A rchive Date
[ 09-06-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ India ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/London/Salim_Mansur/2004/06/09/491125.html
India's valiant war effort barely recalled
SALIM MANSUR, For the London Free Press
2004-06-09
Sixty years measure lives of three generations, and events from 60 years ago are just about on the curve of receding memory fading away to merge into the lifeless mass of nearly forgotten historical records.
This was the sense surrounding the 60th-anniversary commemoration of D-day last Sunday: The passage of time placing this most memorable event of our age alongside other major events of the past beyond the reach of living memory.
Already for our first-year college and university students, who are not much older than many Canadians who landed on the Normandy coast that morning of "the great crusade" to liberate Europe from the darkest force ever to rampage over a continent, D-day is probably as distant as the week in 1867 when the shape of a new country on North America was being decided.
For me, the discovery of D-day's history came in school through the pages of Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day. Ryan's account was riveting and it led me to search and read as many books on the Second World War as could be found in Calcutta.
Neither D-day, nor the war itself, was remote to us in school. A great many Indians joined the war against the Axis powers, and India provided a strategic base to the Allied war effort.
This part of wartime history, however, is scarcely remembered. For my generation at school, the liberation and partition of India and the tumult that accompanied them were the dominant historic events. And yet for many of us, the stories from our parents' generation of uncles, cousins and neighbours who had served in the Royal Indian army, navy and air force were fresh and carried the smell of gunpowder.
Britain's empire stood united even as Europe crumbled in front of Hitler's armed might. The empire struck back, and its weight made a decisive difference in the capacity of Britain to wage war in the time when the United States had yet to be drawn into the fight.
During those war years, India was caught in the squeeze between the movement for independence and its place as the crown jewel of the British empire. Despite the call of Mahatma Gandhi for Britain to "Quit India," for which he and his closest political companions were imprisoned during the war years, Indians provided manpower and resources to contain both German advances in North Africa and Japanese gains in Asia.
At the war cemetery in El Alamein in Egypt, Indians lie buried as a reminder of their contribution to the victory of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's 8th Army over Gen. Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps. Indians alongside Australians and New Zealanders provided the muscle to Montgomery's advance across North Africa, and then into the Sicilian and Italian campaigns in 1943.
In the war against Japan, Indian soldiers bore the brunt of fighting in Burma and through Malaysia into Singapore. In the eventual liberation of Southeast Asia from the Japanese scheme of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, the contribution of India's soldiers, sailors and pilots was significant and remarkable since much nationalist sentiment in the region leaned toward Japan and later turned communism.
A nationalist mood overtook Indian politics as soon as the war ended. Independence followed, but it was greatly tarnished by the bloodletting of the partition that followed.
In the circumstances, scarcely any effort was made to recall the sacrifices of Indians in the greatest war ever fought, waged over several continents and oceans for freedom and democracy for all people.
Today, Indians themselves barely remember contributions made by the generation of Indians 60 years ago under the British flag in distant lands and seas as part of a common effort against the evil of the time.
It is by such forgetfulness, the effect of time's unceasing shredding of memory, that evil thrives and good has to relearn at enormous sacrifice how to prevail.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays Home Page
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