Dreams of Youth 55old, the colonial masters could detain their subjects indefi nitely with-
out trial, and without even making the charges against them public.
The house was searched for arms, ammunition, and explosives. Noth-
ing of the sort was found, and the police had to be sat is fied with seizing
some papers and letters. Seventeen others were arrested in the police
swoop on that day, including two Swarajist members of the Bengal leg-
islative council. Secret intelligence reports claimed that Subhas was
“the leading or ga nizer of the revolutionary movement in Bengal” and
had been in touch “with Bolshevik propagandists.”^15 The suggestion of
a communist connection was totally unfounded; C. R. Das had in fact
rejected an overture from the Communist International. The internal
files of the Home Department (the Ministry of the Interior) asserted
that Das was “supported by the terrorists” and that terrorist members
of the Swaraj party had backed Bose’s candidacy for chief executive of-
fi cer of the Calcutta Corporation.^16 Three British and Anglo- Indian
newspapers alleged that he was the “brain” behind a revolutionary con-
spiracy. An indignant Subhas asked Sarat to sue them for libel on his
behalf, and after lengthy legal proceedings he eventually won damages
and costs against two of them. The government confessed in a commu-
nication to these newspapers that there was not a shred of documen-
tary evidence against Subhas, only the word of anonymous “credible
witnesses.”^17 C. R. Das was outraged by the government’s resort to
“brute force.” “If love of country is a crime,” he thundered, “I am a
criminal. If Mr. Subhas Chandra Bose is a criminal, I am a criminal.”^18
Das was convinced that the British were simply unwilling to counte-
nance the fact that nationalists were running the second- largest city of
the British Empire.
Das and Bose did not support acts of individual terrorism and did
not believe swaraj could be won by terrorist methods. Bred in the Ben-
gali po lit i cal tradition, however, they did not subscribe unquestion-
ingly to Gandhian nonviolence either. Bose may not have been averse
in principle to an or ga nized armed struggle, but he realized it was not
an option for a subject population lacking any weaponry. As early as
1907, Aurobindo Ghose had written that a subject nation had to make
its choice of strategy by taking account of “the circumstances of its ser-
vitude,” and that Indian circumstances indicated passive resistance to