Why India Became Independent
--a view point--
Role of the Defence
Services for India’s independence
When BP Chakravarti was acting as Governor of
West Bengal, Lord Attlee visited India and stayed as his guest for three days
at the Raj Bhavan. Chakravarti asked Attlee about the real grounds for granting
Independence to India . Specifically, his question was, when the Quit India
movement lay in ruins years before 1947, what was the need for the British to
leave in such a hurry. Attlee’s response is most illuminating and important for
history. Here is the Governor’s account of what Attlee told him:
“In reply, Attlee cited several reasons, the
most important were the activities of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose which
weakened the very foundation of the attachment of the Indian land and naval
forces to the British Government. Towards the end, I asked Lord Attlee
about the extent to which the British decision to quit India was influenced by
Gandhi’s activities.
On hearing this
question Attlee’s lips widened in a smile of disdain and he uttered, slowly,
putting emphasis on each single letter mi-ni-mal.”
This ‘unimpeachable’ truth will come as a shock to most Indians
brought up to believe that the Congress movement driven by the ’spiritual
force’ of Mahatma Gandhi forced the British to leave India.
But both the evidence and the logic of history are against this
beautiful but childish fantasy; it was the fear of mutiny by the Indian
armed forces - and not any ‘spiritual force’- that forced the issue of
freedom. The British saw that the sooner they left India the better for
themselves, for, at the end of the war, India had some three million men under
arms.
Majumdar had reached the same conclusion years earlier, as far
back as 1948 as he records. The most dramatic event after the end of World War II was the
INA Trials at the Red Fort — not any movement by Gandhi or Nehru. This led
directly to the mutiny of the naval ratings, which, more than anything, helped
the British make up their minds to leave India in a hurry.
They sensed that it was only a matter of time before the
spirit spread to other sections of the armed forces and the rest of the
Government. None of this would have happened without Subhas Bose and the
INA.
The crucial point to note is that thanks to Subhas Bose’s
activities and the INA, the Armed Forces began to see themselves as
defenders of India rather than upholders of the British Empire. This, more
than anything else, was what led to India’s freedom. This is also the reason
why the British Empire disappeared from the face of the earth within an
astonishingly short space of twenty years. Indian soldiers, who were the
main prop of the Empire, were no longer
willing to fight to hold the Empire together.
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