6 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
pendence movement seemed in disarray. The Quit India movement
launched by Mahatma Gandhi in August 1942 had been crushed.
Bose’s armed thrust from outside India’s borders had been repulsed. At
such a moment of despondency in the nationalist ranks, thousands of
Netaji’s soldiers arrived at the Red Fort of Delhi as prisoners. The tri-
umphant British decided to teach a demoralized nation a lesson by
put ting on public trial three of fi cers of the Indian National Army. Bose
himself could not have made a better choice of the Red Fort three. The
British charged a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Sikh—Prem Kumar Sahgal,
Shah Nawaz Khan, and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon—with high treason
for waging war against the king- emperor. “The trial,” Nehru wrote,
“dramatized and gave visible form to the old contest: En gland versus
India. It became in reality not merely a question of law or of forensic
eloquence, and ability—though there was plenty of ability and elo-
quence—but rather a trial of strength between the will of the Indian
people and the will of those who hold power in India.”^13
As the drama unfolded in the winter of 1945 and the spring of 1946,
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose commanded in absentia the dénouement
of the plot. The conquering hero, whose name was on ev ery one’s lips,
did not make an appearance on the stage at its climax. Bose had been
reported killed in the crash of a Japanese bomber in Taipei on Au-
gust 18, 1945. “You will understand our pressing anxiety,” a British in-
telligence of fi cer wrote on February 19, 1946, “to get to the truth of
whether Bose is ac tually and permanently dead.”^14 British imperialists
may have wanted him “permanently dead,” but most people in India
wished exactly the opposite and longed for him to be permanently
alive! No one man could have elicited such con flicting emotions as
Bose did upon the approach of Indian in de pen dence. Britain’s imperial
hands could not forgive him for subverting the loyalty of the prized
instrument of colonial control: Britain’s Indian Army. He had escaped
to Germany and Italy via the Soviet Union in 1941, looking to recruit
soldiers being held as prisoners- of- war by the enemies of Britain. A
ninety- day voyage on German and Japanese submarines in early 1943
had brought him to Southeast Asia. The taint of Axis collaboration and
negative wartime pro pa ganda had definitively sullied his image in the
West. In the South Asian subcontinent, by contrast, Bose was a great