A Flaming Sword Forever Unsheathed 7popular hero—the object of almost blind and uncritical adulation, on
a par with Mahatma Gandhi.
Indians never had any dif fi culty in combining reverence for saints
with admiration for warrior- heroes. The great Indian epics, especially
the Mahabharata, had placed warriors engaged in a just cause, such as
Arjuna, on the highest pedestal. “The sword of the warrior,” an early
twentieth- century nationalist had asserted, “is as necessary to the fufil-
ment of justice and righ teous ness as the holiness of the saint.”^15 A
people forcibly disarmed since the defeat of the 1857 rebellion had de-
ployed Gandhi’s weapon of nonviolent noncooperation since 1919, but
were equally enthused by Bose’s decision during the international war
crisis of the 1940s to meet force with force. During the war, the British
had tried to impose tight censorship on news in India about Bose and
the Indian National Army. The public trial at the Red Fort provided an
occasion for nationalist newspapers and magazines to widely dissemi-
nate the story of the INA saga. By February 1946, the British had to
release nearly eleven thousand INA prisoners, who returned to their
home villages to tell of their wartime experiences. Putting on trial a few
INA men to set an example to Britain’s Indian subjects proved to be a
catastrophic error on the part of the colonial masters.
Subhas Chandra Bose had been twice elected president of the Indian
National Congress, in 1938 and 1939—with Gandhi’s blessings on the
first occasion and against Gandhi’s wishes on the second. Even though
he had parted ways with the Gandhian leadership in 1939, he had
whole heartedly supported Gandhi ever since the Mahatma had called
upon the British to quit India in 1942. The Indian National Congress
now decided to defend the Indian National Army at the Red Fort trial
of November 1945. In the pro cess, it managed to regain some of the
po lit i cal momentum it had lost. A highly skilled and experienced law-
yer with liberal po lit i cal views, Bhulabhai Desai, led the legal defense
team established by the Congress. Nehru donned his barrister’s robes
for the first time in a quarter- century, in solidarity with the army led
by his erstwhile comrade and rival (though he had been skeptical of
Bose’s wartime exploits). The arguments of the defense failed to sway
the military judges, but found wide acceptance in the court of public
opinion.