The Terrible Price of Freedom 205would greatly help India’s unarmed freedom fighters at home.^6 Before
implementing any of his plans, Bose demanded that the tripartite pow-
ers make an unambiguous and unequivocal declaration recognizing
Indian in de pen dence. In the latter half of May, he wrote up a draft of
such a declaration and tried his best to get the German and Ital ian gov-
ernments to issue it publicly.^7 The Germans and Ital ians gave various
excuses for delaying it. One reason for this prevarication was that the
tripartite powers had tacitly agreed that India was within the Russian
sphere of in flu ence, and they could not at this stage publicly repudiate
that position.
Bose was on a visit to Rome when he received news that on June 22,
1941, Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. He was utterly dis-
mayed. The international scenario “looked gloomy.”^8 Bose’s strategy
had been critically de pen dent on the continuance of the German-
Soviet pact. He had even indulged in some wishful thinking that a rap-
prochement between Japan and China could be facilitated through
Soviet mediation. Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, which had been se-
cretly in the works even as Bose passed through Moscow, upset all his
plans. He decided to be characteristically frank, forthright, and fearless
in speaking his mind to the Germans. He told the German Foreign Of-
fice in clear terms: “The Indian people felt defi nitely that Germany was
the aggressor.” The Germans thought Bose was “strongly in flu enced by
the Soviet thesis on the question of the origin of the German- Russian
con flict.” They tried to reassure him that they remained “firm” in their
“intention regarding a proclamation for a free India,” but were waiting
for a “suitable time.”^9
Bose returned to Berlin on July 17. On that day, his instructor in
German, Gieselher Wirsing, found him seated in a lotus position with a
grave look on his face and a world map in front of him. He railed
against Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union and warned that it
would have very bad consequences.^10 In a letter to Ribbentrop on Au-
gust 15, Bose stressed that without a declaration regarding Indian in de-
pen dence, “the nearer the German armies move towards India, the
more hostile will the Indian people become towards Germany.” “The
march of the German troops towards the East,” he warned Ribbentrop,
“will be regarded as the approach not of a friend, but of an enemy.”^11