These two had no bones to pick with each other but IB continues to follow colonial practices

During my childhood in Calcutta, almost every family had framed pictures of Rabindranath Tagore, Vivekananda, Ramkrishna – and Netaji – on their walls.

As kids we’d giggle over rumours, spread by elders, that Netaji was about to return, on Ashtami, the eighth – and holiest – day of Durga Puja. Around that time, Netaji would have been more than 80 years old. Some claimed he was already back, as a fakir.

The founder-rector of our school in Calcutta used to lecture us every Foundation Day. On one such occasion he described an incident, when he was called out at night and flown to a secret destination in freezing Tibet. At dawn, he saw a balding man wearing a dhoti going for his ablutions. Later, the same gentleman, now in military fatigues, told our founder to prepare future generations for his imminent return to India. The guy in fatigues, of course, was Netaji.

Many Ashtamis later, with Netaji around 118 years old, BJP claims that ‘Nehru’s government’ kept his family under watch for nearly 20 years. This is pure propaganda: Nehru was prime minister for 17 years, so his successor Lal Bahadur Shastri must also have been complicit in the game.

Actually, neither was. Our intelligence agencies continue to follow colonial practices. Snooping, say, on a woman landscape-artist in Gujarat, is rampant even today. And Subhas, and his elder brother Sarat Bose, are complex historical characters.

The outstanding historian of Sarat and Subhas Bose is Leonard Gordon, of the City University of New York. His 1990 book, Brothers Against the Raj, proves several things. One, the Bose brothers despised the communal politics of Bengal of the 1930s.

Two, they refused to divide the state. Three, they refused to accept deals – like Dominion status – that wily Mohandas Gandhi was willing to cut with the British. The Bose brothers wanted unconditional freedom.

Three, the Bose brothers, especially Subhas, saw no point in pussyfooting around with on-off satyagraha, Gandhi’s preferred method. Disciples of Chittaranjan Das, barrister, nationalist and critic of Gandhi, they fought for a free, united India.

Remember, swadeshi began in Bengal, 1905, after it was partitioned by Curzon. Swadeshi had many strands. It included Tagore’s invention of rakhi bandhan to unite people of different faiths and militant activity by martyrs like Khudiram Bose, hanged 1908. The movement was successful: Bengal was reunited in 1911. This was four years before Gandhi landed up in India. Subhas, increasingly, began to believe that Gandhi was trying to marginalise east India from the Congress mainstream. In this, he was prophetic.

In 1938 Bose was elected president of the Congress. The next year, he again beat Gandhi protégé Pattabhi Sitaramayya to presidency. As a reward, Gandhi kicked Subhas out of the party.

In his 2007 memoir Bangalnama, historian Tapan Raychaudhuri recalls that in 1947 when Cyril Radcliffe arrived to carve up India, conservative Bengali Congressmen meekly sided with their north Indian colleagues. But Raychaudhuri’s uncle Kiran Sankar Roy, an important Congress leader, accompanied Sarat Bose and Muslim League Prime Minister of Bengal Shaheed Suhrawardy, to ask Delhi leaders not to carve up the state. They were rebuffed.

In 1940, Bose escaped house arrest and travelled to Japan via Afghanistan, Moscow and Berlin. The Japanese wanted to mobilise all Asians for a so-called Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and asked him to lead the Indian National Army (INA). This comprised Indian POWs from British forces, who had run away from battle. In Singapore, Bose was received with rapture.

Bose was a nationalist, spurned by Gandhi, who took his own path. By 1945, Japan had been nuked and Bose was dead in Taihoku, modern Taiwan. He’d led the INA all the way up to Imphal, Manipur, where the Indian flag was hoisted for the first time. An INA memorial stands there today.

Between 1945-46, the British tried INA soldiers for war crimes. The three most famous ones, tried at the Red Fort, were colonels Prem Sahgal and Gurbaksh Dhillon, and Major General Shahnawaz Khan. India erupted in fury, sparking a naval mutiny in Bombay. Three important lawyers defended them: Bhulabhai Desai and Asaf Ali, husband of firebrand leader Aruna Ganguly, who launched the 1942 movement from Gowalia Tank in Bombay. They are remembered by streets named after them in Bombay and Delhi, respectively. The third was Jawaharlal Nehru, who donned his barrister’s robes for the first, and last time, at Lal Qilla.

On November 11, 1945, this newspaper reported an INA witness quoting Shahnawaz Khan: “When we reach India we shall meet men and women. And those who are dear to us we shall consider as mothers and sisters…. If and when India is made free, and the Japanese who are now helping us, try to subdue us, we shall fight them too.” These were the ideals of Bose, neither fascist, nor communist, fiercely nationalist. Nehru defended these ideals in court.

Years later, Nehru’s daughter, Indira, invited Shahnawaz to train the Youth Congress. And many years after that, Shahnawaz Khan’s grandson, a man called Shahrukh, became one of India’s biggest stars.

That Bose parted with Gandhi was inevitable, but he and Nehru had no bones to pick with each other. If the IB spied on his family, it was responding to its colonial dog-whistle. Bose’s portraits still hang in Bengali homes; too bad, BJP ideologue Shyama Prasad Mukherjee gets no space.