TAKING COMMAND?From August 15, 1942 to November 11, 1945, Nehru’s paper, the
National Herald, had not been published – as Nehru explained it,
the National Heraldrefused to submit to the conditions of censorship
and control imposed upon it by the government. The fanfare reopening
editorial, written by Nehru, was headlined ‘Jai Hind’.
This was, of course, an appropriation of the rallying call of the Indian
National Army led by Subhas Bose. Bose’s INA had failed to seize the
moment; militarily speaking they were a failure, and Bose himself was
dead, killed in a plane crash on the island of Formosa. It is not clear
how many people in India had even known of the existence of the INA.
Now that the war was over, INA prisoners were returning to India,
censorship regulations had lapsed, and the British military establishment
wanted to make an example of the INA as traitors. Suddenly the country
was faced with news of an army they had not encountered before (if they
had been reading People’s War, the CPI’s journal, they would have read
that Bose was a fascist who was a puppet of the Nazis and the Japanese,
but this would not have given them a clear idea of what he was doing
there, nor of the INA itself).
Slogans and appropriations were now the order of the day. The National
Herald’s last editorial of August 15, 1942, before its self-imposed silence,
had been headlined ‘Bande Mataram’ – the title of a prayer to the nation-
as-mother by the Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay that
had become something of a national hymn for the Congress and its
sympathisers from the days of the Bengal swadeshimovement. The only
problem was, the novel of proxy nationalism from which the song was
drawn cast Muslims as the alien outsiders resisted by Hindu nationalists.
The song had become something of a political battleground, leading to
its overtly anti-Muslim verses being culled, but many Muslims felt that
the whole song was offensive, and that the Congress should abandon it.
With regard to slogans, ‘Jai Hind’ was infinitely crisper, and solved the
problem of sectarian tendencies: in simple Hindustani, it declared ‘Victory
to Hind’, a term that still preserved the geographical rather than the
sectarian meanings of the word.
And of course the INA trials had raised passions that nobody could
have anticipated. The Indian Army had been the foundation of British rule
in India: if their loyalty was suspect, as Wavell and other military sources126 THE END OF THE RAJ