Bose with his enemy’s enemy

[1]

By Romain Hayes [2]

Rs 399

There is an abundance of literature on Subhas Chandra Bose apart from his collected works edited by Sisir and Sugata Bose. His most recent biography, His Majesty’s Opponent, by Sugata Bose, his grand nephew and Harvard historian, has been acclaimed as the finest so far.
Romain Hayes, an independent researcher, has specialised for several years on German foreign policy during the Second World War.

This is Hayes’ first book — a comparatively short, readable and carefully documented account of the period between April 1941 and February 1943 which charts, almost month by month, the events in the life of Subhas Chandra Bose in Germany. The book’s focus is on Bose’s efforts to seek the assistance of the Axis powers to overthrow the British imperialist regime from his country by military means. That was his singular aim.
Let us go back a couple of months to February 1941. A disillusioned and marginalised Bose, who till recently was the undisputed leader of his party, escapes house arrest in what was then called Calcutta, travels incognito across India, enters Afghanistan disguised as a Pathan, crosses into Soviet Russia and is rebuffed by the country whose support he seeks. He then changes disguise and enters Germany.

On April 3, 1941, as Bose climbs the steps of the German foreign office on the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, he is an Italian diplomat, Orlando Mazzotta, and this is where Hayes’ narrative begins. Besides chronicling the events of the two following years, he is also confronting the reader with a moral and ethical dilemma. How did one of India’s most progressive and popular leaders of the 1930s end up allying himself with the Nazis? Can such a contradiction be resolved? Perhaps not and neither does Hayes seek to answer the question. But he refuses to accept the simplistic notion that the Second World War was a conflict between the progressive Allied forces and the reactionary Axis powers. The very presence of Bose in Nazi Germany challenges such a notion.
When Bose arrived in Berlin in 1941, the tide of war was entirely in Germany’s favour. Rommel and his Afrika Korps were moving swiftly across the Libyan desert and the German Army had reached Yugoslavia and Greece, the last British bastions in Europe.

Before the outbreak of the war, Bose had visited Europe on several occasions as mayor of Calcutta and later to recuperate his health. He had been received by Mussolini with considerable warmth and the two men enjoyed a close relationship. Bose had expressed his appreciation for fascism in Italy and this was reflected in some of his writings of the time. Bose was not alone in his appreciation. In 1931, Mussolini had hailed Gandhi as a “genius and saint” and the latter in turn had been touched by Mussolini’s “passionate love for his people”. But, in his visits to Germany in the 1930s, Bose had been less successful in his attempts to tell Hitler to excise his disparaging comments about the Indian people in Mein Kampf.
In 1941, Bose’s agenda was different and the detailed plan that he submitted to the German foreign office had two key elements. First, Bose wanted Germany to declare India’s Independence and help set up a government in exile modelled on some of the European governments in London. The second and the more ambitious part of the plan was a full-scale attack on British India by Germany through Afghanistan, and he was convinced that the Indian people would rise up in revolt and thus hasten the destruction of the British Empire.
Bose was obviously not aware of the German plan for the invasion of Soviet Russia. In less than three months after his arrival in Germany the invasion would begin, deeply wounding his socialist sympathies.
Over the next few months, while the Germans dithered on the declaration of India’s Independence because of their own realpolitik, they encouraged Bose to launch his anti-British propaganda over the Free India Radio which functioned with considerable independence. Apart from the broadcasts, Bose was able to start the recruitment process for the Free India Legion from the Indian prisoners of war, particularly from those captured by Rommel in North Africa and the Free India Centre setup in Berlin began to attract expatriate Indian revolutionaries from all over Europe.
The significance of this book lies not so much in the author’s opinions as in his attempt to record Bose’s interactions with the German foreign office and the High Command. In the course of these two years, Bose would have to deal with three key figures of the Nazi regime — Joachim von Ribbentrop, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, a triumvirate of evil. And finally, Adolf Hitler himself.

Bose met most frequently with Ribbentrop, Germany’s foreign minister but was greatly frustrated by the latter’s continuous procrastination on the declaration of India’s Independence and his tendency “to brush off all such responsibility onto… the High Command”.
As Bose’s anti-British propaganda on Free India Radio began to receive international attention, Goebbels, the propaganda minister, was delighted, so much so that he invited the entire staff of the Free India Centre to a tea party at the ministry of public enlightenment and propaganda(!). By the time Bose met Himmler in July 1942, the course of war had begun to change and it was Japan, the third Axis power, which was sweeping across Asia; the German war machine would soon be halted at Stalingrad; and Bose had already started planning his departure for Southeast Asia.
Hayes recounts that Himmler asked Bose how warrior tribes like the Rajputs, Marathas and Sikhs had allowed themselves to become enslaved by the British. According to Hayes, Bose remained silent as he did not have an adequate explanation to offer. This reviewer would prefer to believe that Bose chose not to reply to such a stupid, racist question. Of Hitler’s meeting with Bose in May 1942, Hayes has little of substance to add except that they addressed each other as “old revolutionaries”. Hitler skirted the issue of the declaration of India’s Independence by saying that he was a soldier and not a politician and asked Bose to reach an agreement with Japan quickly so that no “psychological mistakes” would be made. What he meant by “psychological mistakes” Hitler did not explain.
Among the several people mentioned by Hayes who impacted Bose’s stay in Germany, two men deserve mention here. First, Mohammad Iqbal Shedai, the Indian revolutionary based in Italy, who tried his utmost to oust Bose from his position as the foremost Indian nationalist in Europe, and the other, Bhagat Ram Talwar, the Forward Bloc leader and Bose’s trusted follower in Afghanistan, who was actually a Soviet spy and reported back to the Allies every move that the Germans planned for the area.
Romain Hayes ends his narrative as Subhas Chandra Bose boards a German submarine on his way to Southeast Asia in early 1943, his once sullied political reputation now “burnished”. He had earned the respect of the German leadership by his single-minded pursuit of his goal conducted with the dignity of a statesman and, in the circumstances, which converged with their political objectives. By the time Bose arrived in Southeast Asia, his reputation had acquired “near mythical proportion and Indian mass adulation was the reaction to his arrival”.
The period between Bose’s arrival in Southeast Asia in May 1943 and his boarding a Japanese military aircraft at Taipei on August 18, 1945, is not part of Hayes’ narrative, but it is worth remembering, on the eve of Independence Day, the last few lines of his message to the Indian people on August 15, 1945, “There is no power on earth that can keep India enslaved. India shall be free and before long. Jai Hind.”

Aloke Roy Chowdhury can be contacted at alokeroy@hotmail.com [3]