Popular history had us all believe that it was because of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi that India is independent today. But the truth lies buried away deep, and purposely too, by those who find it difficult to digest

by  Koenraad Elst

General GD Bakshi is not just anyone. After retiring from the army, he became a well-known television face applying his military knowledge both to the contemporary political debate and to classical cultures, e.g. the strategic aspect of the Mahabharata war. Everyone in India knows the story that on his very first day in service, in 1971, he was called to fight in the Bangladesh war -- a Just War if ever there was one. It showed that sometimes, going to war is the lesser evil: in this case, it was the only practical way of stopping a Pakistani genocide that was making more victims per day than the whole Indian military intervention made.

Mahabharata For Strategists

It is at several conferences on the Mahabharata, the classic on the theme of Just War (Dharma Yuddha), that I first met the general. There, his cold strategic look at the story, was quite an eye-opener to historians like me, but a bit of a cold shower to more religious types.

For pious denouncers of arch-villain Duryodhana, whose refusal to give even five villages to the rival Pandava brothers counts as the proverbial example of unreasonableness, please consider the strategic angle. After their wedding with Panchala princess Draupadi, the Pandavas might well want the fusion of the Bharata kingdom with Panchala, meaning the conquest of the Bharata kingdom, and in that project, the five villages would acquire tactical value as offensive outposts.

Even Krishna, a common object of devotion, was not spared. As we know, Gandhari, mother of the slain Kaurava brothers, curses him as the real culprit of the war. After all, he as a prince of the Yadava tribe, egged the two sets of Bharata princes on to fight and massacre one another. Not surprisingly, it is the non-Bharatas who profit, with the throne of the Pandava capital Indraprastha falling to a Yadava prince, viz. Krishna's own grandson. So, though idealised and ultimately even divinised by the epic’s pious editors, Krishna may originally have merely been a calculating strategist mindful of the Yadava tribe’s self-interest. That, at least, is what naked strategic data suggests.

It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that regarding the independence struggle too, General Bakshi brings down a pious legend featuring a canonised saint.

Who Achieved Independence?

In the present volume, Bose or Gandhi, Who Got India her Freedom? (Knowledge World/KW Publications, Delhi 2019, ISBN 978-93-87324-67-1, 216 pp.), Bakshi takes on an important topic from recent history: what factor was decisive in achieving India’s Independence? The received wisdom, both in ‘Congress’ India and internationally, is that this historical achievement was the result of Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent agitation. But was it?

How do you wrest sovereignty over a subcontinent from a world power? The British-Indian empire was built on bluff and on the dividedness of the population against itself. This was not threatened by the initial Congress movement, which was just a talking shop of lawyers pleading for native interests within the British empire. By contrast, it had really been threatened by the Mutiny of 1857, when different communities rallied around the Sepoys (Sipahi, a native soldier in colonial service) and came together to revolt against the British. And this gives the gist of Bakshi’s narrative already away: the British were afraid of military revolt, particularly by the native mercenaries on whom they counted to uphold their imperial edifice, not of pious discourses and slogans.

However, the General does give the Mahatma a part of the honour. No doubt, the shift of Congress activity from lawyerly negotiations to agitation at the mass level was Gandhi’s achievement. He popularised the Freedom Movement. This is undeniable, but the point is: it is not what made the British decide to pack up and leave.

Look at it in more detail than is done in, for example, Richard Attenborough’s propaganda movie Gandhi. The Mahatma’s last campaign was not the camera-savvy Salt March or other events from before the Government of India Act 1935, the reform with which the British managed to re-normalise the situation and regain control over political developments. It was the Quit India movement started in August 1942, which was a failure in every respect.

First off, it was based on an assessment of the world situation that seemed plausible in 1942 but turned out to be wrong: that the Japanese would win the war and chase the British from India. In that event, India would be in a better position if it was an independent Asian nation rather than a British colony (though, what about the independent Republic of China?). Second, it created profound dissensions in Congress, which was mostly reluctant to embark upon this adventure.

Strategically, the British were at war and on the defensive, so they would not pull their punches in the repression of any “disloyal” agitation; and morally, many Congressmen such as Jawaharlal Nehru were on the British side in that war. Indeed, it is mostly Nehru’s speech against Quit India that made the British decide he was essentially “one of us”, so that they started treating him rather than Gandhi as their Congress contact.

Third, though intended to be non-violent, the movement soon lapsed into violence, depriving Gandhi of his moral high ground. Fourth, the British put the movement down brutally but efficiently. Fifth, the Congress leaders were imprisoned and neutralised while their rival Mohammed Ali Jinnah remained free to enlarge his influence. Sixth, when they were released, they were demoralised and had lost credibility.

Especially Gandhi, chiefly responsible for the movement, had been cut to size; he only regained his place in history by his martyrdom.

After the Japanese capitulation on 15 August 1945, the Freedom Movement as such was nowhere to be seen. Paul Johnson and other historians who have lapped up the official version, with the Mahatma as the main motor of decolonisation, write that if the British themselves hadn’t been kind enough to leave, it is unclear how Independence could have come about, as the native dynamic for it had petered out. But they have been tutored to be oblivious of the one factor that dramatically revived the Freedom Movement within weeks: the return (in chains) of the soldiers of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army (INA) or Azad Hind Fauj.

The INA

After the war had broken out on 3 September 1939, India’s politicians had to choose their camp. Jinnah’s Muslim League automatically sided with the British, and so did Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, mainly for tactical reasons: that way, numerous Hindu young men would get a military training and experience. The sympathies of the Congress largely lay with the British, but they fell out over a procedural matter: the Viceroy had declared war without first consulting with Congress, their partner in administering India’s partial self-rule. So, while its political rivals were earning British gratitude, they remained on the sidelines, never the best way to make the most of a war situation.

The Communists, meanwhile, opposed the “imperialist war”, citing the Soviet example on the “bourgeois democracies” France and Britain, rather than on Germany; it is only after the German attack on the Soviet Union that they did an about-turn, supporting what had become a “people’s war”.

One significant leader remained on his own: Subhas Chandra Bose, born in Cuttack in 1897. He belonged to the Congress’ Left wing, but had been ousted as Congress president by Gandhi. As a response, in 1939, he founded his own party, at first Intra-Congress, the Forward Bloc. It would remain in existence after the war and be part of the Communist-led alliance that governed West Bengal for decades.

In spite of being under house arrest in Kolkata, he fled to Afghanistan in January 1940, and thence to Moscow, where he hoped to get cooperation for military action against Britain. He was told that the Soviet Union was not at war with Britain, but their temporary ally Germany was.

Ideologically this did not pose a problem: Bose had always believed that India would need a few decades of dictatorship, which would administer the best elements from both Communism and Nazism (Mind you, this is my own addition to the background sketch. General Bakshi purposely leaves the ideological aspects out of his consideration: some readers might object to Bose’s ideological choices, yet that doesn’t alter his strategic role in forcing the transfer of power, the actual topic of this book). He had already lived in Austria intermittently in 1934-37 and even had a wife and baby daughter there. So, he was brought to Germany, where at once he could raise an Indian army with 3,000 Indians from among the British prisoners of war caught in Dunkirk, with the privilege of only fighting British enemy soldiers.

It is in Germany that Bose received the title Netaji from his men, “revered leader”, roughly the translation of Führer or Duce. It was in Hamburg, during the founding of the German-Indian Friendship Association, that his soldiers and well-wishers stood to attention for the first time for Jana Gana Mana as the national anthem.

While Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had humoured him with vague assurances of support, Bose’s meeting with Adolf Hitler was a cold shower. Hitler expressed his belief in the rightness of British (‘Aryan’) colonisation. When Japan entered the war in December 1941, and asked Germany for Bose after taking hundreds of thousands of Indian prisoners-of-war in Singapore, Germany transported him by submarine in early 1943, and he was now welcome to lead some 40,000 soldiers in the INA.

This force had already been founded by expatriate Indians, notably by Ras Behari Bose, but now it needed a credible leader, and Subhas Bose was the right man for the job.

Bakshi informs us cursorily that from abroad, Bose also did what he could to contribute to the struggle within India, including the Quit India movement. Alas, the delivery of arms and other material which he arranged for, was often sabotaged by unreliable agents, and remained without sizeable effect. His main claim to fame was and still is the INA.

Unfortunately, in military respect, the INA came too late on the scene. It never controlled more of India than the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and some border areas of the Northeast. When it seriously besieged the Northeastern cities of Imphal and Kohima, the momentum of the Japanese advances had passed, and the British-Indian army could take care of it. The INA still fought some battles against the British forces in Burma, but its historic chance in India had passed.