286 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
speech had some glaringly weak points, especially in its discussion of
caste in India, which he claimed was withering away in modern India
(though it was not). But Bose was able to delineate with clarity for a
foreign audience what he thought would be the three most urgent tasks
facing free India: national defense, eradication of poverty, and provi-
sion of education for all. An international order, he argued, could be
built only on the foundation of associations of regional cooperation.
Citing the failure of the League of Nations, he urged Japan, as the
sponsor- nation of Asian regionalism, to “avoid a selfish and short-
sighted policy and work on a moral basis.”^100
Bose desperately wanted to resume his march toward Delhi. Though
he continued to hope that Britain’s Maginot Line in Imphal could be
breached with a second assault, talks with the Japanese, along with
American bombs being dropped on Tokyo, appear to have convinced
him that he could not expect any further help from that quarter. So in
November 1944 he tried to establish contact with the Soviet Union
through their ambassador, Jacob Malik, in Tokyo. He anticipated con-
flicts between the Soviet Union and the Western allies, and wanted to
reopen a line of communication with a country which had never really
helped him in the past, except to grant him passage though Moscow in
- The Soviet ambassador transmitted a message from Bose to Mos-
cow, but there was no reply.^101 From Tokyo, Bose also made a series of
broadcasts to the United States. He told his “American friends” that
Asia was “surging with revolutionary fervor”: “You had an opportunity
of helping us, but you did not do so. Now Japan is offering us help and
we have reason to trust her sincerity. That is why we have plunged into
the struggle alongside of her. It is not Japan that we are helping by wag-
ing war on you and on our mortal enemy—En gland. We are helping
ourselves—we are helping Asia.”^102 Of the two superpowers on the
postwar horizon, he had taken the opportunity of his visit to Japan to
make an overture to one and to explain himself to the other.
Netaji’s letters from this period reveal his special solicitude and con-
cern for the young cadets he had sent to be trained at the military
academy in Tokyo, and for the young women who had joined the Rani
of Jhansi Regiment. He made it a point to meet the Tokyo cadets and
spend time with them. “My dear boys,” he wrote on November 29, 1944