140 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
tutional devices designed to divide and deflect the anticolonial move-
ment, Bose was perceptive enough to see that “the policy of divide and
rule” was “by no means an unmixed blessing for the ruling power.” He
believed the “principle of partition” was ingrained in the “juxtaposition
of autocratic princes and democratically elected representatives of Brit-
ish India.” He therefore called for uncompromising opposition to the
federal part of the Government of India Act of 1935, even while urging
the Congress provincial ministries to “change the composition and
character of the bu reau cracy.” If the scheme of federation with the 565
princely states got rejected, he suspected that the British would “seek
some other constitutional device for partitioning India and thereby
neutralizing the transference of power to the Indian people.” At the
same time, however, he could see Britain getting “caught in the meshes
of her own po lit i cal dualism” flowing from divisive policies based on
religious and sectarian af fili a tions in India, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, and
Ireland. It was im por tant, then, for Indian nationalists to address the
minorities question in India. Bose urged a policy of “live and let live in
matters religious and an un der stand ing in matters economic and po lit-
i cal.” He did not, interestingly enough, use the term “secularism” in
his broad-minded approach to the prob lem of religious difference. He
knew that religious faith was im por tant to most Indians and advocated
equal respect for all communities, rather than a hard separation of reli-
gion and politics. He also wanted justice for the “depressed classes”—
India’s erstwhile untouchable castes.
While advocating “cultural autonomy for the different linguistic
areas,” Bose suggested accepting Hindustani—a blend of Hindi and
Urdu—as the lingua franca. He wanted to allow “the fullest latitude”
for the use of both the Devanagari and Arabic- Persian scripts, but con-
sidered the adoption of the Roman script as “the wisest solution in the
long run.” He had been converted to this idea during his visit to Turkey
in 1934. The ambition of unifying India through “a strong central gov-
ernment” had to be balanced, in his view, by the need “to put all the
minority communities as well as the provinces at their ease, by allow-
ing them a large mea sure of autonomy in cultural as well as govern-
mental affairs.”^8 This vision was a stretch removed from the monolithic
nationalism insisted on by some of the other leaders of the Congress,