|
This
fortnightly feature was published on August 2
Freedom and the soldier
By Kuldip Singh Bajwa
IN this golden year of our Independence, let
us pause and consider the contribution made by our
soldiers to the freedom struggle. On the surface it may
appear that the sepoy was a mercenary who helped the
British to first subjugate India and then to rule us for
over 150 years. The underlying reality is considerably
different.
We were a
fragmented people when the East India Company embarked on
its conquest of the subcontinent. The Mughal empire had
broken up into a host of large and small principalities,
with their own armies and riven by internecine rivalries
and local conflicts. The British and the other Europeans
made their entry into the country as traders, an 18th
century version of the modern day multi-nationals. They
gradually took over the production and trading in the
primary commodities of indigo, opium, cotton and jute and
the sea trade. They exploited this economic domination to
curry favour with the local chieftains. By becoming
advisers to the armies of local rulers and thus
insinuating themselves into the power structure, they won
the confidence and loyalty of the Indian soldiers.
The power structure itself
was systematically weakened by inciting the rulers to
settle scores with each other. In this deepening power
vacuum, the sepoys flocked to their banners. By 1857, the
combined strength of the Bengal, Madras and Bombay Armies
was well over 3 lakh Indian sepoys as against only 40,000
British soldiers. The British defeated us in detail, kept
us divided and Britania came to rule. Undoubtedly, the
sepoy provided the main force to achieve their design but
he was not a mercenary in the strict sense. We had been a
nation, though often lacking in the trappings of a state
in the modern sense but by the 18th century, our
awareness of being a nation had been largely blurred. The
sepoy fought because this was his calling and he deeply
revered our traditions of a work ethic and honour, his
own and that of his family and his clan.
In 1857, only two-thirds
of the high caste sepoys of the Bengal Army had risen in
revolt. The initial motivation was a caste conflict.
Popular support was confined to parts of what is now
Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal, generally the area where
ruthless Firangi planters of the primary
commodities had treated the locals very harshly. By 1858,
the British had triumphed and the subcontinent passed
into a passive submission. But the first spark for the
freedom struggle had been lit.
Our peasant manhood was
welcomed and wooed into uniform. Their social and moral
conditioning and their traditional loyalty to the class,
clan and the local chieftain, was cleverly juxtaposed
into a fierce Paltan Ki Gairat, a concern for
pride and honour of the unit. The British officers were
encouraged to completely identify themselves with the men
they commanded; in fact most of them spent a part of
their leave in the areas from where their men came. This
theme of a tight knit group of the unit and the leader,
substantially made up for the lack of a unifying pull
from the alien and the rather remote British Crown.
The soldiers were
generally insulated from the broader canvas of our
political struggle for freedom and treated with special
care. But the march of ideas could not be stopped by
physical barriers. The British themselves created the
grounds for receptivity. The ever insidious onslaughts of
Indian assimilation, drove them to a zealous social
insulation. The outward arrogance of this basically
defensive mechanism, launched bruising thrusts onto the
already injured Indian pride. Soldiers, though very
thoughtfully handled, were not immune to the adverse
impact of the "No dogs and Indians allowed"
syndrome. Further more, the assiduously cultivated aura
of "white superiority" received a jolt, when
during the World War I Indian soldiers fought side by
side with white men in the Middle East and in France and
proved themselves as good, if not better. The dastardly
massacre of innocent and unarmed civilians in Jallianwala
Bagh at Amritsar on April 13, 1919, with the help of
Indian and Gorkha troops left a profound adverse impact.
In its wake came the civil disobedience movement started
by Gandhi in 1920, the atrocities committed during the
Akali morchas, hanging of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and
Sukhdev and death of Lala Lajpat Rai as a result of
injuries suffered in a police lathi charge. The Indian
soldiers were not immune to the shadows cast by these
events. In 1930, the Garhwali soldiers refused to open
fire on the Khudai Khidmatgars at Peshawar.
In the thirties, the
British tried to contain the non-violent Indian freedom
struggle mainly with the help of the police. The soldier
was largely kept out. Nevertheless, dormant concepts of
liberty became previous to the call for freedom given by
the Indian National Congress. The harsh discipline and
the obvious hopelessness of an open defiance, kept the
armed forces out of the gathering momentum of the freedom
struggle. Nevertheless, the British hold over the Indian
soldier was on the decline.
During the World War II,
the Indian Army underwent a tremendous expansion; from
less than 150,000 in 1939 to over 2,00,000 by 1945.
Inevitably the recruitment base had to be widened and the
intake thrown open to a very large spectrum of classes
other than those in which the British had especially
cultivated a tradition of loyalty to the crown. Most of
the nearly 10,000 youth inducted into the officer corps
had received liberal education. They had imbibed the
burgeoning worldwide awareness of liberty and equality. A
fair percentage of the soldiers were also educated. Both
had been exposed to the influence of the freedom
movement. During the war, bulk of them served in
South-East Asia, where the myth of white supremacy had
been blown by the Japanese. At the start of the war, the
white colonial powers, the British in Burma and Malaya,
the French in Indo-China, the Dutch in Indonesia and the
USA in the Philippines, had been humbled by the Japanese.
In Africa and Europe too, the Indian soldier had
participated in the defeat of Germany, another white
military power. Thus, the Indian soldier had become aware
of the concept of freedom as a human birth-right, and in
1945 was vastly different in his outlook from what he was
before 1939.
The overthrow of the
colonial yoke was no longer considered an unattainable
dream. This emotional development generated the primary
motivation for the formation of the Indian National Army
out of the Indian prisoners of war captured by the
Japanese. While militarily, this force made only a token
contribution to the fighting in the Eastern Theatre, its
emotional and psychological impact was significant. The
INA trials in, of all the places, the Red Fort at Delhi,
drew an upsurge of national feelings. Soon after, the
naval mutiny at Bombay and Karachi followed. Though not
connected with the freedom struggle, this mutiny, spread
indiscipline in the Air Force, unrest in the Army at
Jabalpur, all of which amounted to a fundamental change
in the outlook of the Indian soldier, left little doubt
in the minds of the British that they could no longer
rely on the Indian forces. In the wake of these
developments, Lord Wavell, the Viceroy, in a despatch to
King George VI on March 22, 1946, states:"... It is
a sorry state of misfortune and folly. Perhaps the best
way to look at it is that India is in the birth pangs of
a new order, the most disturbing feature of which is the
unrest beginning to appear in some units of the Indian
Army...." Britain, exhausted by the war, could not
support a military presence in India, credible enough to
ensure their rule. This was virtually confirmed by Earl
Atlee, the British Prime Minister in 1947. In 1956,
during a visit to India, he told the Governor of West
Bengal:" The decision to withdraw from India was on
account of a number of reasons, the most important among
them being the fact that the loyalty of the men of the
Indian Army and the Navy to their British commanders had
been undermined." Any calculation to hold on to the
"jewel in the crown" of the empire was no
longer cost-effective. The withdrawal from their Indian
Empire had become inevitable. Our non-violent freedom
struggle had nurtured the spark lit by the sepoys in 1857
into a blaze and the substantive change in the outlook of
the soldier, manifested by the eruptions and the
rumblings in the Indian armed forces, had rendered the
burning desire for Independence, uncontrollable. The
soldier had helped the British to conquer and rule India.
Now he had convinced them to quit India.
|