222 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
nal and external policy of Free India.” “While standing for full collabo-
ration with the Tripartite Powers in the external sphere,” he asserted, “I
stand for absolute self- determination for India where her national af-
fairs are concerned, and I shall never tolerate any interference in the in-
ternal policy of the Free Indian State.” Insofar as socioeconomic prob-
lems were concerned, his views were “exactly what they were when I
was at home—and no one should make the mistake of concluding that
external collaboration with the Tripartite Powers meant acceptance of
their domination or even of their ideology in [India’s] internal affairs.”
Once his task of liberating India was complete, he would once again
call on Mahatma Gandhi, as he had promised in his farewell talk with
him in June 1940.^49
During the spring and summer of 1942, Gandhi and Bose drew
closer in their aims and tactics in relation to World War II and the final
struggle for Indian freedom. In late April 1942, Gandhi had drafted a
radical resolution for the Congress Working Committee, calling upon
the British to quit India. “Japan’s quarrel is not with India,” Gandhi
wrote. “She is warring against the British Empire. India’s par tic i pa tion
in the war has not been with the consent of the representatives of the
Indian people. It was a purely British act. If India were freed her first
step would probably be to negotiate with Japan.” The Mahatma was
prepared to tell the colonial masters to leave India to anarchy or God.
“Rivers of blood” may have to flow, he told journalists, for India to pay
the “price of freedom.”^50 Under the in flu ence of the more cautious
among the leaders, including Nehru and Azad, the Congress Working
Committee adopted a watered- down version of the resolution at its
meetings in the second week of July.
Bose still had a fine intuitive grasp of Indian anticolonial politics,
even though he was located thousands of miles away. “In view of the
internal developments in India,” he urged Ribbentrop on July 23, 1942,
“I would like to be in the Far East in the first week of August, if possi-
ble.”^51 On August 4, Adam von Trott wrote to one of his colleagues that
Bose was expecting a major conflagration in India after the meeting of
the All- India Congress Committee (AICC) on August 8. He was right.
That evening, the AICC delegates gathered on the sprawling Chow-