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By Root 4362 0

from the Japanese, who had received more details on the fatal crash, INA personnel remained unconvinced and passed on this feeling to Indian civilians. When the news of Bose’s death reached India, about a week later, many did not believe it and dismissed the report as British propaganda. In Tokyo young INA leaders studying at the Japanese Military Academy were also unconvinced by the account of his death and disturbed by the hasty cremation. They guarded Bose’s ashes around the clock.16 There are still some in India today who believe that Bose remained alive and in Soviet custody, a once and future king of Indian independence. The legend of ‘Netaji’ Bose’s survival helped bind together the defeated INA. In Bengal it became an assurance of the province’s supreme importance in the liberation of the motherland. It sustained the morale of many across India and Southeast Asia who deplored the return of British power or felt alienated from the political settlement finally achieved by Gandhi and Nehru.

Of those Indians who did accept that Bose had perished, most eulogized him as a great patriot and military leader, even when they took the official Congress line that he was mistaken in allying with Japanese ‘fascism’. Even Gandhi thought kindly of him. To Amrit Kaur he wrote: ‘Subhas Bose has died well. He was undoubtedly a patriot, though misguided.’ Typically, however, the Mahatma immediately changed the subject and reverted to avuncular advice, adding: ‘Your gum has caused me much trouble. I blame the dentist.’17 Bose’s martyrdom most directly traumatized the many young men and women from the Indian civilian communities of Malaya and Singapore who had rushed to enlist. Fearing British reprisals, the INA officers in Tokyo sought sanctuary in the USA from the new military ruler, General MacArthur.18 Bose’s exit further dramatized the issue of the legitimacy of the INA and the problems that the British would face in dealing with it. They had already decided to try as many as 300 of its officers, but their gradual retreat from this position over the next two years was a further demonstration that the Raj was moving inexorably towards its end.

NATIONS WITHOUT STATES

Alongside these big nationalisms – Indian, Malay and Burmese – the war had mobilized and militarized a host of minority peoples across the vast swathe of South and Southeast Asia. It was not only the leaderships of easily recognizable minority groups, such as the Karen of Burma, who were asserting their claims to autonomy in the autumn of 1945. Other older and more shadowy entities seemed to be rising from the grave of history to plague both the would-be new imperialists and the new nationalists who were on the point of grasping independence. Strange as it may seem today, in 1945 many Bengali leaders, Hindu and Muslim alike, were contemplating a separate ‘Banglistan’, a Bengal outside of or only loosely affiliated to any future Indian federation. Some Hindus, for instance, were unhappy with any political settlement that might put the rural Muslim majority of the province into a position of unassailable power. Some Muslims in the province would have preferred partial separation from India to subordination to all-India politicians such as Mahomed Ali Jinnah.19 Across the border in Arakan, the northwestern coastal strip of Burma which had been the scene of heavy fighting during the war, similar ideas of separation were in the air. The Muslims of the region had been violently at odds with their Buddhist neighbours since the 1930s. They had already signed up for a vague idea of a Pakistan embracing the Muslims of eastern Bengal and those of Arakan. Even the Buddhists here harboured dreams of autonomy. Arakan had only been annexed to Burma in the 1780s. Arakanese Buddhists always thought of themselves as a different sort of Burmese. Some of them had leaned more to the British than had the Burmese of the Irrawaddy valley and the south. Others again had fantasies of re-founding the ancient state of Arakan which had been a major force in the region in the sixteenth and