312 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
dren and others for the dead ones who fell on the battlefield. And still
new means of destructions are sought. The whole world seems to have
been plunged into madness.”^16
In 1946, Mountbatten’s headquarters at Kandy conducted another
in quiry into the fate of Subhas Chandra Bose. The relations of Bose’s
INA with Mountbatten’s forces had been fraught with tension. Cyril
John Stracey had kept his promise to his leader and had erected the
memorial to the INA martyrs in record time. Mohammad Zaman Ki-
ani, whom Netaji had left in charge at Singapore, performed the inau-
gural ceremony of this monument with the INA motto “Faith, Unity,
Sacrifice” emblazoned on it. It turned out to be a mournful memorial
ser vice for Netaji, the first soldier of India’s army of liberation, and all
others who had perished. When the British landed in Singapore on
September 5, 1945, the proud INA memorial on the harbor greeted
them. On September 8, Mountbatten’s soldiers—Indians under his
command—laid dynamite charges and blew the monument to smith-
ereens as INA soldiers watched with helpless rage. This act of vandal-
ism toward the war dead was not forgotten or forgiven by Indians. The
specter of Subhas Chandra Bose continued to haunt the British during
the winter of 1945–1946. Mountbatten’s probe into whether Bose had
in fact died was conducted through Colonel J. G. Figgess, who was at-
tached to General MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo and overseen by
an American intelligence of fi cer working under the general headquar-
ters of the Supreme Command Allied Powers (SCAP). On July 25,
1946, Figgess reported that their mortal enemy had indeed met his cor-
poreal death on August 18, 1945.^17
Yet the matter did not end there. The tension between the feeling
that he must be alive and the evidence of his death played itself out for
de cades to come. One night in 1939, Subhas had been walking along
Marine Drive in Bombay with his friend Nathalal Parikh, when he had
looked up at the moonlit sky and expressed a wish about how he
wanted to die: he wanted to fly as high as the stars and then suddenly
come crashing down to earth.^18 But that was not the way his people
wanted him to go, and certainly not before India was free. The popular
yearning for Netaji to return became even stron ger in the immediate
aftermath of in de pen dence and partition. At the same time, from 1946