The United States of America has unequivocally declared its intention through its new National Security Strategy to “enlist and expand” its influence over the Western Hemisphere. That leaves the East as a hemisphere, at least for now, free of American colonialist designs. What does that freedom mean for countries in Asia that form the vast majority of the landmass of the East? Will the East simply be a mirror image of the West, with Chinese hegemony taking the place of American expansionism? Or is a different Asia possible, speaking a different language, espousing a distinct set of cultural values, representing an alternative modernity? Two men, born 140 years ago in Bengal, dreamt of such an Asia.
One born in Kushtia in British India became a practitioner of law; the other, from French Chandernagore, an expert in evading it. The former made the university and then the courtroom his home, the latter was more at home in the subterranean networks which he built across the continent. Despite their radically different career paths, they were united by a mutual predicament — how to conceive of Asianism in their fight for Indian self-determination from colonial rule. This was not the query they set out to answer when they started their respective careers. Rather, both, in their own ways, came around to the view that self-rule was not simply about seizing political power from the British. Alternative decolonial frameworks that reimagined the nature of the relationship between the people and the State needed to be built. One chose to reimagine the rule of law, while the other opted for revolutionary violence. Both of them were guided by their admiration for a newly-resurgent Japan and pitched their enterprise at a continental scale.
Justice Radhabinod Pal acquitted all Japanese war criminals accused in the Tokyo Trials after the Second World War. This was not because they had not committed heinous acts of violence. Rather, Pal’s view was that if the law were to be used to convict them, it should equally be used to convict those responsible for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For Pal, law was not only about niti — a set of rules mechanically devised and neutrally applied by judges — but also more fundamentally about hrit — a quest for universal truth underpinned by a shared morality.
The revolutionary Rash Behari Bose, who bombed Viceroy Lord Hardinge in 1912, fled to Japan in 1915, marrying a Japanese woman and settling there permanently. An expert in the art of lathi khela and, later, arms and ammunition, Bose did not fit within the colonial perception of the effeminate Bengali babu. One can only wonder at the horror of the investigators looking into the attempted bombing of the viceroy when they discovered it was Bose — a head clerk at the Forest Research Institute, Dehradun — who had orchestrated it. Joseph McQuade’s research tells us that Bose, in his later writings, reflected that “the revolutionary movements that would later unfold across the arc of Asia… had their inspiration in the glorious victory of the Japanese in the war of 1904-5.” Japan had shown that another Asia was possible — on the rise after decades of suppression, in a thoughtful rather than vengeful manner. That promise soon dissipated with Japanese imperialist expansion in Korea and Manchuria. But having seen what might have been, both Bose and Pal remained optimistic.
For their generation, growing up under colonial rule as British subjects, the idea of increasing Japanese influence in the continent — rooted in Asian values — offered an alternative to the hegemony of European empires. The Treaty of Portsmouth, when Russia was forced to recognise Japan’s dominance in Korea in 1905, set a precedent — there could be a world power beyond Europe and the US. Sunil Khilnani writes how “on hearing news of the Japanese victory led by Admiral Togo, a fifteen-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru, then on his way to boarding school at Harrow, sent a one-line postcard to his cousin Brajlal Nehru: ‘Three Cheers for Togo’.” It was against this historical backdrop that Bose would settle in Japan and work towards Indian freedom, while Pal used these arguments to set Japan’s actions in the Second World War in context.
Both their global careers peaked in the 1940s. On the bench in Tokyo from 1946 to 1948, Pal’s dissenting judgment can and has been widely critiqued as falling short in its legal reasoning. Simply put, as a matter of law, just because the Americans had bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it could not absolve the Japanese military of
their crimes in Asia. But Pal was not operating at the level of positive law, he was reimagining the nature of the enterprise itself.
Pal questioned the very basis of the trial — the charge of waging war — as an action that had never been considered a crime before. If it had not been a crime at a time when European colonial powers were plundering Asia and Africa, it could not conveniently become a crime, now that it was Asia’s time to rise. Japan’s crime, according to Pal, was not waging war but losing it. If international law could be selectively used in this manner to prevent Asian powers from rising to prominence, then it could no longer function as a set of principles but rather as a pretext to undermine the sovereignty of a resurgent Asia.
Bose, who had been in Japan for many decades, saw the Second World War as an opportunity to facilitate the organisation of the Indian National Army with Japanese cooperation. Throughout his life, he had believed it was through violence and brute force that not just India but all of Asia could be free from the clutches of European imperialism. The INA, therefore, was not merely a rebel army comprising revolutionaries and former prisoners of war, but dreamers who, like Bose, imagined an Asia independent of European imperialism. Subhas Chandra Bose even went so far as to proclaim that “India freed means humanity saved.”
Bose usually pitched his argument at a similarly transnational level. In a 1938 letter to Subhas Bose, he asserted, “In a subject country no constitutional and legal organisation can ever secure freedom, because the constitution or law is framed by the rulers for their own benefit and interest.” This was at once an alternative to the Anglo-American conception of the nation-state, capable of being moulded in both radically republican as well as totalitarian directions. Unfortunately for Bose, it did not go very far, as the INA, despite its inspiring initial victories, was soon crushed at around the same time that he himself passed away.
As the world is again at a moment when international law appears to be non-existent and Western colonial expansion has gone back full circle to its mercantile genesis, there are important lessons to be learnt from the Asianist world views of Rash Behari Bose and Radhabinod Pal. To imagine new possibilities of solidarities — transnational in scope and decolonial in spirit — one must look back into these connected historical moments to realise how such possibilities were imagined, sustained and where they failed. Lest we fail again.
Arghya Sengupta and Sneharshi Dasgupta are Research Director and Project Fellow, respectively, at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. Views are personal
