भारत की आज़ादी का श्रेय हिटलर को जाता है। निचे लिखे लेख में कुछ तर्क सही लगता है।
'अहिंसा परमो धर्म ' सिद्धांत तो ठीक है । मैं एक लेख पढ़ रहा था उससे काफ़ी हद तक सहमत हूँ। आप की क्या राय है। आप नीचे लिंक से यह जानकारी प्राप्त कर सकते हैं।
Hitler, NOT Gandhi, Should Be Given Credit for the Independence of India in 1947
Dr. Susmit Kumar, Ph.D.
1 Cain, P.J. and Hopkins, A.G., British Imperialism 1688-2000, 2nd Ed., Pearson Education, Harlow, U.K., 2002, p. 560.
World War II had a profound effect on
the colonial powers because it completely destroyed their economies.
Although Hitler committed crimes against humanity, I give him credit—and
not Gandhi—for India’s independence immediately after World War II.
Hitler destroyed the economies of Britain and France to such an extent
that they were no longer able to financially maintain their military
forces, and were hence incapable of containing the burgeoning freedom
movements in their colonies. It is worth noting that Britain was in such
bad shape that it received about one-fourth of the total aid given
under the Marshall Plan. Regardless of Gandhi or any other charismatic
leader, Britain would have left India in 1947 purely for financial
reasons, due to its wholly collapsed economy. After WWII, Britain left
not only India but nearly all its other holdings, including Jordan in
1946, Palestine in 1947, Sri Lanka in 1948, Myanmar in 1948, and Egypt
in 1952. For the same reason, France also had to grant independence to
Laos in 1949 and Cambodia in 1953, and had to leave Vietnam in 1954. Had
there been no Hitler and no World War II, it most probably would have
taken another 30 or more years for India and some of the other colonies
to achieve independence.
Another major consequence of World War
II was that it greatly hastened Indian political independence. The
highly publicized Cripps Mission that took place in India in 1942 was
essentially a political ploy approved by Churchill to buy time for
Britain and to try to assuage anti-colonialist feelings in the U.S.[1]
British historians P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins described the hopeless situation of the British in India as follows:
By the end of war,
there was a loss of purpose at the very center of the imperial system.
The gentlemanly administrators who managed the Raj no longer had the
heart to devise new moves against increasing odds, not least because
after 1939 the majority of the Indian Civil Service were themselves
Indian. In 1945 the new Viceroy, Wavell, commented on the “weakness and
weariness of the importance of the instrument still our disposal in the
shape of the British element in the Indian Civil Service. The town had
been lost to opponents of the Raj; the countryside had slipped beyond
control. Widespread discontent in the army was followed in 1946 by a
mutiny in the navy. It was then Wavell, the unfortunate messenger,
reported to London that India had become ungovernable [which finally led
to the independence of India].[2]
There is a saying that history is
written by the victors of war. One of the greatest myths, first
propagated by the Indian Congress Party in 1947 upon receiving the
transfer of power from the British, and then by court historians, is
that India received its independence as a result of Mahatma Gandhi’s
non-violence movement. This is one of the supreme inaccuracies of Indian
history because had there been no Hitler and no World War II, Gandhi’s
movement would have slowly fizzled out because gaining full independence
would have taken several more decades. By that time, Gandhi would have
long been dead, and he would have gone down in history as simply one of
several great Indian freedom fighters of the times, such as Bal
Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Motilal Nehru, Dada Bhai Naoroji, and
C.R. Das. He would never have received the vast publicity that he did
for his nonviolence movement. Political independence for India was
achieved not by Mahatma Gandhi, but rather by Hitler rendering the
British Empire a bankrupt entity.
In fact, Gandhi’s popularity among the
masses had decreased substantially already in the 1930s, perhaps
partially because in reality Gandhi had no idea of how to bring about
India’s independence. At the Madras Congress session in 1927, when
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose, two other freedom
movement leaders, succeeded in having a resolution passed declaring
India’s complete independence, Gandhi was annoyed, and hence—only to
cater to Gandhi—the Madras resolution was modified to request dominion
status under the British the following year at the Calcutta Congress
Session in 1928.
Subhas Chandra Bose was a genius with a
superlative academic record. After only six months of preparation, he
stood fourth in the prestigious Indian Civil Services (ICS) examination,
which in those days was held at regular intervals in Britain. In his
book The Indian Struggle, Bose described his first meeting with Gandhi
in 1921:
I began to heap
question upon question…The reply to the first question satisfied me…His
reply to the second question was disappointing and his reply to the
third question was no better…My reason told me clearly…that there was a
deplorable lack of clarity in the plan which the Mahatma had formulated
and that he himself had no clear idea of the successive stages of the
campaign which would bring India to her cherished goal of freedom.[3]
Bose was unanimously elected Congress
Party president in 1938. The following year, he decided that the party
should launch a nationwide civil disobedience movement, giving the
British six months’ notice. With this goal in mind, he decided to run
for re-election as party president. This was completely within
precedent; just before his term, Nehru had also been Congress Party
president for two terms. Gandhi, however, was not pleased. He threw his
entire support behind Sitaramayya, another senior Congress leader.
Despite this, Bose defeated him. Gandhi said publicly that the defeat of
Sitaramayya was his own defeat. He then manipulated his followers in
ensuing executive committee meetings in such a way that he forced Bose
to resign from the party. Commenting on this, Aurobindo Ghosh, the
nationally famous freedom fighter turned renunciate, stated:
The Congress at the
present stage—what is it but a Fascist organization? Gandhi is the
dictator like Stalin, I won’t say like Hitler: what Gandhi says they
accept and even the Working Committee follows him; then it goes to the
All-India Congress Committee which adopts it, and then the Congress.
There is no opportunity for any difference of opinion, except for
Socialists who are allowed to differ provided they don’t seriously
differ. Whatever resolutions they pass are obligatory on all the
provinces whether the resolutions suit the provinces or not. There is no
room for any other independent opinion. Everything is fixed up before
and the people are only allowed to talk over it—like Stalin’s
Parliament.
Ultimately, however, Gandhi and the
Congress Party opted for a “Quit India Movement” against the British in
1942 and he spread the slogan “Do or Die,” which in fact Subhas had
proposed in 1938. The British government arrested all the top Congress
Party leaders and thus killed the Quit India Movement before it had a
chance to gather steam. It fizzled out entirely within a matter of
months.
Although Bose’s Indian National Army
(INA), which drew its cadre from Indian POW’s in Japanese camps and
fought along with Japanese forces on India’s eastern front towards the
end of the war, failed in its ultimate mission, indirectly it succeeded
in causing the British to leave India early. When Japan surrendered, the
British charged 20,000 INA men with treason. They decided to hold the
trial in public at the Red Fort in Delhi. The first three of Bose’s
officers to be tried were a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Sikh. This
immediately united Indians of all three religions against the British.
While the Muslim League was at that time fighting with the Congress
Party and demanding a separate state for Muslims, on this issue it
joined Congress in the now-national movement against the INA officers’
trial. Most of Bose’s army cadres were Muslims.
On November 21 and 23, 1945, a mass
demonstration took place in Kolkata (Calcutta). Participants included
members of the Congress Party, the Communist Party, and Muslim League.
The police shot more than 200 people, of whom 33 died. Then the British
decided to put on trial only those INA men who were charged with
committing murder or brutality against other POW’s. However, Kolkata
simply exploded when, in February 1946, an Abdul Rashid Khan (a Muslim)
of the INA was given seven years’ rigorous imprisonment for murder. The
protest began peacefully by students of the Muslim League, but later
students of the Congress and Communist parties joined them in
solidarity. Both the police and the army were called to put down what
came to be known as “the almost revolution.” This time nearly 400 people
were shot down, and nearly 100 killed. Since racial discrimination was
rampant in the Royal Indian Navy, Khan’s trial gave thousands of Indians
the excuse to mutiny. The mutiny spread to nearly 80 ships and 20 sites
on land. This came closer to overthrowing the British than anything
Gandhi ever did. The reasons behind Indian independence are nicely
summarized by the esteemed Indian historian Ramesh Chandra Majumdar:
There is, however,
no basis for the claim that the Civil Disobedience Movement directly led
to independence. The campaigns of Gandhi … came to an ignoble end about
fourteen years before India achieved independence … During the First
World War the Indian revolutionaries sought to take advantage of German
help in the shape of war materials to free the country by armed revolt.
But the attempt did not succeed. During the Second World War Subhas Bose
followed the same method and created the INA. In spite of brilliant
planning and initial success, the violent campaigns of Subhas Bose
failed … The Battles for India’s freedom were also being fought against
Britain, though indirectly, by Hitler in Europe and Japan in Asia. None
of these scored direct success, but few would deny that it was the
cumulative effect of all the three that brought freedom to India. In
particular, the revelations made by the INA trial, and the reaction it
produced in India, made it quite plain to the British, already exhausted
by the war, that they could no longer depend upon the loyalty of the
sepoys [low-ranking Indian soldiers under British command] for
maintaining their authority in India. This had probably the greatest
influence upon their final decision to quit India.”[4]
It was British prime minister Clement
Atlee who, when granting independence to India, said that Gandhi’s
non-violence movement had next to zero effect on the British. In
corroboration, Chief Justice P.B. Chakrabarty of the Kolkata High Court,
who had earlier served as acting governor of West Bengal, disclosed the
following in a letter addressed to the publisher of Ramesh Chandra
Majumdar’s book A History of Bengal:
You have fulfilled a
noble task by persuading Dr. Majumdar to write this history of Bengal
and publishing it … In the preface of the book Dr. Majumdar has written
that he could not accept the thesis that Indian independence was brought
about solely, or predominantly by the non-violent civil disobedience
movement of Gandhi. When I was the acting Governor, Lord Atlee, who had
given us independence by withdrawing the British rule from India, spent
two days in the Governor’s palace at Calcutta during his tour of India.
At that time I had a prolonged discussion with him regarding the real
factors that had led the British to quit India. My direct question to
him was that since Gandhi’s “Quit India” movement had tapered off quite
some time ago and in 1947 no such new compelling situation had arisen
that would necessitate a hasty British departure, why did they have to
leave? In his reply Atlee cited several reasons, the principal among
them being the erosion of loyalty to the British Crown among the Indian
army and navy personnel as a result of the military activities of Netaji
[Subhash Chandra Bose]. Toward the end of our discussion I asked Atlee
what was the extent of Gandhi’s influence upon the British decision to
quit India. Hearing this question, Atlee's lips became twisted in a
sarcastic smile as he slowly chewed out the word, “m-i-n-i-m-a-l!” [5]
1 Cain, P.J. and Hopkins, A.G., British Imperialism 1688-2000, 2nd Ed., Pearson Education, Harlow, U.K., 2002, p. 560.
2 Ibid., pp. 560-1.
3 “Netaji and Gandhi, 2 Titans of the Independence Struggle”, India Abroad (India), January 24, 1997.
4 Majumdar, Ramesh Chandra, Three Phases of India’s Struggle for Freedom, Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, India, 1967, pp. 58-59.
5 Ranjan Borra, “Subhas Chandra Bose, The Indian National Army, and The War of India’s Liberation,” Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 20 (2001), No. 1, reference 46.
source :
http://www.susmitkumar.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=100&Itemid=86
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