In 30 Seconds
Story
Expelled from the Congress’s councils in the summer of 1939, Subhas Bose did not retire, regroup quietly or wait for rehabilitation. He founded a party to gather the movement’s left, campaigned against compromise through the war’s first year, went to prison, fasted his way out, and then, in the January cold of 1941, vanished from a watched house in Calcutta to reappear, by way of Kabul and Moscow, in Hitler’s Berlin. The Forward Bloc years, from the Calcutta announcement of May 1939 to the great escape, are the bridge between Bose the Congress rebel and Netaji of the legend, and they display, compressed into twenty months, everything his admirers and his critics have ever said of him, the energy, the daring, the prophetic reading of the hour, and the terrible company his single mindedness was prepared to keep.
The Forward Bloc was conceived as a party within the party, a rally of all leftists inside the Congress to hold it to struggle and against constitutional temptation, and its first year measured both the left’s breadth and its incoherence. The socialists of the CSP and the communists, whom Bose had counted natural allies, held aloof or turned hostile, their own lines tangled by Moscow’s pact diplomacy, and the Bloc’s real strength gathered where Bose himself stood, Bengal above all, with pockets in the south and among the radical peasant leaders, Swami Sahajanand the greatest of them, who joined the Bloc’s anti compromise conference platform. When the war came in September 1939 the Bloc’s line was the one Bose had preached at Tripuri, that Britain’s difficulty admitted no support and no bargaining, only the immediate demand, and through 1940, as the Congress oscillated between conscience and negotiation, Bose toured the country against compromise, the Anti Compromise Conference at Ramgarh in March 1940 assembling under his presidency across the field from the official session, the rhetoric of final struggle answering the Congress’s measured resolutions. In Calcutta that summer he found a cause with local fire, the campaign to remove the Holwell Monument, the memorial to the Black Hole that stood in the city as, nationalists held, a slander in stone, and on the eve of the agitation, on 2 July 1940, the government took him under the Defence of India rules.
Prison closed the legal road, and Bose broke it with the weapon the government could not manage. In November 1940 he began a hunger strike to the death, framing it in his letter to the government in the idiom of his deepest formation, that life under such conditions was not worth living and that it was blood alone, his if need be, that must pay freedom’s price, and the government of Bengal, unwilling to hang the martyrdom of Calcutta’s darling around its neck, released him in December to house arrest, the watch on Elgin Road to be resumed, it intended, with his health. Bose used the weeks of seclusion to grow a beard and a plan. On the night of 16 January 1941, dressed as a Muslim insurance agent, Mohammed Ziauddin, he slipped past the watchers in the household car driven by his nephew Sisir, and the journey that followed became national folklore, the train from Gomoh, the road to Peshawar, the tribal passes crossed on foot and by mule as a deaf mute Pathan, Bhagat Ram Talwar his double dealing guide, Kabul’s weeks of cold and improvisation, and at last, with an Italian passport in the name of Orlando Mazzotta, the flight through Moscow to Berlin on 2 April 1941, while in India the government, which had concealed the escape for days, discovered it was hunting a ghost.
What he sought in the Axis capitals, the Free India Centre, the Azad Hind Radio’s broadcasts, the Indian Legion raised from prisoners of North Africa, and what he made later in the east, belongs to the war’s chapters. The escape itself completed the figure the Forward Bloc years had drawn. To the government he was now the most dangerous man in India’s politics, to be intercepted, the files later showed, at any cost. To the country, informed by rumour and enemy radio of the leader who had walked out of the empire’s hand to raise the flag abroad, he was the movement’s sword arm gone to find a sword, and the judgment his choice of forges has demanded ever since, the alliance with fascism weighed against the single minded pursuit of freedom, was already, in the Kabul snows, the price of the legend being born.
