A contrarian view of Independence

Bose or Gandhi: Who Got India Her Freedom 
Maj Gen GD Bakshi (retd) 
KV Publishers Pvt Ltd 
216 Pages

Major Gen GD Bakshi (retd) is on the wrong side of history when he proposes that it was Subhash Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army (INA) who got India independence and not the combination of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru along with the Congress.

Such a thesis goes against conventional historical wisdom and the narratives propounded by historians of India's nationalist movement, indeed by historical writings anywhere in the world.

Yet, Bakshi's narrative, despite not being a professional historian's, makes for a good read. It is one straight from the heart – without beating around the bush. For the popular TV channel guest, historical nuances count for little. But in doing what he does, he attempts to challenge a few shibboleths.

For Bakshi, British posturing, which cleverly portrayed Gandhi and Congress-led disobedience and ahimsa as the tool that they were afraid of, were basically fig leaves. The 1847 mutiny was a watershed and the British realised that they could only stay on in India if they had the support of the British Indian Army.

Bose and his INA did a lot to shake that faith and the ability of the British to stay on in India. Of the INA's overall strength of 60,000 soldiers, nearly 26,000 laid down their lives in an effort to rid India of the British, albeit unsuccessfully. But their sacrifices did not go in vain. The British left, according to Bakshi, because of the military and hard power challenge of the INA and its ability to instigate armed rebellion among 2.5 million well-trained men of the British Indian Army, who had been demobilised after the Second World War.

"If they had rebelled in mass, the battle-weary British were simply in no state to deal with such an armed rebellion. The ghost of the INA was capable of initiating precisely such an armed rebellion. That is what made the British quit," asserts Bakshi, quoting copiously from the Transfer of Power documents from the British archives.

Bose or Gandhi: Who Got India Her Freedom (left); and Major Gen GD Bakshi (retd)

The Kargil War veteran argues that the British were perfectly capable of dealing with Gandhi's and the Congress's non-violent movement, as they proved during the Quit India Movement in 1942. The British, then fighting the Second World War, were in no mood to indulge the 'naked Indian fakir'. They mustered up five divisions 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," notes Bakshi.

It was only the possibility of large-scale violence by demobilised soldiers of the British sepoy army that discomfited the British, who did not want to get bogged down in a potential military standoff with its former soldiers. They quickly cut their costs and left the country. Apparently, the ghosts of 1857 and the spectre of a military revolt 90 years later, were bigger factors than Congress mumbo jumbo in compelling the British to leave India earlier.

In the writer's reckoning, "Bose had most astutely understood that the centre of the 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 unraveled, 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."

Then began the INA trials that inflamed national passions. That was followed by the Indian Naval Mutiny and the revolt by officers of the Royal Indian Air Force in 1946, and finally rebellion among the Indian Army signal units in Jabalpur. Both Lord Archibald Percival Wavell and then British Commander-in-Chief Claude Auchinleck, professional soldiers, signaled to their government in London that it was curtains for the British Empire in India. After much dithering, that was the way it turned out to be.