More and more, however, it became apparent that he put his own personal fortunes above loyalty to the cause, and in the early thirties he was expelled from the movement for his insubordination and secret plotting.
Straightaway Bose attacked the Mahatma as a muddleheaded old mystic, preaching a mealymouthed gospel, and he began the organization of terrorist gangs for the avowed purpose of pillage and massacre. All India was scoured for lawless, desperate men, and to swell his strength, the rabble-rousing Bengali went into the universities and attracted a following of reckless students.
Now began a series of outrages that made Gandhi’s policy of mass disobedience seem tame and futile. Trains were wrecked, buildings fired and mothers cut down by hatchet men as they fought to protect their children. As if to flout the Mahatma’s insistence on nonviolence, there were outright massacres in Bombay, Malabar and the village of Chauri-Chaura, where twenty-one policemen and watchmen were drenched in oil and burned alive.
Prison sentences only served to increase Bose’s popularity with the masses. While in jail, for example, he was elected mayor of Calcutta. By 1938, he was strong enough to win the presidency of the Indian National Congress over Gandhi’s opposition, and would have served a second term but for certain shrewd tactical moves by the Mahatma that forced his resignation. At the outbreak of war, Bose formed an All India Anti-Compromise Congress of his own, and raced up and down the land, screaming that the Empire’s peril was India’s opportunity. Open in his praise for Germany, Italy and Russia, Bose advocated for his country a government that was a combination of Nazism, Communism and Fascism.
That Bose had been in secret communication with Hitler soon stood proved. Fleeing India, he escaped to Berlin and took his place as a stooge of Doctor Goebbels, side by side with the Mufti, Haj Amin El Husseini, the perjured old Arab. Even as the Mufti broadcast to the Moslem world, urging a holy war against the British, so did Bose call on India to rise in revolt, skillfully inferring that the Fuhrer was waging a war in behalf of the world’s subject races.
Pearl Harbor, however, changed the picture. Overnight, Japan became the country that was to give India her independence, with Germany standing by to aid and protect. Plentifully supplied with Nazi funds, Bose made his way to Tokyo and, after conference with Tojo, was sent to Singapore as the best field for his operations. Preaching the war as one between colors, he painted the paradise that would come into being for every native race when the white man was driven out of Asia. Americans, no less than the Dutch, the English and the French, were cruel and rapacious, despite the pretense of democracy.
With the Japanese invasion of Burma and the desperate attempt to capture India’s Imphal Plain, Bose’s activities gained in size and importance. Made a general by Tojo, he formed an Army of Liberation, and is now at the front-not as a fighting man, of course, for he was always careful of his own skin, but as a propagandist. Day in and day out, he broadcasts to India, damning Gandhi and Nehru as false and discredited leaders, and urging the people to kill and burn.
In the hour of Allied victory, it is certain that Subhas Chandra Bose will plead patriotism as his defense. It is a lie and has always been a lie. Repudiated by India’s patriots, the Bengali stands revealed as a criminal type, ever willing to stoop to any baseness out of an insane egoism and passion for power.
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