324 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
a tragic lonely fig ure during the communal holocaust that accompa-
nied partition. The saint and the warrior acting in concert may have
had a better chance of averting the catastrophe that engulfed the sub-
continent in 1947. But this was not to be.
It is clear that, by this time, Gandhi felt genuine admiration for Bose,
though he continued to disagree with the methods the fiery leader had
adopted. According to him, Netaji’s final message to the INA was that
even though they fought with arms outside India, they would have to
become nonviolent soldiers of freedom inside the country. Although
Nehru’s championing of the INA cause from November 1945 onward
had an element of po lit i cal opportunism in it, there is evidence that
he was truly moved when he visited the site of the INA memorial on a
trip to Singapore in 1946.^40 Yet under the in flu ence of Lord and Lady
Mountbatten, he was not prepared to integrate the INA raised by his
youn ger comrade and rival into the army of free India. A number of
talented INA of fi cers were taken into the diplomatic ser vice and served
with distinction as Indian ambassadors abroad. Insofar as the armed
forces were concerned, Nehru opted for postcolonial continuity over
anticolonial rupture. In Jinnah’s Pakistan, by contrast, INA of fi cers and
soldiers were accepted into the army after their ser vices had been used
in the war over Kashmir in 1948.^41
One of the of fi cers who fought on Pakistan’s side in the Kashmir war
was none other than Habibur Rahman, Netaji’s companion on his final
plane journey. Writing in 1966 to Tatsuo Hayashida, who had carried
the urn containing Netaji’s ashes from Taipei to Tokyo, Habib thought
it was a “great tragedy” that Bose had not been able to see for himself
the fruits of his freedom struggle. “How much we wish that he had
come back alive,” he wrote. “In that case it is more than certain that he
would have occupied a dominant position in Indian politics.” The rela-
tions between India and Pakistan would then have been “cordial rather
than embittered,” since he was known to be “a most judicious and fair-
minded leader.”^42 Fifty years after partition, another of his followers,
Raja Mohammad Arshad, came from Pakistan to India and described
him as “a great exponent of harmony, free of any bias or petty discrimi-
nation.” “Perhaps with him in the country,” he mused, “many prob lems
that afflict the people of the subcontinent would have been resolved