254 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
self on October 19–20, 1943, drawing on Indian his tory and on ele-
ments of the Irish and American declarations of in de pen dence. Earlier
that evening, Bose had asked whether Ayer knew what had happened to
the signatories of the Irish proclamation of in de pen dence: they had
been shot dead—and the same might happen to those who ventured to
sign his proclamation, he added with a laugh. Once the last visitor had
departed, well after midnight, he sat down with his coffee to write the
proclamation. “Then I witnessed a phenomenon,” Ayer has recorded. “I
had a glimpse of the great man. He took hold of a bunch of quarter-
sheets of blank paper, took a pencil in hand, and started writing.” As
Netaji delivered each handwritten page, Ayer typed it up to be sent to
the printers. “Having goaded Indians to desperation by its hypocrisy,”
Netaji began, “and having driven them to starvation and death by
plunder and loot, British rule in India has forfeited the goodwill of the
Indian people altogether and is now living a precarious existence. It
needs but a flame to destroy the last vestige of that unhappy rule. To
light that flame is the task of India’s Army of Liberation.” Ayer has de-
scribed the writing pro cess during that night:
He did not lift his eyes from the paper in front of him, silently handed
to me the first page as soon as he fin ished it, and I walked out of the
room and sat at the typewriter. Abid [Hasan] and [N. G.] Swami went
to his room in turn and brought me the proclamation manuscript,
sheet after sheet, as Netaji fin ished it. What amazed me was that he
never once wanted to see any of the earlier pages that he had written.
How he could remember ev ery word that he had written in the preced-
ing pages, how he could remember the sequence of the paragraphs. In
the entire manuscript there was not one word corrected or scored out,
and the punctuation was complete.In the final paragraph came the exhortation to the Indian people:
“In the name of God, in the name of bygone generations who have
welded the Indian people into one nation, and in the name of the dead
heroes who have bequeathed to us a tradition of heroism and self-
sacri fice—we call upon the Indian people to rally round our banner
and strike for India’s freedom.” The wording echoed that of the procla-