THE SUBCONTINENT

force would obstruct the army from ‘marching forward to liberate the innocent civilians’ in what would be ‘the world’s largest hostage rescue operation’.

There is currently serious discussion among analysts of the ‘Sr i Lankan model’ of counterinsurgency. This is seen as a repudiation of all the fashionable liberal ‘hearts and minds’ thinking of recent years and a return to the good old-fashioned ‘kill enough of them to make them stop’ strategy. The LTTE famously helped popularise suicide bombing and, until the quantum leap in terrorism on 9/11, were seen as the most effective organisation using the tactic. Between 1987 and May 2009, the LTTE despatched 273 attackers, of whom forty-seven were women, on 137 missions. One sure consequence of the end of the war is that these have now stopped.

However, one of the strengths of this book is that, unlike much of the reporting at the time of the crisis in 2009, it unpicks the roots of the problem that led to the emergence of the effective, aggressive, innovatory and very ugly organisation that was the LTTE. This goes much further than a simple account of tensions between Tamils and Sinhala or Hindus and Buddhists, delving deep into Sri Lanka’s tradition of maximalist politics and the role of the

JOHN KEAY

THE BENGALI P IMPERNEL HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT: SUBHAS CHANDRA BOSE AND INDIA’S STRUGGLE AGAINST EMPIRE

★

By Sugata Bose

(Belknap Press/Harvard University Press 388pp £25.95)

SUBHAS CHANDRA BOSE IN NAZI GERMANY: POLITICS, INTELLIGENCE AND PROPAGANDA 1941–43

★

By Romain Hayes (Hurst and Co 224pp £20)

DESPITE TWELVE VOLUMES of Collected Works, thirty-odd biographies and innumerable studies and festschr ifts, Subhas Chandra Bose remains an enigma. To contemporaries engaged in the struggle for Indian independence in the 1930s he was an inspiration – fearless, intellectually robust and highly articulate. Twice elected president of the Congress Party, Bose represented a radical Bengali alternative to both the non-violent utopianism of Gandhi and the high-minded dithering of Nehru. In the triumvirate of prewar nationalist leaders he alone consistently demanded unconditional independence and cold-shouldered the constitutional consultations and initiatives elicited from the British. Perhaps it helped that he was more often behind bars than not. Detachment from the infighting within the violence in Sri Lanka during the 1970s and 1980s in forming the worldview of its current leaders. One minor criticism of The Cage is that Weiss could have stressed further how Rajapaksa, for all his evils, remains an extremely popular politician. Yes, he is a demagogue. Yes, he has a history of repressing the press. Yes, his rejection of any blame and clear lack of interest in any genuine reconciliation after the war are shocking. But he has won a military victory that the majority of voters are deeply grateful for and this, along with careful efforts to develop rural areas where his core supporters live, assures his power as much as anything. His various political victories are not the result of electoral fraud. The end of the war in Sri Lanka has sparked an economic boom that is forecast to double the wealth of Sri Lankans – if not of northern or plantation Tamils – within a few years and possibly triple it within a decade as foreign investment and tourists flow in. If that is so, his continued rule seems assured. The lesson of the historical chapters, indeed of this book as a whole, is clear: violence brings more violence. The lesson of the next chapter of Sri Lanka’s history may well be that violence can also bring wealth and continued power. To order this book for £11.99, see LR bookshop on page 16

Congress and from its slanging match with the Muslim League only added to his popularity. Clear-sighted and inflexible, he could not be distracted from the fundamental injustice of British rule and the paramount need for every Indian to contest it.

But it was precisely this intransigence that dictated his fateful response to the outbreak of the Second World War. Faced with a choice between passively condoning the deployment of Indian troops by the imperial power or spending the war back behind bars, Bose suddenly vanished in January 1941 from his f amily’s Calcutta home. Three months later, by way of Kabul, he resurf a c ed i n Berl i n a s a p r i z ed a s s e t i n t he Führer’s menagerie of puppet nationalists, then in Rome as a good fr iend of Il Duce, and finally in Japanese-held Singapore as the swaggering ‘Netaji’, ‘Beloved Leader’ of a Tokyo-sponsored Indian government-in-waiting and its 30,000-strong Indian National Army (INA) of mostly re-enlisted prisoners of war. His justification for joining the Axis powers was simple. In war as in diplomacy, ‘one’s enemy’s enemy is one’s fr iend’; even the Arthasastra, a Sanskr it treatise on statecraft, said so. Imperial Britain contracted similar alliances with the anti-imperialist USA and the communist Soviets. This did not mean that London endorsed communism or was serious about self-determination any more than Bose’s stand meant that he subscribed to Nazi supremacism. Yet he would still be tarred with the brush of fascism by the Western press and ridiculed as a tin-pot quisling. His broadcasts were as much rubbished as those of Lord Haw-Haw and his credibility plummeted like that of

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LITERARY REVIEW June 2011