322 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
the yardstick of his own aspirations—in ful fill ing his life’s mission by
- On what would have been his fiftieth birthday, January 23, 1947,
the Mahatma summed up Netaji’s achievements:
He had sac ri ficed a brilliant career for the sake of the country’s ser-
vice. He suf fered various imprisonments, twice became President of the
Congress, and at last by great strategy gave the slip to the guard put
over him by the Government of Bengal and by sheer courage and re-
sourcefulness reached Kabul, passed through European countries, and
fi nally found himself in Japan, collected from scattered material an
army of brilliant young men drawn from all communities and from all
parts of India and dared to give battle to a mighty Government. A
lesser man would have succumbed under the trials that he went
through; but he in his life verified the saying of Tulsidas that “all be-
comes right for the brave.”^37
Knocking out the keystone of Britain’s worldwide empire was no
mean achievement. For this, the old hands of the British raj never
forgave Bose. Britain’s Indian Army had served for more than a cen-
tury and a half as the empire’s rod of order against recalcitrant and
rebellious colonial subjects. Netaji’s tireless wartime activities not only
hastened the pro cess of Indian in de pen dence, but undermined the
prospects for reconquest in other parts of the colonial world. The reju-
venation of a flagging freedom struggle at war’s end was his signal con-
tribution, aided no doubt by a large dose of British hubris. His friend
Dilip Kumar Roy vividly described how Subhas’s “suddenly amplified
fig ure, added to the romance of an Indian National Army marching,
singing, to Delhi, galvanized a frustrated nation out of its torpor and
substantially damaged the insulation of the Indian army from the mag-
netic currents of popular enthusiasm for immediate in de pen dence.”^38
Postponement of the burning desire for freedom through palliative
mea sures and a greater Indianization of the colonial administration
was now utterly out of the question. Nor could En gland still conceive
of deploying the British Indian Army against Aung San’s resurgent
Burma or to aid the French and the Dutch against the Vietnamese and
Indonesian freedom movements.
