Netaji Vs Gandhiji

The two things that Mahatma Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose had in common were their unwavering faith in God and their desire to free their country of colonial rule. Beyond that, their ideologies differed widely. Anyone who came in contact with Bose was always impressed by his quiet faith and his deep spirituality.

Mentored by his political guru CR Das, and guided by the thoughts of his spiritual mentor Swami Vivekananda, he once told his friend Hari Vishnu Kamath, ‘How can I possibly accept Ahimsa as an inflexible principle of action, when Sri Krishna himself exhorted Arjuna not to run away from a righteous war, a dharmayuddha?’ Bose, when he was staying in Calcutta, would always visit the Ramakrishna Mission Ashram.

When he went to sleep, he almost always kept under his pillow a pocket edition of the Bhagavad Gita. Bose had been disillusioned by Gandhiji`s approach to the freedom struggle from the beginning of his career, but as he grew older and garnered more support, he became more open about defying Gandhiji. In 1928, he openly rejected dominion status for India as proposed by Gandhiji in the Congress, and suggested the formation of the Indian Independence League as a counter proposal.

While Bose acknowledged Mahatma Gandhi’s popularity with the masses, he did not think that Gandhiji’s methods of passive resistance would lead the country to freedom. When in 1935, Gandhi retired from the Indian National Congress, Bose said that Gandhiji had to do so because he did not seek international help, had the tendency to trust the British, and hovered between the roles of a politician and a ‘world teacher’.

Often, the intermediary between Bose and Gandhiji was Rabindranath Tagore. He wrote to Gandhiji as Bose’s well wisher and if there was anyone that Gandhiji felt duty bound to justify his actions to, it was to Tagore. Likewise, Tagore not only wrote to Bose and showed his unstinted support and loyalty, he did his best to show Bose the other side of the picture. Perhaps due to this, Bose often found himself thinking about Gandhiji and his politics. He found Gandhiji's popularity with the masses hard to fathom.

In the 'The Indian Struggle', he wrote: ‘The role which a man plays in history depends partly on his physical and mental equipment, and partly on the environment and the needs of the times in which he is born. There is something in Mahatma Gandhi which appeals to the mass of Indian people. Born in another country, he might have been a complete misfit. What, for instance, would he have done in a country like Russia or Germany or Italy? His doctrine of nonviolence would have led him to the cross or to the . . . hospital.

“In India it is different. His simple life, his vegetarian diet, his goat milk, his day of silence every week, his habit of squatting on the floor instead of sitting on a chair, his loin-cloth — in fact everything connected with, him — has brought him nearer to his people. Wherever he may go, even the poorest of the poor feels that he is a product of the Indian soil — bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh.

When the Mahatma speaks, he does in the language that they comprehend, not in the language of Herbert Spencer and Edmund Burke, as for instance Sir Surendra Nath Banerji would have done, but in that of the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana. When he talks to them about Swaraj, he does not dilate on the virtues of the provincial autonomy or federation, he reminds them of the glories of Ramrajya and they understand. And when he talks of conquering through love and Ahimsa, they are reminded of Buddha and Mahavira and they accept him. But the conformity of the Mahatma’s physical and mental equipment to the traditions and temperament of the Indian people is but one factor accounting for the former’s success. If he had been in another epoch in Indian history, he might not have been able to distinguish himself so well.

For instance, what would he have done at the time of the Indian Revolution of 1857 when the people had arms, were able to fight and wanted a leader who could lead them in battle? The success of the Mahatma has been due to the failure of constitutionalism on the one side and armed revolution on the other.’

Bose and Gandhi then had an extensive discussion about uniting their efforts to achieve the best results for the country. Dividing their forces would not serve the country’s interests. So they decided to put up a joint front and Gandhiji recommended Bose as president of the Indian National Congress in 1938.

With Bose’s continued ailing health, he was soon taken to Dalhousie to recuperate. Bose had probably contacted tuberculosis in jail and Dalhousie was perceived to have the ideal conditions for healing. More importantly, Dalhousie was a place away from the hubble-bubble of politics and the British could still keep an eye on Bose. Then, he went back to Vienna to continue his treatment.

On arrival at the Foreign Office in 1937, he demanded that an official apology should be tendered by Germany to India for all racist utterances, racial equity of Germans and Indians must be recognized and the race theory should be modified with the help of an Indian ethnologist. In return, he would encourage German propaganda in the Indian press and urge Indians to buy German goods. These demands did not result in much.

In 1938, Bose was elected the President of the Indian National Congress. This was done after Rabindranath Tagore had put in a special word to both Gandhiji and Nehru. In an essay entitled Deslmayak, Tagore wrote: ‘. . . Long ago . . . I sent out a call for the leader of Bengal who had yet to come. After a lapse of many years I am addressing...one who has to come into the full light of recognition. My days have come to an end. I may not join him in that fight that is to come. I can only bless him...knowing that he made his country's burden of sorrow his own, and his final reward is fast coming as his country’s freedom.

To this, Gandhiji’s response was a counter-article in his journal Harijan in 1940, which said, ‘The love of my conception, if it is as soft as a rose petal, can also be harder than flint. My wife has had to experience the hard variety. My eldest son is experiencing it even now. I had thought I had gained Subhas Babu for all time as a son. I have fallen from grace. I had the pain of wholly associating myself with the ban pronounced on him.'