Gandhi was important, but so were Subhas Bose and Savarkar – Firstpost

In 1948, a year after Bharat gained Independence, R.C. Majumdar, the country’s foremost historian, submitted a proposal to the government to write an ‘authentic’ and ‘truthful’ history of the freedom struggle, starting with the Revolt of 1857. His letters to the Education Ministry of Bengal and also the Union Education Ministry went unheeded. A couple of years later, he wrote to Rajendra Prasad, the then President of the country, who “heartily took up the idea and wrote a very encouraging letter” to him. Maybe it was due to Dr Prasad’s intervention, the Ministry of Education, in 1952, appointed a Board of Editors.

Unfortunately, the Board of Editors was dissolved by the government on 31 December 1955. A year later, when the project was revived, Majumdar found himself removed from the Board without being informed and his place was given to a bureaucrat named Tara Chand.

Why was Bharat’s foremost historian treated so disdainfully? One finds the answer in Majumdar’s other book, History of the Freedom Movement in India, Volume 1. In its Preface, he writes: “The official history of the freedom movement starts with the premises that India lost independence only in the 18th century and had thus an experience of subjection to a foreign power for only two centuries. Real history, on the other hand, teaches us that the major part of India lost independence about five centuries before, and merely changed masters in the 18th century… Political exigencies gave rise to the slogan of Hindu–Muslim fraternity.”

As we see, Majumdar had shown the moral courage and intellectual integrity to not just stand up against the Nehruvian bluff on Hindu–Muslim unity, but also write matter-offactly that the two communities ‘lived in two watertight compartments’, with their distinct cultures and different mental and moral characteristics. Even more importantly, the historian threatened to take the lid off the Nehruvian myth that Bharat’s Independence was predominantly, if not solely, the handiwork of Gandhian ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha.

Majumdar writes: “A number of revolutionaries had joined the Non-Cooperation Movement of Gandhi, but were disillusioned after its suspension. Many of them had rejoined the revolutionary groups whose main object was to keep alive the spirit of violence leading to armed rebellion against the British for achieving independence… As a matter of fact, Gandhi fully realised the growing influence of revolutionary ideas over young men, and it is not without good reason that the revolutionaries claimed that they practically, though indirectly, forced Gandhi to renew the struggle for freedom, in 1930 and again in 1942; for he feared that otherwise he would lose the leadership of the country and the initiative would pass into the hands of the revolutionary young men, Gandhi himself admitted that one of his motives in undertaking non-violent Satyagraha or Civil Disobedience was to ward off the evils he apprehended from the growing strength of the revolutionary ideas. In other words, he regarded his movement as a safety-valve for youthful energy and patriotic ardour which would otherwise flow through a different channel of a violent kind.”

Majumdar makes three big points: one, the country’s Independence was not the handiwork of Gandhian ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha alone. Two, revolutionaries not just worked in their revolutionary silos but also under the overarching Gandhian cover to fight for freedom. The revolutionaries would form the backbone of a Gandhian movement, such as the Non-Cooperation Movement, and when Gandhi would call it off, they would do what they did best—openly go the revolutionary way! Three, more often than not, Gandhi would start a movement to contain the growth of revolutionary fervour—a sort of ‘safety-valve for youthful energy and patriotic ardour’ so that it didn’t ‘flow through a different channel of a violent kind’.

Also, those in the thick of things just before Independence saw Bharat’s freedom struggle differently. For them, Gandhi’s role in the freedom struggle was ‘m-i-n-i-m-a-l’, as former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee told Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court Justice P.B. Chakravartti, who was then Bengal’s acting governor as well, at the governor’s mansion in Kolkata in 1956, slowly chewing out the word to make an instant, dramatic impact. “The INA (Indian National Army) activities of Subhas Chandra Bose, which weakened the very foundation of the British empire in Bharat, and the RIN (Royal Indian Navy) mutiny which made the British realise that the armed forces could no longer be trusted to prop up the British,” Justice Chakravartti quoted Attlee as saying.

B.R. Ambedkar, too, reflected the same sentiment during his interview with BBC in 1955. He wondered, “I don’t know how Mr Attlee suddenly agreed to give Bharat Independence. That is a secret that he will disclose in his autobiography. None expected that he would do that?’ However, based on his ‘own analysis’, Ambedkar believed that the ‘national army… raised by Subhas Chandra Bose’ could be the reason.

Commander-in-Chief of British armed forces in the subcontinent, General Claude Auchinleck, too conceded on 24 November 1945, in his letter to Field Marshal Viscount Wavell, how “the present INA trials are agitating all sections of Indian public opinion deeply”. While saying that “any attempt to force the sentence would have led to chaos in the country at large and probably to mutiny and dissension in the army, culminating in its dissolution”, he also pointed at how the INA issue provided the Congress with “an excellent election cry”. An Intelligence Bureau report on 20 November 1946, too, admitted that “there has seldom been a matter which has attracted so much public interest and, it is safe to say, sympathy… this particular brand of sympathy cuts across communal barriers”.

The role of the Congress party and the government, however, was dubious on the INA issue. Anuj Dhar, in India’s Biggest Cover-Up, writes about Captain Hari Badhwar, a British Military Intelligence mole in the Congress. Captain Badhwar first joined the INA, then switched sides and finally gave evidence against the INA men during the Red Fort trials. “It is a great shame that Badhwar should have led a comfortable life as a general in free India”, writes Dhar, exposing the Congress’ duplicity that found problems with recruiting INA men in the army but had no such inhibitions with those who were in bed with the country’s enemies.

According to Dhar, it was Captain Badhwar’s internal report, highlighting overwhelming support among the masses for the INA, which encouraged the Congress to take up the Red Fort trials. Badhwar had sourced his information to Asaf Ali, a leading Congress Working Committee member who would later become free Bharat’s first ambassador to the United States. “This inflamed feeling forced the Congress to take the line it did”, Badhwar told one of his handlers in the British military.

Incidentally, in a private conversation in October 1946, Asaf Ali reportedly stated that his party ‘would lose much ground in the country’ unless it took up the INA case, while adding in the same breath that the INA men would be removed from the army and some of them might even be put ‘on trial’ if the Congress came to power.

Things turned out the same way as predicted by Asaf Ali. The Congress did publicly fight the INA trial case, for which Nehru donned his barrister gown after three decades to join the lawyers’ team led by Tej Bahadur Shapru and Bhulabhai Desai, but once it came to power, it removed all INA men from the services and even put some of them on trial.

The party, which was in the forefront in 1946, as per a New York Times report, ‘to build up Bose as the George Washington of India’, went on an overdrive post-Independence to wipe out his memory. Overnight, he became untouchable— someone not to be invoked, remembered and, worse, celebrated.

Bose wasn’t the only revolutionary to be ignored, targeted and even abused. In fact, if one has to choose one who ticked all the three boxes mentioned above, the name of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar will top the list. He was the foremost among revolutionaries who had already caught the nation’s imagination by the time Mahatma Gandhi was starting his political journey in Bharat. It is widely believed that Gandhi had Savarkar in mind when he wrote Hind Swaraj. Similarly, Savarkar’s 1923 treatise, Essentials of Hindutva, was an intellectual potshot at the Mahatma and his pacifist philosophy.

Savarkar and Gandhi share interesting similarities. Both spent significant times outside the subcontinent—Gandhi in Britain and South Africa, while Savarkar in Britain first and then over a decade in the dreaded Cellular Jail of the Andamans. They were both avowed Hindus, though their approach differed radically. In fact, Gandhi was far more orthodox and conservative than Savarkar. Both passionately favoured Hindi over other languages. Both wrote books in the same year, 1909, that were banned by the British: Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and Savarkar’s First War of Indian Independence on the 1857 uprising.

Vikram Sampath, the author of a two-volume Savarkar biography, writes in detail about the first time the two giants met. When Gandhi first reached out to meet Savarkar at London’s India House, the latter was busy cooking. He writes, “Savarkar asked him to first have a meal with them. Gandhi was horrified to see the Chitpavan Brahmin, Savarkar, cooking prawns. Being a staunch vegetarian, Gandhi refused to partake. Savarkar apparently mocked him: ‘If you cannot eat with us, how on earth are you going to work with us? Moreover, this is just boiled fish; while we want people who are ready to eat the British alive.’”

This was the beginning of the great rivalry, which intensified during Gandhi’s Khilafat Movement. Confined in the infamous Cellular Jail of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands at that time, Savarkar was outraged to see Gandhi playing with the Islamist fire in the name of Khilafat. The failure of the Khilafat Movement saw a series of communal clashes across the country, the worst being in Malabar where Gandhi’s ‘brave, God-fearing Moplahs’ unleashed a pogrom on Hindu Nairs in 1921.

Savarkar’s Hindutva was an answer to Gandhi’s Khilafat-kind of experiment. Also, as Sampath recounts, his sufferings and harsh experiences at the hands of Muslim prison staff and inmates at the Cellular Jail shaped his outlook. Yet, Savarkar remained a modernist and condemned ‘irrational’ views and practices, religious or otherwise. His views on 2Cs—caste and cow— might offend many who adore him today. But then he had a mind of his own. And he was uncompromising and unapologetic about it. Savarkar was Gandhi’s main rival, politically and intellectually. He was a Hindutva ideologue and yet he inspired noted communists like M.N. Roy and S.A. Dange; even Bhagat Singh was deeply influenced by a small English biography of Savarkar that he read in the Dwarkadas Library of Lahore.

Yet, post-Independence, Savarkar has been pushed to the margins of the mainstream freedom struggle discourse. Worse, he is viciously criticised and called names for his ‘mercy petitions’ from Cellular Jail to the British government.

Journalist–author Vaibhav Purandare writes in Savarkar: The True Story of the Father of Hindutva that to cry ‘cowardice’ and ‘surrender’, to call him a ‘traitor’, or to say he was ‘begging for mercy from the British while Gandhi was sleeping on the dirt floor of a jail’ is unwarranted and puerile. He writes: “He (Savarkar) was put into solitary confinement for long stretches of time. He was deprived of food and water and made to do hard labour; he would faint from exhaustion but still wasn’t given reprieve from work. He was chained to a wall, hands extended above his head, for hours at a stretch on consecutive days. During these spells, he was not even allowed to go to the bathroom to relieve himself and had to stand in his own filth chained to the wall.”

Sampath delves in detail about the mercy petition issue, and reaches two conclusions: one, it was quite normal in those days to write such petitions to the British government; and two, the move on Savarkar’s part was tactical. He believed that a freedom fighter was of better use outside the prison rather than inside. Sampath refers to Savarkar’s own memoir, My Transportation for Life, written just a few years after his release in 1924, wherein he disapproved of “the non-violent mode of struggle that was being propagated by Gandhi”. This stands in sharp contrast to his petitions where he declared his “support for constitutionalism, nonviolence, and reforms”. Explains Sampath, “These seemingly contradicting stands lead one to believe that the petitions were a mere tactical ruse to secure a release and therefore plan a future strategy. Nothing substantial could be achieved by being holed up in jail.” Even the British saw it that way. They kept a close, watchful eye on Savarkar even a decade after his release from the jail.

Worse was still in store for him when the country got Independence: Savarkar was implicated in the Gandhi assassination case, the ridiculousness of which was exposed by Ambedkar himself when he confided in Savarkar’s lawyer saying there was no case against the Hindutva leader and the latter would go scot-free. He also said that the orders to implicate Savarkar had come from the top. Ambedkar was then the Union law minister, the first to occupy that post in independent Bharat. If one thought the political divide over Savarkar would go away with the deepening of democracy in the country, and the freedom fighter would get his due, then it wasn’t to be the case. In fact, over the decades, opinions over Savarkar have got further polarised, especially after the Bharatiya Janata Party, riding predominantly on the ideology of Hindutva, displaced the Congress to become the strongest party in the country. The Congress’ distrust for the Hindutva icon, thus, became much acute and sharper.

In a historiography manipulated by our eminent distorians, one is made to believe that Bharat’s freedom struggle was all about Gandhi since his arrival in Bharat on 9 January 1915, more so after 1920, by when Tilak had passed away. The reality, however, is that, as revolutionary Sachindra Nath Sanyal, one of the founding members of the Hindustan Republican Association (or Army, HRA) in 1924, along with Ramprasad Bismil, writes in Bandi Jeevan: “Mahatma Gandhi had no role to play in the freedom movement from the end of the Satyagraha in 1921 till 1930. During this decade, it was only the revolutionary movement that was announcing to the world, in no uncertain terms, that the young man of India were willing to sacrifice their lives for the liberation of the country.”

Gandhi called off his Non-Cooperation Movement after the Chari Chaura incident on 12 February 1922 in which three civilians and 22 policemen were killed. There was a lull in Gandhian activities thereafter. One young revolutionary who stood out in this phase was Bhagat Singh, who emerged in the national scene after the setback of the Kakori case, which saw most prominent revolutionaries of the era either killed or imprisoned. He re-launched HRA by adding the term ‘Socialist’ to it: So, HRA became HSRA (Hindustan Socialist Republican Association or Army). Bhagat Singh, along with Chandrashekhar Azad and Rajguru, came to the limelight when he avenged the death of Lala Lajpat Rai by killing Saunders, a police official involved in the lathi-charge on ‘Punjab Kesari’ when the latter was leading a demonstration boycotting the Simon Commission in Lahore on 30 October 1928.

Be that as it may, the fact of the matter is Gandhi’s ahimsa and satyagraha alone didn’t get Bharat its Independence. The revolutionaries had played an equally important, if not bigger, role in this endeavour. As Sanjeev Sanyal writes in Revolutionaries, Bharat’s revolutionary movement wasn’t the case of marginal, episodic and isolated heroism, more often than not misplaced in its priorities, but a well-organised phenomenon that worked incessantly for the country’s Independence and which had well-organised international networks and dimensions with “nodes in Britain, France, Thailand, Germany, Russia, Italy, Persia (now Iran), Ireland, the USA, Japan and Singapore”.

Not just that, the presence of revolutionaries and their successes helped Gandhi and Gandhians bargain better with the British. The harder the revolutionaries came down upon the British, the better the Mahatma and his men were dealt with by the colonial government. The existence of revolutionaries, thus, “made it easier for Gandhi’s non-violent movement to accomplish its goals”, as noted by another historian.

Looking back, it’s but obvious that Gandhians had a unique advantage during the freedom struggle: While they appropriated the entire credit for the country’s liberation from foreign rule, thanks to the dubious role played by our eminent distorians who, with political patronage, displaced the likes of R.C. Majumdar and Jadunath Sarkar in the 1950s to hijack the country’s historiography, they had it easy during the British Raj: Gandhians were handled with kid gloves by the British at a time when revolutionaries were made to go through the worst of hardships at the Cellular Jail in the Andamans and elsewhere. It also made a lot of sense for the British to handover the power to Gandhians and Nehruvians: It helped them retain their influence in the subcontinent even after Independence. We will discuss it later in the chapter.

The story of Gaekwad ruler Sayajirao III of Baroda is apt to showcase why the British preferred those who claimed to be moderates, constitutionalists, Gandhians, et al, and not extremists and revolutionaries. For those not quite well-versed with the era and its politics, it must be told that Sayajirao had generously provided financial assistance to the likes of Ambedkar and Aurobindo Ghosh, helping them become what they ultimately did. During the 1911 Delhi Durbar, he broke the royal convention by not just refusing to wear the full regalia, but also making just a single perfunctory bow, instead of the customary three, to the visiting British emperor. Worse, he turned around and walked off, showing his back to Emperor George V—much against the royal convention.

This single act of defiance made him the hero of free-spirited people in this country, but Motilal Nehru, who was one of the witnesses to the event, wrote disapprovingly about the incident to his son, Jawaharlal: “I am sorry to say that the Gaekwad had fallen from the high pedestal he once occupied in public estimation.”

Now that’s called eating the cake and having it too: you keep the enemy you are fighting in good humour, so as not to enrage him—and worse, accuse those who had the audacity to challenge the same adversary head on as lesser, unsophisticated beings!

Sachindra Nath Sanyal, who was given the ‘Kalapani’ sentence twice—once for Ghadar (released in post-Jallianwala amnesty) and the second time for the Kakori conspiracy case—too faced this holier-than- thou attitude from no less than the Nehrus. In his memoirs, he recalled meeting Subhas Bose and the Nehrus, Motilal and Jawaharlal. While he was impressed by Netaji, he wasn’t too happy after meeting the Nehrus.

About his meeting with Motilal Nehru, he recalled: “I had many thoughts, but before I could begin to enunciate them, Pandit Motilal Nehru started to laugh at my proposal. I did not have an opportunity to explain to Pandit Motilal that before the French Revolution, a lot of political clubs had been set up, especially in Paris. He did not even pay attention to what I had to say. Whenever he found some free time during the day, he would smile, look at me and ask, ‘So, Mr Sanyal, any other brilliant suggestion?’ To hide my embarrassment and discomfiture, I would reply, ‘Everyone here is brilliant, so what brilliance can I display?’ This was the extent of my conversation with Pandit Motilal Nehru.”

About Jawaharlal Nehru, this is what Sachindra Nath Sanyal had to say: “At first, when I looked at Pandit (Jawaharlal) Nehru’s face during our conversation, I felt as if I was a rather misguided young man, a simpleton who had lost his way. It was (as) if Jawaharlal Nehru was doing me a favour and wasting his time by listening to me. Something along the lines of, ‘This poor chap is a lost soul and he wants to say something, so one will have to give him some time. What to do … If it has to be done, might as well do it at breakfast’.”

(The above article is an edited extract from Utpal Kumar’s new book ‘Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History’, published BluOne Ink publications)

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.