Bose or Gandhi: Who Got India Her Freedom? – Review

By Anindya Rai Verman for The Sunday Guardian Live

‘Netaji expedited India’s freedom’

BOSE or GANDHI. (Image/Credit: Amazon)

The book says that had India followed Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent protests alone, India’s Independence would perhaps have been delayed by 30-40 years, like in the case of many African countries.

Had it not been for the Indian National Army (INA) that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose formed with Japanese help, India, like many African nations, would probably have secured its independence some 30-40 years after it finally did in 1947 by the “actual and implied violence of Bose and his INA”, if India had followed Mahatma Gandhi’s form of mass mobilisation and non-violent protests which, arguably, lacked efficacy. This is the decisive message that emerges from the book Bose or Gandhi: Who Got India Her Freedom? by Maj Gen (Dr) G.D. Bakshi SM, VSM (retd). The book, published by KW Publishers Pvt Ltd, attempts to settle the long-standing debate over this question at a very crucial juncture—today (21 October, Sunday) is the 75th anniversary of the formation of the Hukumate Azad Hind government-in-exile by Netaji Subhas Bose in Singapore (1943), ahead of yet another significant milestone, the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi that falls on 2 October next year.

The book says that “left to non-violence alone, freedom would have come to us in India somewhere in the 1980s or 1990s, just as it had come to South Africa only in April 1994 because it had relied on non-violence alone”. All African countries, the book points out, that adopted non-violent methods for their freedom struggle only got their liberation from 1960-1970 onwards and even later. The book also categorically rubbishes claims of “court historians” who have the “temerity to call the Indian freedom struggle an entirely peaceful and non-violent affair”. The author points to a popular lyric that is part of the hagiography that has been so assiduously built around the legacy of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. It says: De di hame azaadi bina kharag bina dhal, Sabarmati ke sant tune kar diya kamaal. This translates into: “O Saint of Sabarmati You wrought a miracle, You gave us our freedom sans sword and shield.”

This lyric, the author says, is an “unabashed insult to the 26,000 martyrs of the INA”. The INA had an overall strength of some 60,000. Of these, as per official INA history, some 26,000 laid down their lives. This amounts to 43% of the force that was martyred. […]

Bose or Gandhi: Who Got India Her Freedom?
By Maj, Gen (Dr)G.D.Bakshi), SM, VSM (Retd)
244 pp.
ISBN13: 978-9387324671

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