On the 15th of August this year, India will be celebrating the 79th anniversary of her independence from British imperialism. It is a day for celebrations, but also a day when we should recapitulate and remember the contribution of those who gave their lives so that India could be free from foreign yoke.
Time and again it has been propagated that India won her independence through non-violence and non-cooperation methods. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Since 1857, when the first war of independence was launched, there have been several movements — both non-violent and violent — that accompanied the freedom struggle. It would be well-nigh impossible to cover all these uprisings in this short introductory note. We have therefore chosen three of the most outstanding personalities in the Indian freedom movement, namely Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose. All three of them were basically Indian — they represented Indian cultural tradition. A study of these three personalities in effect will result in the study of the entire Indian freedom movement. Tilak was a revolutionary, Gandhi a man of the masses, and Bose was a revolutionary as well as a man of the people.
Forcibly disarmed by the British after 1857 and subjected to terror and brutality, the Indian people lay prostrate for a while — but with the birth of the Indian National Congress in 1885, there came a new awakening. From 1885 until the end of the First World War, the Indian people, in their endeavour to recover their lost liberty, tried all possible methods: agitation and propaganda, boycott of British goods, sabotage and finally armed revolution. This was the time when Tilak came to the forefront.
Aurobindo Ghosh, another prominent figure in the nationalist movement, wrote an article on Tilak in the paper Bande Mataram on 26 December 1906, prior to a session of the Indian National Congress. He wrote:
… from Mr. Tilak we expect no great speech and no sensational pronouncement, his very presence is more powerful than the greatest declamations; for it is not as an orator he stands prominent in spite of his clear incisive utterances, nor as a writer in spite of the immense influence which as the editor of the Kesari he exercises on the political ideal of Maharashtra, but as the man who knows what has to be done and does it, knows what has to be organised and organises it, knows what has to be resisted and resists it. He is pre-eminently the man who acts, and action is to be the note of our future political energies.
The First World War ended in 1918. In 1919 there was the massacre in Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. In 1920 India stood at one of the cross-roads of history. Politics of constitutional agitation was discredited. Armed revolution for India’s independence was impossible. After his long imprisonment in a Burmese prison, Tilak died. India needed a new leader and a new weapon of struggle.
It is at this historic moment that Mahatma Gandhi emerged with his weapon of non-violent non-cooperation. For the first time in Indian history, Gandhi was able to draw vast masses of the Indian people into the freedom struggle. No political leader anywhere in the world has ever practised passive resistance on so vast a scale. What Tolstoy preached, Gandhi applied to the politics of our country. He therefore emerged as the undisputed leader of the Indian people. Undoubtedly, his greatest contribution was to arouse in the minds of the masses the craving for freedom from British imperialism.
But Gandhi’s movement had serious limitations. Despite three civil disobedience movements, Gandhi was not able to affect the loyalty of the British Indian Army to the British ruling power. It is only when Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army (INA) under his leadership launched their final onslaught on British imperialism at the Indo-Burma frontier that the British Empire in India was shaken to its very foundations.
On 21 October 1943, the Provisional Government of Azad Hind (Free India) was founded in Singapore, with Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose as the Supreme Commander of the Indian National Army and the first Prime Minister of the Government of Free and United India in exile. Thereafter, the Azad Hind Government declared war on the British and American governments. We should not forget that the Japanese Armed Forces joined the Indian National Army to fight against the mighty Allied Forces. Colonel Shaukat Ali Malik hoisted the Tricolour on Indian soil in Moirang on 14 April 1944, after pushing back the British Indian Army. But soon thereafter, due to superior Allied air power and the onset of the monsoon, the INA and the Japanese Armed Forces had to retreat, suffering heavy casualties.
They suffered a military defeat, but ultimately it was the fight of the Indian National Army and the subsequent trial of INA officers in the Red Fort in Delhi that destroyed the loyalty of the British Indian Army towards the British Government in India. The court-martial of the three INA officers — Major General Shah Nawaz Khan, Colonel Prem Kumar Sahgal and Colonel Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon — created havoc with the Armed Forces as well as the people of India. There was uprising in the British Indian Army, mutiny in the Naval forces and revolt in the Air Force.
Bhula Bhai Desai, in the opening of his defence address at the first INA trial, said:
The honour and the law of the Indian National Army are on trial before this Court. What is now on trial before the Court is the right to wage war with immunity on the part of a subject race for their liberation.
Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck wrote to Prime Minister Attlee that the sympathy of the Indian officers and soldiers in the British Indian Armed Forces was now on the side of the Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose. Britain had to leave India as they no longer had the military power to rule India.
Col. G. S. Dhillon, in his memoirs, included the following lines written to him by Netaji:
Whatever happens to us individually in the course of this heroic struggle, there is no power on earth that can keep India enslaved any longer. Whether we live and work or whether we die fighting, we must, under all circumstances, have complete confidence that the cause for which we are striving is bound to triumph. It is the finger of God that is pointing the way towards India’s freedom. We have only to do our duty and to pay the price of India’s liberty. Our hearts are with you and with all who are with you in the present struggle, which is paving the way to our national salvation. Please convey my warmest greetings to all the officers and men under you and accept the same yourself.
Jai Hind. Subhas Chandra Bose.
Dhillon added: “The letter was worth more than a reinforcement of a hundred guns. It did put a new life into me and into all those who were with me. It is human to be appreciated and human to appreciate.”
Jai Hind.