Rumours of Netaji and Lord Kitchener
The Famous Poster
The febrile
excitement caused by the release of the Netaji files has now died down. The
excited yelping that had accompanied the release of some of the files seems to
be over; the (distant) relatives of Netaji are no longer in the news and all is
quiet until the next episode of Netajiitis. Perhaps today’s celebrations will
set off another bout.
The
centenary of the commencement of First World War spawned a large number of
books, some of which I have read with fascinated interest. One historical
parallel which had earlier escaped my notice may be of interest.
As soon as
the War started, by public demand and acclaim, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum was
appointed the War Secretary. On hindsight, it seems clear that while he was
public relations dream (remember the posters showing him pointing to the public
saying “the country needs you!” probably the most famous poster in history); he
was a military disaster. He was used to colonial wars of the 19th
century when British troops armed with the latest weapons of mass destruction
faced colonial armies who were often armed with nothing more than bows and
arrows. His success in these battles ( as Hilaire Belloc put it “ Whatever
happens we have got, the maxim gun and
they have not”) , showed him up a larger than life figure and to the British
public he was a demigod who could do no wrong.
Unfortunately
his tactical and strategic flaws were showed up again and again in battle after
battle. The disasters of the first British Expeditionary Force, Dardanelles
(aided and abetted by the other great ass who thought himself a military genius,
Churchill), and Somme showed him up for what he was, a washed up has been and
there were initially titters of discontent which soon changed to a torrent of
abuse. However, dreams die hard, and he was still in charge of the war when he
sailed For Russia to coordinate a meeting with the allies. The ship he was
travelling on, the HMS Hampshire struck a mine near the coast of Scotland and
drowned killing almost all on board, including the great lord.
His body was
obviously never found and immediately there started a popular refusal to
believe that he was dead. Theories abounded. He did not die; his epaulettes
were later found in Norway, proving he had survived; he was in Russia,
commanding the Tsar’s army or that he was a prisoner of the Germans. These were
only the less improbable theories.
One of his
sisters tried to contact his spirit using the services of a spiritualist, she
failed: this proved to the conspiracy theorists that he was not dead, because
if he had been dead, he would definitely have responded to his sister’s call. Another
theory was that he had been spirited away to the Middle East by submarine where
he was on a secret mission. He had been seen disguised as a Chinese potentate.
In 1917, a crofter’s wife in Orkney claimed to have seen him waving to her from
a cave in which he was living (shades of Gumnam Baba).
Other
variants of this story claimed that he was in hiding and would emerge when
Britain had most need of him a la King Arthur. In 1922, a spiritualist claimed
that he had appeared to him (safely dead this time) and told him the details of
his drowning and promised to be reborn in a noble English family in the
fullness of time.
There were
in addition a lot of conspiracy theories regarding whodunit. The Jews were
blamed as were fifth columnists, the Bolsheviks and trade unionists. All or
some of them were apparently responsible for tipping off the Germans that the
great man was travelling.
(All this
information is from Jeremy Paxman’s Great Britain’s Great War, Penguin Books, London, 2014)
Many of the
stories bear an eerie resemblance to the stories that circulated after Netaji’s
death. The same refusal to face up to facts, the same insistence that “he will
reappear” until physiology made this claim untenable. A historian friend tells
me that the same phenomenon was seen after Nana Sahib disappeared into the
jungles of the Terai during the 1857 war of independence.
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