@Spectre
Alternative history is never easy. Anything can happen. But if the Japanese had won, then we would have been worse off than China was under them. Remember that China was an independent nation by the time the Japanese started their war of aggression against her. The Japanese would never have treated India differently; in fact, their record of treating Indian prisoners, not just the ordinary brutality that they inflicted on all prisoners, but their use as targets for firing practice, shows what would have been the norm in an occupied India.
There will be those who talk enthusiastically about the INA and about Subhash Bose; unfortunately, those were just pawns, to the Japanese, they were never given anything more than superficial control over themselves. Again, a brief look into history will make the point. Whether in Korea, or in China, through their catspaws in Manchukuo, or in any other country, including Burma, they encouraged a faction that would cooperate with their military administration and not ask too many questions. Day to day governance always remained firmly in the hands of the Japanese.
But Bose and the INA were what gave India her independence, according to dozens of emotional Indians, especially Bengalis, and to those who routinely, almost professionally hate Nehru and the Congress in general, for no reason much more convincing than that the Congress represented the 'in' people, those whose word in the right ear could move the levers of power, and they, the critics, identified themselves, whether for education, for social status, or for profession or professional status, with the 'out' people, those whose voices could be raised high but were not heard.
This is a distortion. It is the jaundiced vision of two distinct sets of people: one, the westernised professional who feels faintly embarrassed at the primitive whiff of Gandhi's popularism and habits and practices, those who spontaneously turn the conversation away from Nehru and the flirtation with the enemies of the west that the India of the first thirty odd years of her existence conjured up in the minds of these Indians, even if these were no longer the pictures conjured up in the minds of their daily life associates.
The other is point of view of those who have convinced themselves that the abstention of their forebears and intellectual leadership from the rigours and pains of the physical and intellectual struggle against the British Empire was in fact a disguise for a greater loyalty, to a greater struggle yet, more profound in nature than the struggle against the Raj. This was the struggle against the creeping westernisation, the so-called modernisation that disguised the subversion of an ancient and eminent civilisation that exceeded the western world in every possible way, but had been reduced to silence by a series of military conquests. That, too, became part of scripture; the conscious and deliberate destruction of an old way of life by the weight of the sword and through the near-ethnic cleansing of generations of Indians at the hanof cruel, barbaric practitioners of a primitive religion. It is difficult to suppress the feeling of the simplistic that a reversal was the answer, that giving the invaders sitting in our midst a taste of their own medicine, of robbery, murder, rape of their women, forcible conversion, attacks on their cultural attributes.......all these are now considered legitimate weapons for achieving redressal of ancient and ongoing wrongs inflicted by a brutal minority on a suffering minority. And what better way to start than by inflicting a sharp military defeat on the latest invader, with the help of Asian allies?
The truth, as always, lies in between. It was not Gokhale and Jinnah's constitutionalism, it was not Gandhi's raising of the masses and his unabashed appeals to the strongest emotional levers of the farming or working Indian, and it was not Bose's failed attempt at a military solution that brought the British to leave, finally. That makes it appear that they were grimly determined to hang on till eternity. A travesty of the truth. The Minto-Morley Reforms of 1919 were just the first step. The rising tempo of reform and attempted empowerment then reached a peak with the Government of India Act, 1935, which eerily anticipates much of what the Indian Constitution and its makers thought of fifteen years alter. Of course, that is irony; of course, the constitution makers obviously looked back at the 1935 Act and picked up whatever appealed to them. That is not the point. The point is the rising belief within the British that they had to let go at some time or the other, and that it should be done in a planned and systematic manner, justifying all they had done in their time as a necessary prelude to the handing over of power to the native Indian.
This, then, the realisation that Britain could not rule India for ever, and the growing belief that preliminary action had to be taken, without delay, was the fourth factor. There was, as it happens, a fifth as well.
Britain had just won a war, and had just entered into a new social contract, and was tired of Empire. What the majority who had given their vote about the nature of the forming of the post-war world did not want was another round in a conflict that had no glory at the end of it, that could be seen, no huge rewards, in fact, the contrary, and no huge opportunity for their gainful employment. Britain wanted to get out of India.
Which of these factors, then, should we hold pre-eminent? Why, none, for none was above the others. Let us simply remain thankful for what we have and what we easily might have missed out on having; Bose wanted a period of ten to fifteen years of military rule. Does that sound familiar? And would his pre-empting Ayub have got us further ahead?
Somehow I doubt it.
As penned by @Joe Shearer
@PARIKRAMA have posted it. Told him to do so himself. But he is hesitating
