Ajit Doval is wrong. Subhas Chandra Bose could not have prevented Partition

The rhetoric around Bose has been as shrill as it has been militantly nationalistic, yet to appropriate him selectively is to blur his place in India’s history. Subhas Chandra Bose was nobody’s fool and a staunch patriot. From the beginning, his obsession had always been India’s freedom from the shackles of the Raj, an obsession that was hampered by his differences with Gandhi and, eventually, with Nehru. The differences came to a furious head in the Haripura and Tripuri sessions of the Congress, held between 1938 and 1939, when intra-party factionalism forced Bose’s resignation as President. Bose’s life after his bitter exit from the Congress would be defined by the choices he made. It is through these choices that history views him even today. But to choose a lens with which to view a man navigating, single-handedly, a world torn between imperialism and fascism, nationalism and communism does no service to Bose, his life or India’s history.

Even as Bose lobbied relentlessly for India’s freedom during his travels across Europe and Southeast Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, shifting geopolitics made for decisions that were questionable, to put it mildly. In Bose’s case, he spent considerable time in Berlin and Tokyo, building what he hoped would be alliances with the likes of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. Yet if Bose was making some dubious decisions, so were many of his counterparts in India, at various points on India’s road to freedom. In 1939, for example, Gandhi wrote a letter to Hitler, addressing the Fuhrer as the “one person in the world” who could prevent the kind of war that would devastate the globe. In the late 1940s, Sardar Patel leaned heavily on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for its aid during Partition-related violence in Punjab and Delhi.

None of these examples should be taken as ultimate judgments on character or mettle. Much of history, after all, is shaped by actions taken on the spot, at any given time and place. India’s first political leaders worked against the bloodied backdrop of Partition and war, integration and accession. These were men who made the decisions they thought best at the time, and for those reasons, they deserve to be assessed objectively, rather than being eulogised beyond belief.

That said, the role of symbolism in political decisions cannot be underestimated. In 1945, for instance, when Bose was finally thwarted in his march on India from the forests of Burma, and his men hauled before the Crown as traitors, it was the Congress — led ably by Bhulabhai Desai — who decided to defend the Indian National Army (INA). To support the INA in 1945-1946 was a purely political decision, spurred by the desire to take advantage of the restive anger against the Empire. Nehru — the same man who told journalists that he would fight Bose if he brought the Japanese to India — now publicly supported Bose, as did Gandhi. All the ingredients for a stirring courtroom drama lie in the reams of evidence presented by the defence and the prosecution during the trial. For the common man, however, the drama lies in the live action of the trial itself, in Desai’s stirring speeches and his brilliantly fiery defence of Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, Shah Nawaz Khan and Prem Sahgal, despite suddenly collapsing mid-way through the trial. This, then, was a prime example of another kind of symbolism — in the image of Indian barristers, on the ramparts of the Red Fort, defending the cause of a truly Indian army led, for the first time, by an Indian. It sparked the kind of massive unrest that the Empire feared and that the Congress could use to its advantage.

Symbolism, then, does have its uses. If chosen well, as the Congress did in the winter of 1945, symbolism has the power to change the course of history itself. But the recurring pitfall in the modern presentation of political history in India has been to present our leaders as almost cartoonish mascots — either of success or failure. Upholding one political leader to be the architect of every success is as myopic as pinning the mistakes of history onto another. From Nehru to Modi, from Bose to Gandhi and Patel, this renders men invisible, unidimensional or simply above question. Presenting Bose, for instance, as the man capable of single-handedly preventing Partition is not only comically reductive but harmful to a nuanced understanding of our history — and the role that Bose played in it.

True service to India’s past, its present and its future does not lie in servility to ideologies and symbols. It lies in acknowledging the complex humanity of the men who led us to freedom. It does not lie in sidelining, caricaturing or erasing those who played a role in building this country — whether they be bureaucrats, diplomats or freedom fighters. It lies in acknowledging that independence was not forged simply by fire and bloodshed, and that no single person was responsible for India’s Partition or its freedom. Independence was wrangled, debated and discussed for years, before it was written into legislation.

Therefore, to present history as histrionics is not only to reduce the labour that went into birthing a nation, but to obliterate the many midwives who assisted India’s entry into the post-colonial world.

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The writer is a historian and the author of VP Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India