172 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
that Gandhi imposed on his own eldest son, Harilal. As Gandhi ex-
plained in one of his columns: “The love of my conception, if it is as
soft as a rose petal, can also be harder than flint. My wife has had to
experience the hard va ri ety. My eldest son is experiencing it even now.
I had thought I had gained Subhas Babu for all time as a son. I have
fallen from grace. I had the pain of wholly associating myself with the
ban pronounced on him.”^85 The rebellious son refused to bow to the
quin tes sen tial patriarch.
By December 1939, Bose was denouncing the vacillating policy of
the Congress leadership. He issued a stern warning against the Con-
gress proposal of a “Constituent Assembly under the aegis of an Impe-
rialist Government,” which he likened to the Irish Convention of Lloyd
George. It was a “stunt” to “stave off a struggle,” since “behind the fa-
çade of a party- struggle within the Congress there was in reality a
class- struggle going on all the time.”^86 The nationalists could convene a
genuine Constituent Assembly only after the seizure of power. In his
presidential address to the All- India Students’ Conference at Delhi, in
January 1940, he commended the Ahrars, a Muslim group in Punjab,
for acting while the Congress leaders were deliberating. “Nevertheless,”
he declared, “there are people—and stay- at- homes at that—who do
not scruple to cast aspersions on the pa tri ot ism of Indian Muslims as a
body.” The Congress High Command, he charged, could “think of a
compromise with the Fascist British Government” but was hell- bent on
“war to the bitter end” against their leftist compa tri ots. Alluding to
Mahatma Gandhi’s stirring call issued at the time of the noncoopera-
tion and Khilafat movement, he reminded his student audience of a
“message once given to ‘Young India’ by one of our erstwhile Leftist
leaders,” who had said: “Freedom comes to those who dare and act.”^87
Though Subhas Chandra Bose used the adjective “fascist” to de-
nounce the British raj, he was certainly aware of the menace that Brit-
ain’s fascist enemies posed to the entire world. His elder brother Sarat
attempted an answer to this moral dilemma in the course of a speech
in December 1939. Imperialism, Sarat argued, even more than totali-
tarianism, had “darkened the prospects of human freedom” across the
globe. He conceded that, being older, imperialism had lost some of its
virility, while the adherents of totalitarianism had the “zeal and energy