118 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
Hospital, on February 3, 1937, to Naomi Vetter in Vienna, Subhas
wrote: “Lest I forget, may I ask one question. The Indian papers pub-
lished the news some time ago that Chancellor Schussnig was se-
cretly married at Mariazell some months ago. The news did not come
through the regular news agency—so I do not know if it is idle gossip-
ing. Nowadays there is so much idle gossiping going on in Europe
about people who are prominent in the public eye.”^99 This was not
just an innocent query about some idle gossip. The matter of a secret
marriage was clearly something that Subhas was weighing in his own
mind.
By early March 1937, it was becoming increasingly untenable for
the British authorities to continue holding their ailing prisoner in de-
tention. There was some disagreement among Bose’s doctors as to
whether the source of his health prob lems was his liver or his lungs.
The doctor in charge, Lieutenant Colonel Vere Hodge, was of the opin-
ion that it was an enlarged liver.^100 On the po lit i cal front, there had
been new provincial elections in which the Indian National Congress
had done remarkably well with clear majorities in six out of the eleven
provinces, and it was well positioned to be able to form governments in
two more. In Bengal, the Congress under Sarat Chandra Bose’s leader-
ship had won most of the general constituencies, but the constitutional
arrangements had provided for many more Muslim reserved seats that
were shared by the Krishak Praja party, the Muslim League, and in de-
pen dents.
Prior to the elections, radicals within the Congress—including Jawa-
harlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose—had been opposed to accept-
ing of fice in the provinces. After the good showing in the elections,
however, the majority opinion within the Congress swung toward
forming governments where the party had won the majority of the
seats. The Congress was still implacably opposed to the federal part of
the Government of India Act of 1935, which had counterposed repre-
sentatives of the princely states in a future federal assembly, in order to
deny elected nationalists from the eleven British Indian provinces a
majority at the all- India level. As the British mulled over the possibility
of releasing Bose, they were anxious not to let him strengthen Nehru’s
hand at a Congress meeting slated for March 1937. They also did not