Hindutva tribute to Subhas Chandra Bose is meant to confuse

Denuded of the large ideas he stood for, the Right-wing in India has reduced Subhas Chandra Bose to a virtual scarecrow figure in military uniform and knee-length boots

Mohan Bhagwat’s comments in Kolkata, on January 23, on the 126th birth anniversary of Subhas Chandra Bose show that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is keen to claim his legacy. He declared that the RSS was moving ahead with the same national agenda as Bose — of “building a glorious India”, creating “a true human being”, and performing “collectively in various spheres”. These generalities can mean anything, and are hard to disagree with.

However, just two days before Bhagwat’s speech, Bose’s daughter Anita Bose Pfaff reiterated that the RSS and her father had nothing in common. She said, “The two value systems do not coincide” and were “poles apart”.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared (in 2021) that Bose’s birth anniversary would be celebrated as ‘Parakram Diwas’, and on January 23 claimed that “deeply influenced by his thoughts, we are working to realise his vision for India”. He was virtually inaugurating a museum named after Bose on an island in the Andamans. According to media reports, an official said the memorial, “will have a museum, a cable car ropeway, a laser-and-sound show, a guided heritage trail through historical buildings and a theme-based children's amusement park, besides a restro-lounge”!

In Parliament House, leaders gathered to pay tribute to Bose were given military caps like the one worn by Bose as Supreme Commander of the Azad Hind Fauj (Indian National Army — INA), as were children invited to listen to Modi.

The Hindutva forces have tended to selectively appropriate nationalist leaders, eclipsing the ideas that were central to their political thought. Bhagat Singh is shorn of his socialism and atheism, and reduced to his Sikh identity with a saffron turban; Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s abhorrence for the RSS is never alluded to, and now Bose is made bereft of his commitment to socialism, secularism, and India’s diversity.

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What the RSS selectively iconises is the use of military solutions against the colonial regime. Singh’s Naujawan Bharat Sabha, Bose’s INA, and Patel’s use of the army to force accession of the rulers of Junagadh and Hyderabad to the Union of India. Only around this issue is the memory of the three leaders tailored so as to fit the core ideology and organisational agenda of the RSS which follows VD Savarkar’s message to Hindus on his 59th birthday: “Hinduise all politics and Militarise Hindudom”. The RSS and its sister organisations pursue the militarisation of Hindu society to take on the ‘internal enemy’ — the Muslims.

Patel ordering military action against Hyderabad and Junagadh — both principalities headed by Muslim rulers — is projected as an early expression of the military might of an emergent Hindu majority India. Bose too is admired for his military adventurism against the British. Bose also presses the right buttons for the RSS because he flirted with the fascist powers, hoping to use them to fight against British imperialism. One of the founding fathers of the RSS, BS Moonje (mentor of RSS founder KB Hedgewar) also went to meet Mussolini, and was inspired by his methods. Both Bose and the RSS were morally blind to the racist crimes of the fascists for their own reasons.

Yet in reducing Bose and Patel to precursors of the RSS dream of regenerating India militarily, they forget that in their lifetime neither Patel nor Bose supported Hindutva’s obscurantist ideology and goals. Bose, in fact, warned communalists such as Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Savarkar not to support British imperialism.

In a 1942 broadcast from Azad Hind Radio in Germany, supporting the Quit India Movement, he said, “I would request Mr. Jinnah, Mr. Savarkar, and all those leaders who still think of a compromise with the British, to realise once for all that in the world of tomorrow, there will be no British Empire. All those individuals, groups or parties who now participate in the fight for freedom will have an honoured place in the India of tomorrow. ….The supporters of British imperialism will naturally become non-entities in a free India.”

Many of Bose’s officers in the INA were Muslims (most notable of them being Major General Shahnawaz Khan and Brigadier Habib-ur-Rehman). He had the national anthem Jana Gana Mana adapted to accessible Hindustani (Shubh sukh-chain ki barkha barase, Bharat bhag hai jaaga) by Mumtaz Hussain, a writer with Azad Hind Radio and Colonel Abid Hussain Safrani. He named his government in exile in Urdu as Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind (Provisional Government of Free India). The Hindutva brigade does not celebrate any of these Muslim heroes of INA, nor Bose’s religious, cultural, and linguistic inclusiveness. Denuded of the large ideas he stood for, Bose is reduced to a virtual scarecrow figure in military uniform and knee-length boots.

The well-known differences of these leaders on certain issues, with Nehru and Gandhi, are emphasised to counter the Congress narrative of being the sole legatee of the freedom struggle. It is well-known that Gandhi-Bose differences at the Tripuri Congress led to Bose’s resignation despite his election as the President of the Congress. Gandhi is also castigated for not nominating Patel as Prime Minister in favour of Nehru with the assumption that he would have been ‘better’ for the job.

In 2016, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government at the Centre made a great deal of noise about previous Congress governments ‘hiding’ secret files about Bose’s death. Bose, it was suggested, had survived the air crash in 1945 at Taihoku, and had lived incognito, disguised as a sanyasi, fearing for his life. They made public the so-called Bose files with much fanfare, but no proof of their allegations came to light.

Despite this, the BJP and the RSS have continued to claim Bose, and pit him against Nehru and Gandhi. It has been pointed out by many historians that while Bose had differences with them, he held them in high esteem — and in fact, named INA brigades after them. The Hindutva tribute to Bose is meant to confuse the public rather than pursue the values of secularism and socialism that Bose held dear.

(Bharat Bhushan is a Delhi-based journalist)

The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.