The Terrible Price of Freedom 211dence was achieved in 1947. Bose had played a key role in resolving the
controversy surrounding the other song, “Bande Mataram,” in 1937—
he had opted not to use it, since he was keen to win Muslim support.
He was open to accepting Muhammad Iqbal’s song “Sare Jahan se
achha Hindustan Hamara”—proclaiming the excellence of India com-
pared to the whole world—as the national anthem, but in the end the
collective decision was in favor of Tagore. Bose asked his followers to
find a common national greeting that would have a nice ring to it and
would be acceptable to all religious communities. One day, Abid Hasan
heard some Rajput soldiers greet each other with “Jai Ramji Ki”—a
phrase that had a musical quality. Hasan changed it to “Jai Hindustan
Ki.” This did not quite work, but the abbreviated form “Jai Hind”
(“Victory to India”) sounded perfect, and Netaji enthusiastically em-
braced it as India’s national greeting.^24 These words became India’s
national slogan in 1947, and continue to reverberate across the length
and breadth of India. The decisions regarding the national anthem and
greeting were examples of Bose’s well- honed po lit i cal intuition, and
would be among his lasting legacies to in de pen dent India.
During 1941, Bose used two channels of communication to stay in
touch with family and friends in India: one went via Kabul, the other
through Tokyo. On March 31, Sisir, sitting at Woodburn Park in Cal-
cutta, had received a visitor’s slip saying, “Bhagat Ram—I come from
frontier.” Bhagat Ram handed over letters and documents from Subhas
to Sarat and Sisir, and arrangements were made to send a young Ben-
gali revolutionary, Santimoy Ganguli, to Peshawar and Kabul. The Ka-
bul conduit, however, became compromised once Bhagat Ram revealed
his German and Ital ian contacts to the Russians in September 1941 and
began to play the role of a consummate multiple agent. The German
invasion of the Soviet Union transformed the war, in the eyes of many
communists and their fellow travelers, from an imperialist war to a
people’s war. Bhagat Ram shed his old Forward Bloc connections to
join a local or ga ni za tion known as the Kirti Kisan party, and thus
moved close to the communist line on the war. Much later, in Novem-
ber 1942, he would be arrested and immediately released by the British,
on condition that he supply intelligence about Bose’s moves through
the Communist party of India.^25