Hey Katju, here's why you are wrong on Subhas Bose

“If you disagree with me you should give your reasons, not abuse” is the most reasonable statement by far to have come from Markendya Katju in last 24 hours or so. He followed this up with a rant against Subhas Chandra Bose. “Subhas Chandra Bose was a Japanese agent.”

The former Supreme Court judge stated this and much more using his Twitter handle and Facebook account. And of course he marshaled his reasons for alleging so.

If "Netaji" was not a Japanese agent, why did he surrender when the Japanese surrendered? He should have carried on a guerilla war against the British.

If the Japanese had been victorious against the British, do you seriously think they would have granted independence to India? No, they would have made India a Japanese colony, and ruthlessly exploited and looted it.

Unknown to Justice Katju there is considerable data on record by way of statements of those who mattered, official records and sworn testimonies to prove that all his assumptions about Bose and his benefactor Japan are not correct. Here are the posers as Katju would put them, and their answers:

What was the nature of Japan-Bose relations?

In 1972, Bose’s military secretary colonel Mahboob Ahmed, then a senior ministry of external affairs official, in his deposition before the Khosla Commission stated the following:

There was a great deal of respect for Netaji for his personality, for his person, amongst the Japanese that we came across and his relation with the Japanese government was that of the two interests at that stage coinciding. That is to get the British out of India.

Was Bose a Japanese stooge?

The National Archive in Melbourne, Australia, has a file on Bose made up of formerly secret German-Japanese diplomatic communication intercepted by the Australian Navy. On 30 July 1943, Japanese Ambassador Hiroshi Oshima sent this account of his telling Adolf Hitler about Bose:

The Japanese government too, has absolute faith in him and is giving him carte blanche where India is concerned.

Please do not confuse carte blanche with the title of the James Bond novel by Jeffery Deaver. It’s a French word meaning “complete freedom to do something”. 

Was Japan interested in conquering India?

In a paper on Bose, eminent historian TR Sareen observed after studying the British records that it was just a myth propagated by the colonial British to enlist support of the Indian political parties during the war. “Interrogation of Japanese high officials confirmed that they had never contemplated the conquest of India.”

Looks like several Indians are still reeling under the propaganda unleashed in the 1940s.

Late Barun Sengupta, eminent journalist and a fighter for democracy during the Emergency, had a point when he said that if the Japanese had no respect for Bose, why was he tailed by their senior generals? "How often during the liberation war of Bangladesh, our Lt Gen JS Arora was moving about with the acting president of Bangladesh…or their prime minister?” he asked.

Lt Generanl Iwaichi Fujiwara, co-founder of the INA, told the Khosla Commission on oath in 1972 that “Netaji was highly respected by Japanese people”. In 1956 when first inquiry committee the government of ours had been compelled to form under pressure to find out the truth about Bose’s fate went to Japan, it was noted that “Netaji’s name was still a household word in Japan, and a great deal of interest was taken about him both by the public and the Press.”

Eventually, even the ministry of external affairs under the hostile Congress regimes came to hold the view that “India as the country of origin of Buddhism and Netaji and INA’s association with Japan during the war also invoke friendly feelings among a section of the Japanese society”.

This factor is one of the reasons for the current bonding between Japan and India.

Justice Katju thinks that Netaji did not serve the interests of the Indian people because he "served the interests of foreign powers". He is obviously in complete dark about the information on record proving, to borrow a term from the cricket arena, that "the man of the match" of the Indian freedom struggle, thanks to Japan, was Subhas Bose.

The dots are rather easy to connect now than ever in history:

As late as 1946, Mahatma Gandhi stated, “We shall be able to win freedom only through the principles the Congress has adopted for the past 30 years.” Gandhi’s own three top principles were “truth, ahimsa and brahmacharya”. The first two are well-espoused by the Gandhians, who rather not speak about the third for it is a blot on the Gandhian legacy.

No one knew India’s internal situation better in those days than the director, Intelligence Bureau. Sir Norman Smith noted in a secret report of November 1945 which was declassified in the 1970s: “The situation in respect of the Indian National Army is one which warrants disquiet. There has seldom been a matter which has attracted so much Indian public interest and, it is safe to say, sympathy… the threat to the security of the Indian Army is one which it would be unwise to ignore.”

Lt General SK Sinha, former Governor of Jammu & Kashmir and Assam, one of the only three Indian officers posted in the Directorate of Military Operations in New Delhi in 1946, recalled the following in 1976. “There was considerable sympathy for the INA within the Army... It is true that fears of another 1857 had begun to haunt the British in 1946.”

Agreeing with this contention were a number of British MPs who met British Prime Minister Clement Attlee in February 1946. “There are two alternative ways of meeting this common desire (a) that we should arrange to get out, (b) that we should wait to be driven out. In regard to (b), the loyalty of the Indian Army is open to question; the INA have become national heroes...” This minute too was declassified in the 1970s.

A most valuable light on the role of the INA was thrown by Bhimrao Ambedkar in February 1956, a few months before he passed away, in a tell-all interview to the BBC. “I don’t know how Mr Attlee suddenly agreed to give India independence... It seems to me from my own analysis that two things led the Labour party to take this decision: 1) The national army that was raised by Subhas Chandra Bose. The British had been ruling the country in the firm belief that whatever may happen in the country or whatever the politicians do, they will never be able to change the loyalty of soldiers. That was one prop on which they were carrying on the administration. And that was completely dashed to pieces.”

British historian Michael Edwardes fairly summed this up in his 1964 book, The Last Years of British India. “It slowly dawned upon the government of India that the backbone of the British rule, the Indian Army, might now no longer be trustworthy. The ghost of Subhas Bose, like Hamlet’s father, walked the battlements of the Red Fort (where the INA soldiers were being tried), and his suddenly amplified figure overawed the conference that was to lead to Independence.”

Lastly, this is as official as it gets. In strike contrast to the interpretations of the state historians and all those who cannot see beyond the Gandhi-Nehru combine, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, probably the best person to make such assessment given his unmatched track record in understanding national security, echoes the same views. 

Finally, Justice Katju wonders “why did Netaji surrender when the Japanese surrendered?” “He should have carried on a guerilla war against the British.”

Who says that Netaji surrendered? From all accounts, he had seen the end of war coming and Japan losing. So, he tried whatever he could to continue his struggle from different theaters. One of the plans on the table, before Bose disappeared, was that he would go "to Yunan, the headquarters of Mao Tse-tung, who would help him carry on his campaign against the British". This was according to the deposition of a close aide of his before the Khosla Commission. It is a matter of historical fact that Bose sent his diplomatic pointman Anand Mohan Sahay met Ho Chi Minh in 1945 to explore the same possibility.

But the option that evidently worked, or appeared to work, for Bose was seeking help from the Russians. So, among other things, Bose told Sahay “to contact the Russian ambassador” in Tokyo and later told him that “he had asked the Japanese Army authorities to arrange a passage for him to Russia via Manchuria”.

In 1990s a Russian researcher found in the KGB archive a letter Bose had written in October 1944 to that very Soviet ambassador — Yakov Alexandrovich Malik. Bose had written that he wanted “to pay a visit to Your Excellency and find the way through which your Government can help us for success of our struggle for freedom”.

In his deposition before the Justice MK Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry into Subhas Bose’s disappearance, the seniormost surviving INA veteran Colonel Pritam Singh stated in July 2002 that in 1945 he told Bose that his “surrendering would not serve any useful purpose”. 

Then Netaji told me that a contact had already been established with Russia and we should try to move towards that direction.

Whatever happened next is beyond the preview of this article as it relates to the complex issue of Bose’s disappearance which Justice Katju has not touched. Should he ever came around to doing that, he would find the following nugget coming from a British intelligence report (declassified in 1997) worth considering, for it was filed months after Bose had “died”:

At the same time the view that Russian officials are disclosing or alleging that Bose is in Moscow is supplied in a report received from Tehran. This states that Moradoff, the Russian vice consul-general, disclosed in March that Bose was in Russia where he was secretly organising a group of Russians and Indians to work on the same lines as the INA for the freedom of India.