7
The Terrible Price of Freedom
My allegiance and my loyalty has ever been and will ever be to In-
dia and to India alone, no matter in which part of the world I may
live at any given time.
—subhas chandra bose, in a broadcast from Berlin, May 1, 1942The exigencies of the Second World War gave rise to strange alliances,
none stranger than the ones that led the arch- imperialist Winston
Churchill to make common cause with Josef Sta lin, and the uncom-
promising anti- imperialist Subhas Chandra Bose to shake hands with
Adolf Hitler. When Bose escaped from India, Germany and the Soviet
Union still had a nonaggression pact. Fascism and communism were
entwined in a cynical and awkward embrace. The internal politics of
European states had little to do with international alliances. Britain and
France, the countries that held sway over the two largest colonial em-
pires, had entered the war in September 1939 in defense of Poland,
which at that time had a dictatorial regime. Their slogans of freedom
and democracy sounded hollow to their colonial subjects. By June
1940, the German Blitzkrieg had overrun France. Paris had fallen to
Hitler’s army, and the German Luftwaffe was conducting relentless
bombing raids on London, the first city of the British Empire.
“When the Nazi hordes crossed the German frontier into Holland
and Belgium only the other day with the cry of ‘nach Paris’ on their
lips,” Bose wrote on June 15, 1940, “who could have dreamt that they
would reach their objective so soon?” He went on to “make a guess”