Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [54]
Then there were the issues to stir the city’s inhabitants to political demonstration and violence. Since before the First World War there had been a tradition of anti-British terrorist violence, with sporadic assassinations of policemen and bomb attacks on symbols of British rule. Revolutionary communism was popular among the educated youth of the city and strikes at the jute mills had sometimes ended in violence and mass protests. This inheritance had been given new meaning by the events of the Second World War, and especially by the exploits of the INA, which had been watched with admiration in Bengal. A relatively small percentage of INA troops had been Bengalis. This was because of the predominance of men from the Punjab and North West Frontier Province in the Indian Army troops captured by the Japanese in 1942. The civilians who joined the INA were mostly Tamils, because they had dominated Malaya’s plantation workforce. Yet, because the INA’s revered leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, was a Bengali and his brother, Sarat Chandra, had spent much of the war in British jails, Bengalis identified strongly with the INA. Almost from the moment that the British allowed normal political life to resume there were demonstrations, public meetings and pamphlet campaigns demanding the release of the INA men. These grew to a climax in November as the British began the trials at the Red Fort. Bengal rallied to the call of K. N. Katju, one of the men’s defence team, when he declared, ‘they are the soldiers of freedom,’ and, ‘for a subject people the law of treason has no moral sanction behind it’.69 The Bengal Provincial Congress Committee set up a defence fund, declaring that the men’s only crime had been to love their country. As detainees were released and soldiers returned, an old rumour that the British had summarily executed some of the INA men was given a new lease of life. Freed from a Bengal jail, the president of the UP provincial Forward Bloc, Bose’s old party, stated that he had seen Sardar Singh of Jullunder being led to execution shouting ‘Jai Hind!’ (Victory to India!) and ‘Inquilab Zindabad!’ (Long live the revolution!).70 Stories of the execution of the ‘soldiers of freedom’ merged with new speculation and evidence about British atrocities during the 1942 Quit India campaign. Tamluk, a subdivision of Midnapur district with a forty-year history of anti-colonial resistance, had been the scene of numerous examples of police firing on crowds, village burnings and rapes by the security forces. The victims could now come forward to tell their stories, as they were in Nuremberg. Indians did not waste the opportunity to make some inflammatory comparisons: Britain’s record in Bengal was every bit as bad as that of the Nazis at Belsen; ‘will the UN have the courage and the fairness to hold trials in India?’71
Emerging legends about the INA were closely bound up with a fever of speculation about the fate of Subhas Bose himself. In November an ‘authoritative source’ had confirmed to a Press of America reporter that Bose had died at 9 a.m. on 18 August at Taihoku hospital, Formosa (present-day Taiwan). Bose’s staff officer had asked the Japanese to take his body to Tokyo, but the coffin was too big for the small plane available. The body had therefore been cremated and Bose’s aides had carried his ashes to members of the Indian community in Tokyo, who had performed a small ceremony in the Renkoju Temple, Suginami.72 This account seems to have been substantially true, but since the source could not be identified and none of the Tokyo Indians could