the Ceylonese Tamils, who were predominantly Hindu, remained very exposed through their English-language education and status. The Bangkok conference had not mentioned the cause of Ceylonese independence.

 

Continue to Part 2: Assassination Orders

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