1946 Naval Uprising: How honouring Netaji Bose marks a paradigm shift in India’s Independence narrative

The moment the hologram image of Subhas Chandra Bose lit up at the most important boulevard and location of modern India, tears were flowing in the eyes of millions of Indians. I was just one among millions that evening. We were finally doing justice to the man the world had been so unfair to.

Most of my childhood in the 1970s-80s was spent in Lutyens’ Delhi and my introduction to our great nation’s history came during the morning walks on the weekends at the India Gate with my father while living in the capital city of the world’s largest democracy. My father had an astounding memory filled with dates, events, and facts from history some of which he had witnessed himself. His amazing storytelling style captivated me and formed my understanding of Indian history and our family’s past in matters of governance over centuries from the Mauryas to the Mughals and Marathas.

My father often narrated the mind-blowing story of Azad Hind Fauj (INA) and how Subhas Chandra Bose finally got us our freedom. My father had volunteered in the Quit India movement as a teenager and knew General Shahnawaz Khan of INA. He believed Bose’s sacrifice had no parallel. On many occasions, as we stood at the empty canopy next to the India Gate in an unwavering voice, he told me that of all the giants of India’s freedom movement none other than Bose belonged there. We left it at that. Decades later while working in the movie business in Hollywood, California, I took a deep plunge into the lives of three Indians, my father reverently spoke about, Har Dayal, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Vallabhbhai Patel. Though I did not realise it back then, it was the beginning of a life-transforming journey.

Har Dayal (1884-1939), the cultured Dilliwallah who spoke, wrote, and taught in 17 languages was possibly one of the most brilliant persons to have walked on planet Earth. Profoundly disturbed by the incidents of the Ghadr of 1857, he rejected the opportunity to be an ICS officer and dramatically resigned from his hard-won Oxford scholarships even after forming the Majlis debating society. His Professors at Oxford who had evaluated his tutorials and noted, ‘We can’t improve upon Har Dayal, he writes better than us’ were aghast. No student had ever walked away from Oxford scholarships. Next, the man born with the ‘Indian dimaag’ while teaching at Stanford became the kingpin in the revolutionary movement of India and the architect of the famed Ghadr movement in California (1911-1919) that demanded complete freedom for India in 1913.

Har Dayal’s political startup in California impacted India for its inclusive nature by including women and men from all religions, castes, and regions into its fold. Har Dayal’s name and fame across India, Europe, and America led to a Paramount movie based on his life in the 1920s, and novels by Jack London and Somerset Maugham immortalised him as a character. The life and accomplishments of that ‘presiding genius’ (named so Michael O’Dwyer) who secretly inspired Indians for the armed takeover of their motherland and then to invade Britain to teach the natives Sanskrit was systematically destroyed by the British Intelligence. MI6 was created by Hukumat-i-Britannia for just this particular purpose. Then for reasons best known to the historians of the colonial and post-colonial period Har Dayal was wiped out from the pages of world history.

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Nevertheless, in the global academic circles and top American Universities, this uniquely gifted man who held a Doctorate from London (SOAS now) is still remembered as the foremost authority on Buddhism and his body of work is proof of that unparalleled intellectual prowess that was light years ahead of everyone else. After living on four continents in exile, he died on a cold night in March 1939 in Philadelphia far away from his motherland and the family he loved but by that time the baton had been passed to a man who would eventually liberate India.

Subhas Chandra Bose needs no introduction in India. The Cambridge-educated firebrand resigned from the ICS in 1920 to free his motherland from alien rulers. He selflessly devoted all his energy and years to that singular objective. Appointed as the youngest president of the Congress party in 1938 he was unethically ousted the following year in March 1939 even though he had won the first and last internal election. This forced him to follow through independently on his dynamic strategy of ‘blood and freedom’ rather than the ‘ahimsa and satyagraha’ approach for the independence movement.

Traversing through the planet during World War II, with his existence under constant threat he reached the defining moment of his life as the leader of the Azad Hind Fauj (INA) that met the Hukumat-i-Britannia on the battlefields of Kohima, Imphal, and Mount Popa. His Azad Hind Fauj with Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Parsi soldiers and even a regiment of women warriors marched to the tune of ‘Kadam Kadam Badhaye ja’ and their war cry was ‘Delhi Chalo’.

Bose dreamt of unfurling the national flag at the Red Fort in Delhi, conducting a victory parade of the INA and connecting the dots of the Ghadr of 1857 and the Ghadr Party. This was finally accomplished after the INA trials in 1945-46. The trial of Capt Prem Sehgal, Capt Shahnawaz Khan and Lt Gurbaksh Singh Dhillion of the INA representing the three faiths of India mesmerised India. The nation came out together to defend the three men and demand their immediate release. Even the two bitter rivals Muslim League and Congress were on the same side of the fence as far as INA was concerned thereby destroying the ‘Divide et Impera’ policy of the British.

The nationalists within the British Indian Army influenced by the charismatic Bose and his INA chose ‘Country’ over the ‘King’ and destabilised the British Empire. This landmark trial not only ended the misrule of the Hukumat-i-Britannia in India — it wrecked the despotic British Empire worldwide.

Bose’s foremost adversary General Claude Auchinleck, C-in-C of the British Indian Army called him a ‘genuine patriot’ and wrote in 1946, “Subhas Chandra Bose acquired a tremendous influence over them (British Indian Army) and that his personality must have been an exceedingly strong one.” At that moment, Subhas Chandra Bose with his nonsectarian approach, belief in gender equality, and economic equity became the most important leader of the multilayered Indian freedom movement and the most popular man of his era with all the other famous leaders acknowledging as much.

However, for the next 80 years, court historians in tandem with the massive British propaganda machinery fanatical tarnished the image of the greatest Indian nationalist as a misguided individual. They ignored the facts that his few meetings with the evil and racist Nazis had been absolute failures and he had reached a dead-end in Berlin in 1942. Yet the world was misled to believe that he was a collaborator of the Axis powers and possibly even a fascist. But the masterly legal defence presented by Bhulabhai Desai at the INA trials proves otherwise.

Subsequently, vested interests concocted thousands of weird stories about this incomparable man, and some are still in circulation. On closer examination of the data as extracted from the archives worldwide, the speeches of Bose on the Azad Hind Radio, and especially the words of Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar who attended the INA trials, the true picture emerges and squarely places him in the pantheon of the world’s greatest leaders as well as the liberator of India. The statue at the canopy next to the war memorial finally does him justice after seventy-five years. Without question, India is indebted to him.

In the post-World War II scenario, with India still under shackles, the Hukumat-i-Britannia dealing with the mutinous mood in the British Indian Armed forces and the communal virus dividing the nation, one man rose like a giant to adequately deal with the challenging situation. His name was Vallabhbhai Patel. A brilliant lawyer of Ahmedabad, who topped the exams at the Bar in London, Patel carved a name for himself as the iron man of India on the battlefields of Kheda and in organising the Salt March to Dandi. The chief lieutenant of Mahatma Gandhi for decades, Patel stepped aside to enable a younger man to be his boss and devoted the last five years of his life as the saviour of his motherland.

Even though the highest statue in the world is dedicated to his memory, Patel, the first Deputy Prime Minister of India has not been adequately appreciated for his contributions to the India story in the areas of foreign relations, military affairs, economic policy, internal security, civil service, constitutional matters, and the colossal time-bound tasks of evenly partitioning of India’s assets plus the successful integration of the princely states. The enormous strain of those trying times eventually crushed his health and we lost him on 15 December 1950 when we needed him for another decade at least. The political leadership of that time strategically removed and sidelined all the brilliant civil servants who worked closely with Patel including VP Menon, HM Patel, ICS, and Vidhya Shankar, ICS. Patel’s family wisely remained away from the limelight. Nevertheless, it is universally agreed that if Vallabhbhai Patel was not at the helm of affairs at that crucial time of Indian history there would be no India to talk about today.

After having spent over two and a half decades globally researching the lives of three exceptional men my biographies of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Har Dayal are out there for you to read and my book on life and times of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel is slowly reaching its destination. The key takeaways from these exceptional and inspirational lives for us and the next generation are “Hard Work, Merit, Honesty, Ethics and Patriotism”.

I am delighted that on Republic Day 2022 we witnessed a paradigm shift in our nation’s narrative from colonial (pre-1947) to post-colonial (post-1947) to the real Bharat or Hindustani narrative emerging now in 2022 with our own heroes to take us forward towards world leadership. At this stage we must have in our thoughts the lives of these three world-class Indians Har Dayal, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Vallabhbhai Patel who made us who we are.

The writer is the author ‘Subhas Chandra Bose: The Man India Missed the Most’ (2017), ‘Har Dayal: The Great Indian Genius’ (2020) and ‘India on the World Stage’ (2021). ‘The Life and Times of Vallabhbhai Patel’ is coming soon. Views expressed are personal.

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