Author: Sitanshu Das
Publisher: Rupa
Year: 2011
Language: English
Pages: 634
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9788129109149
Description
In a society immured to its fallen state, any serious effort to awake it to the possibility of improvement demands leaders who should be demigods or prophets endowed with a capacity to work miracles. Demigods and prophets in the present-day are unavailable to work miracles. The redemption of India in the state of abasement demanded leaders who were either demo-Gods or warrior-redeemers.
These leaders had to subject themselves to austerities of extreme severity in order to acquire moral authority necessary before they could get a hearing from their compatriots. If the leaders were avatars in human form, or at the very least, warrior-redeemers, they would have the capacity to individually carry the responsibility, and bear the cost of the endeavors, which in other circumstances, should have been shared collectively. What should have been a collective enterprise of the Indian people was often a responsibility borne by a few.
These few were haunted by a call of duty which should have been answered by many. Extreme personal sacrifices were thus demanded of the relatively few great leaders of the freedom movement, and Subhas was haunted from his boyhood days by a sense of shame and guilt about the abasement of his people. Prolonged sufferings to which the imperial rulers subjected him changed him from a dreamy young man to a warrior-redeemer.
Contents
1. Young Subhas awakes to "Moral appeal".
2. Personal philosophy.
3. Of C.R. Das—Subhas’s political mentor.
4. The 1921 movement Subhas joined.
5. Plunge at the deep end.
6. After Gandhi’s Veto on the lord reading—C.R. Das truce.
7. Repression to defeat Swaraj party challenge.
8. Unrelenting persecution of Subhas.
9. C.R. Das’s sudden death, Bose vulnerable.
10. Gandhi and Subhas, now Das’s political heir.
11. Subhas, Jawaharlal in inter-war years.
12. Option to Bolshevism and fascism.
13. "Despair devoured early Indian leaders".
14. Subhas’s credo after Das’s death.
15. Subhas, exile in Europe.
16. More on inter-war years.
17. Bose, Britain and Europe’s dictators.
18. India on the eve of World War II.
19. Differing war policies in Congress.
20. Subhas’s war policy.
21. The MI-6—OSS—NKVD alliance stalks Bose.
22. "Operation double-cross" in India against Subhas.
23. Euro-Centric war policy.
24. War aims of India’s Congress and Japan.
25. Bose breaks out of Europe to be in Asia.
26. Was Subhas too late in Asia?
27. The last canto of an epic.
28. History’s lament for Subhas Bose.
29. Bibliography.
30. Index