There has been a controversy about the installation of Subhash Chandra Bose’s statue recently in Delhi. The opposing camp questions Bose, in his struggles, seeking support from fascistic Hitler and Japan. European countries had complex power struggles which sucked other countries into their wars. Hitler initially had good relations with Stalinist Russia and England. Later, he turned to attack Russia and the second world war polarised countries with the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria) on one side and the Allied powers (U.S., Britain, France, USSR, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Greece, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, South Africa, Yugoslavia) on the other. The fluctuating relations between countries also reflected in volte-faces in India too. The Communists, for example, fought the British initially; later they became a friend as Germany invaded Russia (a strong friend) and England declared war on Germany (an enemy now). Post-war, of course, Russia and the US went on a confrontationist path.
In a typical scenario of victors writing history, the winners became the good people and the losers (specifically Hitler), extremely bad. The Nazi rule under Hitler was cruel and brutal. The Nazi regime murdered six million Jews and more than five million non-Jews (Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, blacks, the physically and mentally disabled, political opponents, Slavics, dissenting artists, the resisting clergy, and so on). However, to gain a perspective, there were 31 famines in 120 years of British Raj. As Shashi Tharoor (An Empire of Darkness) states explicitly, in just 10 years (1891-1900), 19 million people died in India due to famines alone. The famines, the biggest colonial holocausts, are at the top of some of the most severe inhumanities in modern times. Under the British Raj, India suffered countless famines. The first of these was in 1770 (10 million deaths), followed by severe ones in 1783, 1866, 1873, 1892, 1897 and lastly 1943-44. The regular Bengal famines were the result of careless planning, Malthusian ideas, and highly racist leaders sitting in England looking the other way. Churchill hated the Indians and thought that they bred like animals. He also wondered why Gandhi did not die in the famine. In the 1942-1945 WW2 Bengali Holocaust, the British starved to death upto 3 million Indians for strategic reasons with Australian complicity. All these apart from 62000 and 87000 Indian soldiers who died during the first and second world wars respectively; a war without any personal stake or honour, except for the reason that we were a colony of the British.
The British also divided us politically into two countries using religion; caused social disruptions by their caste-system narratives and pernicious Aryan theory frameworks; converted traditions into religions; stripped us economically; fed their industrialization by raw material produced from India; made India a market for their finished products; destroyed agriculture by converting large tracts of land for cash crops or for their opium trade; and levied heavy taxes. As Dr SN Balagangadhara proposes, the most unfortunate violent consequence of past colonialism is the present ‘colonial consciousness’- an altering of our intellectual frameworks but much after the colonials have left. The colonized refuses to understand any other narrative except the colonial ones.
Hitler undoubtedly was bad; however, Winston Churchill and the British were equally cruel and brutal. But our colonized minds exonerate the latter. Subhash Bose had an equal role, arguably even more than Gandhi, in gaining our independence through the Indian National Army, the INA trials, and the subsequent Naval Mutinies. He was a great patriot and was playing Chanakya Neeti in the art of warfare by approaching the enemy of the enemy to gain what he desired from the core of his heart-the independence of India. As Balagangadhara says, in seeking the Nazi support, it is possible that Bose was expressing our experience of colonialism; as colonial subjects, there was no difference between the British and Nazis in terms of their cruelties. The criticism of the statue by the naysayers is unwarranted and represents a homage to our past colonial discourses by colonized minds.
RANDOM MUSINGS 