In 30 Seconds
Story
In 1938, at Haripura in Gujarat, the Indian National Congress installed as its president a forty one year old Bengali who had spent eleven of his adult years in the empire’s prisons and exiles, and the choice, made with Gandhi’s blessing, crowned two decades in which Subhas Chandra Bose had become the embodiment of the movement’s impatient left. The rise that carried him to Haripura, and within a year to the collision at Tripuri that the next chapter tells, is one of the freedom struggle’s great arcs, the making of the leader whom India would come to call Netaji, and whose quarrel with Gandhian gradualism posed, as sharply as any life could, the movement’s permanent question of method.
The making was Bengal’s and the century’s. Born in 1897 at Cuttack into Janakinath Bose’s prospering professional family, the ninth child, schooled in English before Bengali, Subhas found his compass in adolescence in Vivekananda, service and strength as religion, and his temper at Presidency College, from which he was expelled in 1916 for the affair of the beaten professor, the nationalist student standing by the assault on a master who had manhandled Indians. Sent to Cambridge to redeem the family honour in the Indian Civil Service, he passed fourth in 1920 and then performed the act that announced him, resigning the empire’s most coveted service in 1921, at twenty four, with the sentence that only on the soil of sacrifice could national work be built, and presenting himself to Gandhi and, decisively, to C R Das, the leader he served as lieutenant, publicist and, when Das captured Calcutta’s corporation, chief executive officer. The apprenticeship set the pattern of alternating office and imprisonment, the Mandalay years of 1924 to 1927 among the era’s harshest detentions, and Das’s death in 1925 left Bose, with the returning prisoner’s halo, Bengal’s inheritor.
Through the decade after, Bose built the position Haripura ratified. With Jawaharlal Nehru he led the young wing’s revolt against dominion status, the two the joint tribunes of purna swaraj at Calcutta and Lahore, and unlike Nehru he never made his peace with the leadership’s compromises, opposing the Gandhi Irwin Pact, mourning Bhagat Singh in language the high command would not use, organising volunteers with a soldier’s relish for uniform and drill that his critics mocked and his following loved. The European exile of 1933 to 1936, enforced by his release from prison into medical banishment, became a second education, Vienna as base, the capitals toured, India’s case argued to ministers and press, the book The Indian Struggle written, Emilie Schenkl met and secretly wed, and the conclusions formed that governed everything after, that the world was moving into the age of organised force, that freedom would come through international crisis, and that free India would need a period of iron discipline and state led industry, the synthesis he provocatively imagined between socialism and the authoritarian energies of the age, a formulation his admirers read as developmental realism and his critics never forgave.
Haripura displayed the president in full. Carried to the pandal in a chariot drawn through fifty one villages, Bose delivered a presidential address of striking range, national planning as free India’s first task, the population question faced, industrialisation under a socialist state, federation with the princes’ subjects not the princes, and, within the office’s constraints, loyalty to the Gandhian method whose supersession he privately awaited. The year of his presidency ran the office’s machinery loyally enough, the National Planning Committee founded under Nehru’s chairmanship his lasting institutional gift, the ministries supervised, the princely states’ movements encouraged. Beneath the surface the divergence widened, Bose reading Munich’s Europe as the approaching storm in which India must strike, the high command reading the same sky as reason for caution, and when the president, against all precedent and Gandhi’s known wish, announced that he would stand again in 1939, the movement’s two theories of itself, the saint’s and the soldier’s, were set at last for open collision, at Tripuri, where the next chapter begins.
