Revolutionaries: The Other Story of How India Won Its Freedom

by Sanjeev Sanyal

When millions upon millions of voices roar out your name, And millions upon millions of swords rise up to defend you, Who says, Mother, that you are weak? —Extract from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Vande Mataram, as translated by the author

It is worth noting, in this context, that the revolutionaries were not attempting to take India back to a precolonial past but to establish a modern republic. In this sense, it was an entirely modern movement and distinct from earlier rebellions against the British.

When the Provisional Government of Free India was formed by Netaji in Singapore in 1943, the Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland was the only non-Axis premier to recognize it.

Indians had watched with admiration as Japan modernized itself after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, but its victory over Russia in 1905 was a big inspiration for the revolutionaries. This was the first time in two centuries that an Asian country had defeated a major European power. The last Asian to have done this was Martanda Varma of Travancore, who had defeated the Dutch at the Battle of Colachel in 1741.

The growth of communism in the 1930s happened due to a surprising factor: the systematic indoctrination of nationalist revolutionaries in jail by the British authorities.

British intelligence was deliberately trying to create a rift in the revolutionary movement, but it was a risky strategy. Despite the hold of British communists over the Indian movement, there was always the danger of creating a pathway for Russian influence. In the end, however, it paid back handsomely during the Second World War as the communists collaborated with the British against Gandhi’s Quit India Movement of 1942 as well as their former revolutionary colleagues.

The writer Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay mocked the Congress as a group of ‘beggars’ that had no connect with the wider population.14

Sayaji got his turn early—but he broke all the etiquette rules. First, he refused to wear the full regalia. Then he walked up to the dais and made a single perfunctory bow, before turning around and walking off, showing his back to the emperor. Sayaji was later forced to write a letter of apology, but his was a brave act of defiance in front of tens of thousands of people. No one who had witnessed the event was left in any doubt about what he had done. A witness recorded that Sayaji was laughing mockingly as he walked away from the throne.2 Motilal Nehru was also one of the witnesses and wrote disapprovingly to his son Jawaharlal, ‘I am sorry to say that the Gaekwad has fallen from the high pedestal he once occupied in public estimation.’

‘Our actual enemy is not some force exterior to ourselves, but our crying weakness, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our moribund sentimentalism.’

Aurobindo busied himself with the setting up of the National College in Calcutta as an alternative to the British- and missionary-controlled institutions. The college would evolve into today’s Jadavpur University. It opened in July 1906 with Aurobindo as its first principal.

‘I say that it is the Sanatana Dharma which for us is nationalism. This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatana Dharma, with it it moves, and with it it grows.’

One of the things Savarkar realized while in London was that the British were systematically rewriting Indian history in a way that bolstered their rule in India and reinforced the myth of white supremacy. A prime example of this manipulation was the narrative around the events of 1857, which tarred Indians as the villains. Savarkar decided to rectify this. In the author’s note in his book The Indian War of Independence 1857, he stated, ‘A nation that has no consciousness of its past has no future.’

The revolutionaries were very suspicious of Gandhi from the beginning. Indian Sociologist had been severely critical of Gandhi’s open support of the British against the Zulus during the Bambatha Rebellion of 1906 in South Africa. Thousands of Zulus would be massacred. These suspicions were reinforced by Gandhi’s active recruitment of Indian soldiers for the British cause during the First World War.

When the judge finally asked him if he wished to defend himself, Dhingra said that he merely wanted to read out a statement: I do not wish to say anything in defence of myself, but simply to prove the justice of my deed. As for myself, no English court of law has any authority to arrest and detain me in prison, or pass sentence of death on me. That is the reason I do not have any counsel to defend me. And I maintain that if it is patriotic in an Englishman to fight against the Germans if they were to occupy this country, it is much more justifiable in my case to fight against the English. I hold the English people responsible for the murder of 80 millions of the Indian people … Just as the Germans have no right to occupy this country, the English people have no right to occupy India…9

I admit, the other day, I attempted to shed English blood as a humble revenge for the inhuman hangings and deportations of patriotic Indian youths. In this attempt I have consulted none but my own conscience; I have conspired with none but my own duty. I believe that a nation held in bondage with the help of foreign bayonets is in a perpetual state of war. Since open battle is impossible for a disarmed race, I attacked by surprise; since guns were denied to me, I drew forth my pistol and fired. As a Hindu, I feel that a wrong done to my country is an insult to God. Poor in health and intellect, a son like myself has nothing to offer to the Mother but his own blood, and so I have sacrificed the same on her altar. Her cause is the cause of Shri Rama. Her service is the service of Sri Krishna. This War of Independence will continue between India and England so long as the Hindu and the English races last (if this present unnatural relation does not cease) … Vande Mataram.10

last hymn of the Rig Veda, which ends with the following lines: Common your resolve, common your hearts; Let your thoughts be common, and together may you succeed.

The name ‘Andaman’ derives from the Malay pronunciation of ‘Hanuman’, the monkey hero of the epic Ramayana.

The warders, of course, made use of sticks and whips to ensure compliance. However, if they wanted to break a mentally strong prisoner, they used fetters. One form was a crossbar fetter, which involved an iron bar between the ankles that held the legs apart. The prisoner would then have to walk, sleep and do his tasks with his legs stretched apart. Another form was an iron bar that hung from the waist and was riveted to the prisoner’s feet. This prevented the prisoner from bending his leg. In both cases, the prisoner would be left in fetters for months and, after a while, would find it painful to do even small routine tasks.

Bismil and/or Sanyal were making a distinction between the use of targeted violence as resistance and the use of indiscriminate violence to spread fear or an ideology. This was neither violence for the sake of violence, nor was it hatred of the British as a people. This is why Indian revolutionaries never carried out the equivalent of the Beslan school massacre of 2004, despite the fact that there were tens of thousands of British children in India during this period. A large number of European businessmen, teachers, engineers, artists and other civilians continued to live in India largely unmolested; even wives of senior officials were almost never targeted. Therefore, their self-image was similar to that of members of the French Resistance under Nazi occupation.

Even the ‘Left–Right’ dichotomy was often seen as one between radicals and gradualists. This explains why Subhas Chandra Bose would write of Tilak and Aurobindo Ghosh as belonging to the Left!30 Note that the fluid use of these terms was not restricted to India—the Nazis are usually depicted today as the far Right, but they considered themselves socialists, and the full form of the Nazi party is National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Thus, one needs to be careful when imposing today’s ideological lens to the use of these terms in an earlier era.

Unsure of what to do next, he decided to go to California in the hope of joining the Ghadarite community. He also changed his name to M.N. Roy in the hope of throwing British intelligence off his scent. Here he met and married Evelyn Trent, a graduate student at Stanford University with a passion for radical politics. The United States joined the war in 1917, and it immediately became a dangerous place for Indians with revolutionary links. So Roy and his wife escaped to Mexico. The couple was soon part of a circle of ultra-Left radicals, which included several American draft dodgers. This is how Roy met Mikhail Borodin, who had been sent by Moscow as the emissary of the Communist International. They became close friends and together founded the Communist Party of Mexico in 1919. In this way, a fugitive from India became the father of Mexican communism!

Roy impressed Lenin and was given access to the top Soviet leadership. He was then sent to Tashkent with orders to set up a Marxist indoctrination school for Indians. There were several Indian activists who had sought refuge in the Soviet Union after the Turko-German alliance had surrendered. Lenin wanted to use them to create a group steeped in Bolshevik ideas, which could be deployed to pressure the British in India when necessary. This is how the Communist Party of India was founded in Tashkent on 17 October 1920.

Roy’s training school for Indians in Tashkent was soon dominated by these Islamic radicals. If this Marxist–Islamist mix looked complicated, it became even more so when Enver Pasha, the charismatic wartime leader of Turkey, escaped to Central Asia.

Plans of military operations in India began to look increasingly like the medieval Turkic invasions of the subcontinent. Therefore, Roy distanced himself from Pasha. This was just as well, as the Turkish leader shortly afterwards led a bloody revolt against his Russian hosts and was eventually hunted down and killed.10

A key conduit for foreign influences on the CPI was the Communist Party of Great Britain, and specifically a nebulous activist Rajani Palme-Dutt. He was born in Cambridge, England, to an Indian doctor and a Swedish mother (who was the grand-aunt of future Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme).

Gandhi did not attend Tripuri, but his Loyalists had come prepared to disrupt the president’s agenda. At the outset, Govind Vallabh Pant stood up and proposed a resolution to ‘request the President to nominate the Working Committee in accordance with the wishes of Gandhiji’.27 This was followed by a heated debate. Subhas’s supporters pointed out that it was unfair to ask an elected president to select his team based entirely on the wishes of a person who was not present and was not even formally a member of the INC. In many ways, this was like a repeat of the unseemly spat between the Nationalists and the Loyalists a generation earlier.

Britain and the United States issued the Atlantic Charter in August 1941, which declared that: ‘They respect the right of all people to choose the form of Government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-Government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.’10 Indians were aware that President Roosevelt had been pushing the British to make concessions to the colonies, but this declaration made it concrete. All hope was dashed, however, when Churchill clarified a few weeks later in the House of Commons that the Atlantic Charter did not apply to India. This was blatant hypocrisy and caused a breakdown of trust.

Although the legion and the Free India Centre would have little impact on the course of the war, they had a lasting impact on Independent India. It was here that Subhas decided on Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana as the national anthem. It was also here that the common Indian greeting ‘Jai Hind!’ was coined, and where Subhas came to be known as ‘Netaji’.

The government bureaucracy was so focused on maintaining the scorched-earth policy that it went out of its way to withhold help, including that which would have been triggered by its own Famine Code of 1883.

In a caustic speech, Dr Nalinaksha Sanyal pointed out that even when government rules required food stocks to be released, the bureaucrats made sure that there were no bullock carts and workers to help move them.32 This is why it is more than fair to state that the Bengal Famine of 1943 was deliberate and man-made.

Prime Minister Churchill was more direct about what he thought of Indians in general and Hindus in particular: ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’

One of the least discussed aspects of the Allied war effort was the officially sanctioned brothels in the rapidly proliferating army camps in eastern India. The colonial establishment used the easy availability of starving girls to cheaply stock these brothels. A survey of 30,000 women serving in military camps in Chittagong in 1944, supposedly to dig trenches and build runways, found that 90 per cent suffered from venereal diseases.35 Much has been written about ‘comfort women’ used by the Japanese army during this period, but almost none about how Allied forces did the same thing in India.

Despite wartime censorship, Subhas Bose learnt of the famine raging in his home province in mid-1943. He immediately conferred with Japanese officials and Burmese leaders, and offered to send a large shipment of rice from Burma. The British rejected the offer, possibly because it would have further increased Bose’s popularity. Nevertheless, it should be noted that when a similar famine situation had arisen in occupied Greece in 1941, the Germans had permitted humanitarian agencies to bring in food consignments. It is remembered as an example of Allied–Axis cooperation during the war. In contrast, the War Cabinet even turned down offers of help from Australia on the grounds that it would divert critical shipping.

The reason for the callous behaviour of the British was not just preoccupation with the war or even Churchill’s personal prejudices. It must be recognized that racist views had deep roots in the British colonial establishment. If one reads the views of Churchill’s key scientific adviser Professor Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), it is difficult to distinguish them from those of the Nazis. He not only believed in human eugenics, but was a strong advocate of...

On 21 October 1943, a large IIL meeting was called at the Cathay Theatre, where Subhas Bose announced the formation of the Provisional Government of Free India (Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind). Subhas Chandra Bose was sworn in as the head of state and premier; Rashbehari was given the title of supreme adviser. None of the witnesses would have been in any doubt that this was a historic moment. Within days, the provisional government was recognized by Japan, Germany, Italy, Croatia, Thailand, Burma, the Philippines and Manchukuo. President Eamon de Valera of the Irish Free State also sent a personal note of congratulations to Subhas. Before the end of the month, the Japanese government had handed over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to the provisional government.

Thus, the Provisional Government of Free India now had international recognition, an army and de jure control over territory. It would later issue its own currency. Unlike the provisional government set up in Kabul in the previous war, this one had acquired all the attributes of a legitimate state. As we shall see, this was an important argument put forward at the post-war trials.

Subhas visited the Cellular Jail in Port Blair in December. At a press conference, he explained the significance of his visit: ‘Like the Bastille in Paris, which was liberated first during the French Revolution, setting free political prisoners, the Andamans, where our patriots suffered much, is the first to be liberated in India’s fight for Independence.’39

The Allies were arming the Bengali-speaking Muslims, while the Japanese were arming the Burmese Buddhists called ‘Maghs’.40 Extreme brutalities were carried out by both sides (this is the origin of the Rohingya problem that festers to this date).