12 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
took the subcontinent at the moment of decolonization. He was not
present at the famous midnight hour of Indian freedom. “Only now,
fifty years on,” historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper wrote in
2004, “has Subhas Chandra Bose begun to claim his still deeply contro-
versial legacy as the greatest military hero of India’s modern his tory.”^22
On August 15, 1997, the fiftieth anniversary of India’s in de pen dence,
three voices were played at a special midnight session of India’s Parlia-
ment—those of Gandhi, Nehru, and Bose—and it was Bose who drew
the loudest and long est applause. Untarnished by the disappointments
and disenchantments of the postcolonial era, Bose lives in popular
memory as an alternative beacon of hope.
What perpetuates the Bose legend is that his appeal cuts across
religious, linguistic, and national boundaries. All those who see them-
selves as fight ing for freedom—po lit i cal, social, and economic—claim
his mantle, including those who battle against the Indian state. Many
Kashmiri and Naga militants seeking in de pen dence from India, for
instance, believe Bose would have understood the justness of their
cause.^23 Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Ban gla desh,
spoke eloquently of Bose’s “ideal of sac ri fice and suf fering,” which
would serve as an undying inspiration to aspirants for liberty in all
places and times.^24 Nelson Mandela, on his first visit to India after his
release from prison in 1990, paid tribute to the iconic leaders of In-
dia’s struggle against empire. “Your heroes of those days,” he told his
Indian audience, “became our heroes. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was
amongst the great persons of the world whom we black students re-
garded as being as much our leader as yours. Indeed, Netaji united all
militant youth of all the colonially oppressed world. We followed with
pride his great contributions, as we did that of the Mahatma and Pan-
dit Nehru.”^25
Soon after he proclaimed the Provisional Government of Free In-
dia in October 1943, Bose was presented with a ceremonial Japanese
sword bearing the inscription, “Destroy evil, establish justice.” Twenty
years after in de pen dence, that sword was brought to India by General
Fujiwara Iwaichi, who as a major during the Second World War had
worked closely with the Indian National Army. As the sword was wel-
comed in Calcutta, an astute observer noted a not uncommon paradox