One Man and a World at War 197
March 7, Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) informed its
representatives in Istanbul and Cairo that Bose “was understood to be
traveling from Afghanistan with vital information to Germany via Iran,
Iraq and Turkey” and asked them “to wire what arrangements they
could make for his assassination.”^38 In the event, Bose did not take the
Middle Eastern route. On March 3, Count Schulenburg, the German
ambassador, cabled Berlin from Moscow: “The Commissariat for Ex-
ternal Affairs informs that the Soviet government is ready to give Sub-
has Bose the visa for journey from Afghanistan to Germany through
Russia. The Commissariat has been requested to instruct the Soviet
Embassy in Kabul accordingly.”^39
Subhas Chandra Bose was at this time keeping himself busy writ-
ing a lengthy po lit i cal tract justifying his po lit i cal choices. Drawing on
Hegelian dialectics, he argued that in each phase of his tory, there was
a need for a leftist antithesis to a rightist thesis, and that the melding
of the two would result in a higher synthesis. Interestingly, he sug-
gested that Gandhi in his “Young India” phase (1920–1922) repre-
sented the leftist antithesis to the rightist thesis embodied in moderate
constitutionalism. He reiterated his two criteria for “genuine leftism”
in Indian politics: uncompromising anti- imperialism in the current
phase, and socialist reconstruction once po lit i cal in de pen dence had
been won. Having abandoned his fledgling pressure group within the
Congress—the Forward Bloc—to raise an army of liberation abroad,
he expressed a pious hope that “his tory will separate the chaff from the
grain—the pseudo- Leftists from the genuine Leftists.” He claimed that
his Forward Bloc had “saved the Congress from stagnation and death,”
helped “bring the Congress back to the path of struggle, however inad-
equately,” and “stimulated the intellectual and ideological prog ress of
the Congress.” He asserted that, “in fullness of time,” it would succeed
in “establishing Leftist ascendancy in the Congress so that the future
prog ress of the latter (the Congress) may continue unhampered.” The
“pseudo- Leftists,” he charged, “conveniently forget the imperialist char-
acter of Britain’s war and also the fact that the greatest revolutionary
force in the world, the Soviet Union, has entered into a solemn pact
with the Nazi Government.”^40
The Germans, Russians, and Ital ians had come together to clear