government, in whose pay they are,
if they are disloyal to the present
government tomorrow”. (Mahatma,
Volume7, page 72).
Such an attitude negated any
questions of establishing lines on
communication between the
national movement and the armed
forces. They were condemned to
be “mercenaries” and eternally
loyal to the Government of whose
salt they had partaken. So great
was the influence of such thinking
that even the various revolutionary
forces in the country, including
communists and socialists, who
accepted the concept of armed
struggle, never seriously thought
of establishing contacts with the
armed forces.
Born in the womb of the
Gandhian movement, they could
not appreciate the teachings of
Marx and Lenin on this critical
aspect of the revolution. They
failed to understand that, by
creating the Indian army, “The
British rule simultaneously
organized the first general centre
of resistance which the Indian
people were ever possessed of”.
This understanding of Marx had
been drawn from the experience of
1857. This lesson was not learned
by our later day, revolutionaries.
This applies equally to Lenin’s
statement: “Not a single great
revolution has ever taken place, or
ever can take place without the
‘disorganisation’ of the army”.
In such circumstances it was
but natural that the Indian armed
forces continued to remain loyal to
their salt and mercenary. There
were exceptions. The isolation from
the people could never really be
complete. As the Indian struggle for
freedom gained momentum and
dynamism it had its impact on the
Indian soldier too. How could he
remain untouched by the
reverberations of the Chittagong
armory raid, or the capture of
Sholapur by the workers?
December - 2018
The Chittagong armory raid
took place on 18 April 1931. Only
five days later on 23 April two
platoons of the second battalion of
the 13 th Royal Garhwali Rifles,
refused to fire on unarmed demon-
strators at Peshawar. Thousands
of Muslims had gathered round the
place of detention of Khan Abdul
Gaffar Khan. The British game of
letting loose a communal holocaust
with the help of Hindu soldiers was
effectively foiled. What was more,
the British were forced to withdraw
and Peshawar was in the hands of
the people till 4 May. Another
example of what happens when
sections of the armed forces come
over to the side of the people.
Significantly, Garhwali soldiers
were not violent. They handed over
their arms. They were obviously
“disloyal” to the government that
Gandhi considered evil and had
only a short while back called upon
the people “to destroy it without
delay”. This disloyalty may have
been one of the reasons why he
did not make their release an issue
when singing the Gandhi-Irwin pact
withdrawing the civil disobedience
movement. His explanation was:
“We brought all the pressure
we could bear on our negotiations
and satisfied ourselves with what
in justice we could have under the
provisional settlement. We could
not as negotiators on the
provisional truce forget of our
pledge of truth and non-violence,
forget the bounds of justice”.
(Mahatma, Volume 3, page 63).
After this, how could one
expect the Indian soldier to join the
mainstream of the national
movement?
Then came the Second World
War. The character of the war, as
it developed, demanded and
entirely new type of an army, with
different motivations. The strength
of the armed forces in India had to
be increased considerably. The old
restrictive policies could no longer
be maintained. The compulsions of
a total war, a war whose political
overtones went far beyond the
narrow ambitions of British
imperialism, forced the government
to open the armed forces to the
people.
This was no easy task. No
popular enthusiasm could be
created for the war. The only
motivation was really economic.
Hundreds of thousands of starving
peasants enlisted. A large number
of the educated middle classes
joined the clerical and technical
services. Many of them had
participated in various popular
struggles. Others had, at least, felt
the impact of the national
movement. They all wanted
freedom,
but
economic
compulsions were imperative. The
armed forces provided an
immediate solution.
By 1943 this army of
mercenaries expanded tenfold, into
a force two million strong. It not only
received accelerated training in
arms, but also in the politics of the
war. The skeptical Indian soldier
was told about fascism, about the
war to bring freedom to enslaved
people, and even about the heroic
role of the Red Army.
This army went into the world
to fight for the freedom of different
peoples from the tyranny of the
German, Italian and Japanese
fascism. These mercenaries fought
alongside their White masters and
inflicted crushing defeats on the so-
called invincible White soldiers of
Germany, Italy and their Japanese
allies. What a different role it was
from that of their predecessors,
who had fought to help their British
masters enslave other people. In
the process the Indian soldiers
went through a transformation.
I had the privilege of sharing
some of this experience and
witnessing this transformation. I
served with Indian soldiers in
Burma and Indo-China in 1945. It
was they who won the Battle of
Burma. Their victories in the
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