Road to Delhi. M. Sivaram
of Indian leaders, the Indian National Council was taken over by one Mr. Debnath Das. He had arrived in Bangkok a few months before the outbreak of the war from Kobe where he was an employee of an Indian firm. He had been associated with Satyananda Puri in the work of the Thai-Bharat Cultural Lodge and was popular with the Japanese authorities.
The Indian independence movement in Burma had not made any significant progress. Rangoon had set up a League branch but the task of pacification had not yet been concluded in the interior. Besides, many of the more prominent Indians had left Burma and the Japanese found it difficult to locate acceptable leaders. In other occupied territories, Java, Borneo, Sumatra, the Philippines, and Hongkong, the Japanese military authorities were busy picking up suitable leaders of the Indian communities.
Indian leaders in Malaya were persistent in the demand that the Independence League, with its unorthodox origin, should be placed on a legal and constitutional basis, before it could command the respect and confidence of the people. This, they urged, was also important in the context of the struggle for independence inside India and overseas Indians wished to ensure that any movement they launched with Japanese assistance would not conflict with the policy and program of the Indian National Congress. The Japanese military authorities discussed the problem with Rash Behari Bose in Tokyo and it was decided to set up the headquarters of the Indian Independence League in Bangkok and to organize a conference of Indian representatives from all the territories in eastern and southeastern Asia.
Rash Behari landed in Bangkok early in June (1942) with A. M. Nair and a few other Indians from Japan. Among them was A. M. Sahay, a long-time resident of Kobe, who styled himself President of the Indian National Congress of Japan. Rash Behari held a press conference, to which I was invited. He had known me before and I happened to know the journalist crowd in the city. One of the decisions, announced at the press conference, was to set up a "preparatory committee" to organize the big conference of Indians in East Asia. The next day, I received an official letter from Rash Behari, appointing me as Secretary of this preparatory committee. And Debnath Das followed up the move by selecting me as a member of the Thailand delegation to the proposed conference.
The uneasy period of hibernation had ended, as suddenly as it began. I joined the movement, with my eyes wide open, and after a sober assessment of the prospects. There was adventure aplenty ahead of me, a trifle dangerous no doubt, but if all went well, there was a chance that I might be serving my country. Or, for all my excitement and craze for adventure, I was probably a coward at heart. I hated the peculiar penance I was going through. I was tired of the self-condemned role of the unwanted character. And I feared the painless operation of the samurai sword. The result was that I steeled my heart to see the game through, in spite of the risks involved, and to strive hard for survival.
Rash Behari Bose was no professional politician but he was gifted with a great deal of political common sense. Thirty years of exile from India had mellowed the fiery terrorist that Rash Behari had been. But the energy and pluck of the old war horse were remarkable.
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