Who Got Us Our Freedom?

Who Got Us Our Freedom?

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.

This book therefore begins with a seminal and straightforward question—Who really got us our freedom? Was it the INA of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and his most credible threat of armed violence or was it Mahatma Gandhi and his methodology of Ahimsa, Non-violence and the mystical mumbo-jumbo of Satyagraha and soul force. What made us free—the Soft power of ahimsa or the Hard power of the INA?

These seminal questions therefore deal primarily with the issue of how India got its freedom. Was it because of the soft power of Ahimsa , non-violence and Satyagraha? Or was the use of force, the hard power employed by Netaji and his INA, instrumental in forcing the Britons to leave? These are seminal issues about the very how and why of nation state formation in India. Today, they deserve to be debated and discussed in detail. Where our nation state is headed depends a great deal on where we came from—how we came into being—what were the perspectives that shaped our outlook and institutions then? 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. India is a democracy where we have seen the phenomenon of court historians deliberately distorting history. Bipin Chandra’s book on India’s Freedom Struggle is a magnum opus that runs into over 600 pages. It devotes just one page and a half to Netaji and the INA. That is simply a quantitative indication of the level and extent of the deliberate distortions in emphasis that are being injected into our post-colonial narratives.

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.

Imperial Justice to Social Justice

How strong and pernicious was the influence of the Raj is borne out by the fact that the entire Constitution of India was more or less a faithful reprint of the British India Act of 1935. 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? Why Social Justice? Because this helped us to deftly replace the Colonial concept of “Imperial Justice,” with “Social Justice.” This entailed that the new rulers of independent India would forever have to be psychologically extrinsic to the native Indian milieu. Nehru was precisely such a brown-skinned Englishman—he was therefore supposedly beyond the thrall of the plethora of Indian religions, castes and creeds and races and languages. He was not really a Hindu. He was an agnostic. Because of being so very British in orientation, he was above and beyond the morass that was India and could dispense Social Justice between the various castes and creeds without fear or favour. Social Justice had deftly replaced Imperial Justice as the cornerstone of the constitution of the New Republic that had so deeply internalised the colonial narrative. 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.

Only the Nehru-Gandhi family was thereafter decreed fit to rule this chaotic mass of disparate people because the Nehru-Gandhi clan were so very British and so “propah!” They alone could dispense social justice instead of the imperial justice that the empire had ruthlessly enforced over the warring, squabbling castes and creeds of India. Thus the very foundation of this Republic was kept confined within the imperial constructs of the Raj. This Weltanschauung sadly reflects in the very Preamble of our constitution.

The British left but they left behind a set of WOGs (Western Oriented Gentlemen) who would forever be beholden to the Raj. These wogs would remain sadly oblivious to the delicious irony that wogs was also the second half of a British term called Golli-wog—a black Doll that was used as a racial term of contempt for the natives who put on airs of being British style gentlemen.

The British left behind a Civil bureaucracy and above all an Intelligence Bureau, many of whose servants retained a residual loyalty to the Raj. 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? These are seminal questions that must be asked and investigated. We must get our own history right. We must outgrow the shackles of psychological slavery and begin to think for ourselves as Indians.

The British left but they left behind a set of lackeys that have kept the nation psychologically enslaved and bound down by the Grand Narratives handed down to us by the empire.

This book therefore begins with a set of seminal and straightforward questions. Who really got us our Azadi? Who really made us free? Was it the INA of Bose and their threat of and actual use of armed violence, or was it the soft power of Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha and non- violence which really got us our freedom?

There is that popular lyric that sums it all up so neatly. It is part of the hagiography that has been so assiduously been built around the legacy of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. It says:

“De di hame azaadi bina kharag bina dhaal

Sabarmati ke sant tune kar diya kamaal.”

This translates into:

“O saint of Sabarmati You wrought a miracle

You gave us our freedom sans sword and shield.”

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. It is a disgraceful lie and patent untruth and you cannot attribute it to a saint who made a fetish of always speaking the truth. A nation that has Satyamev Jayate (Truth Alone Triumphs) as its motto cannot subscribe to such a narrative that is at such sharp variance with ground realities and the truth. 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. This happened in India’s period of the warring states when 16 Major States (Maha Janapdas) were constantly at war with one another for supremacy. This was just like in China of the period of warring kingdoms, when 6 major states were at constant war with one another. India’s historical strategic culture had emerged in that period of war and violence in the form of Kautilya’s Artha Shastra. It was hardly pacific in orientation and urged the ruler to be vijayadishu—a conquerer (who would constantly expand the size and power of his kingdom). 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.

Pacification of Military Cultures

After the Second World War, the Allies made a major effort to pacify the highly militaristic races of Germany and Japan. They had exhibited amazing fighting spirits and intense nationalism. 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.

Fortunately India was set free from this pacific outlook. The Nehruvian dispensation led India to a disastrous military defeat in the 1962 war with China. This traumatic defeat cured India emphatically of the Nehruvian disease of pacifism. The decade from 1960 to 1970 was the decade of militarisation for India. Just on the heels of the Chinese attack, the Pakistan military decided to inflict a coup de grace on a floundering pacific state. The rump state of Pakistan was one-fifth the size of India. However it had no baggage of abject pacifism. The Americans gifted it huge amounts of cutting edge military equipment and very soon its Army took charge by imposing Martial Law in Pakistan.

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.

This war was more or less a draw. It was Pakistan’s last chance to exploit India’s pacifism and defeat India militarily. India’s defence modernisation was now put in top gear and by 1971 this process had reached its peak with very generous support from the erstwhile Soviet Union. Resultantly, 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.

This is how a set of wars that were forced upon India impelled it to jettison the post-colonial legacy of pacifism. The fiction created by the empire had sustained this legacy of pacifism. It tried desperately to hide the true causes that had actually compelled the British to leave and tried to sustain the fiction of a non-violent struggle. No one is questioning here the transparent sincerity and dedication of Mahatma Gandhi and what he was able to achieve in terms of making the Indian independence movement a mass-based struggle. He was a saintly figure and truly believed in the need for Ahimsa. No one can ever doubt his transparent sincerity. No less a personage than Subhash Bose himself called Gandhi the “Father of the Nation.”

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.

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.

The enormous tragedy of it all is that even as the Raj was forced to recede, it broke up India into the antagonistic dominions of India and Pakistan. Even more it left behind a dispensation in New Delhi that was entirely anglophile in outlook and orientation and had in fact collaborated with the Raj in its last days.

Gandhi had surprised the British by launching the Quit India Movement in 1942. He had done it against the advice of Nehru and Azad and, in fact, against the opinion of the entire Congress Working Committee (CWC). The British were fighting a war and were in no mood to indulge the “naked Indian Fakir.” They mustered up some five divisions worth of white troops and crushed the Quit India Movement with ridiculous ease. Wartime censorship helped them to banish Gandhi and his freedom struggle from the newspaper headlines. Deprived of the oxygen of publicity, the Quit India Movement collapsed like a pack of cards. Virtually the entire Congress leadership was jailed. When Gandhi went on his customary fast, Churchill decreed that he should be allowed to die unsung. The British now began to rely far more on the highly manipulable Nehru than on Gandhi. Gandhi was finally released in 1944. He was truly broken in spirit. In his press statements he admitted as much.

The Push to Pacifism

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. Like Mao, Bose had wanted to have an INA that would be 3 million strong and a power to reckon with in Asia and the world. It is noteworthy that the PLA of China had actually reached a peak strength of a staggering 4.2 million men (after the Korean War). 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.) To overcome his legacy of violence , they had gone overboard in trying to promote pacifism. 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.

Very fortunately for India, the trauma of partition and the large-scale riots that followed, the Pakistani invasion of J&K and the need to liberate Hyderabad, underlined the inescapable need for military force in a Westphalian state system. Sardar Patel was a strong nationalist leader and a clear-headed realist who understood the need for the use of force in the affairs of state. It was Patel who undid the unholy mosaic of princely states left behind by the British and made India a viable territorial entity in the Westphalian sense. Unfortunately for India, Patel died much too soon after independence.

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.