Mahatma Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose were two legendary personalities, gigantic in their political moral and ethical stature. Both of them were two worthy sons of Mother India. In 1915, soon after his return from South Africa Gandhiji became the unquestioned leader of India’s freedom movement and Indian National Congress. He transformed ‘an unarmed, politicallysubjugated, dumb and illiterate mass of humanity into a fearless, non-violent, politically awakened, resurgent militia. Verily out of dust, he made Indians into men’. Subhas Chandra Bose, ‘the stormy petrel of Indian Renaissance’ younger to Gandhi by 28 years who had resigned his brilliant career in the much coveted heaven-born Indian Civil Service with the resolute aim and determination to devote himself entirely to the fight for India’s freedom.
The saga of relationship between Subhas and Gandhi starts with Subhas meeting Gandhi on the very day (on 16th July, 1921) of his landing at Bombay. Their first meeting set the contours of the relationship over the coming quarter of a century between these two foremost leaders of India’s freedom struggle. To Subhas Bose, Gandhi always remained ‘India’s greatest man’. His appreciation of the unique contribution of Gandhi was unequivocal. He recognised and admitted Gandhi as the undisputable, unrivalled leader of the masses. Subhas had all praise for Gandhi’s unflinching patriotism, firmness in character, love for truth etc. Infact, Bose bowed before Gandhi’s ‘single hearted devotion, his relentless will, and his indefatigable labour’. To Gandhi, Bose was like a son whose ‘self sacrifice and suffering, drive, integrity and commitment to the national cause and the capacity to bind all Indians into one people were unsurpassed.’
Both Gandhi and Bose were totally honest men. They were internationalists and humanists. They were secular in approach and anti-racial in outlook. In whatever situations they were and whatever they were doing, their minds were always diverted towards the liberation of their motherland. The whole life of both the leaders was an epic struggle for India’s independence. In fact, the life long “Tapasya” of both, ended with the ultimate sacrifice of their very lives.
Inspite of all these, there were glaring differences between Gandhi and Subhas and in political life both were posed against each other. Young Netaji was a firebrand nationalist who believed in the tradition of Tilak and Aurobindo. Gandhiji, on the contrary, was a reluctant nationalist who belonged to the tradition of his mentor Gokhale and Tagore. Bose’s strong revolutionary urge for the emancipation of his motherland made him critical of many of Gandhiji’s techniques.
In 1920, at the age of 23, Subhas joined the Non-cooperation Movement which was going on with all its fury in Bengal under the leadership of Deshabandhu Chittaranjan Das. He took prominent part in the agitation against the Prince of Wales’s visit. In protest against the decision of Gandhi in calling off the Noncooperation Movement as a sequence to the Chauri Chaura incident in 1922, Bose felt highly dejected. In 1927, Subhas was elected as one of the General Secretaries of the Indian National Congress. A British Parliamentary Commission, known as Simon Commission was appointed, to fix up the exact status of India’s Constitutional development. Indian leaders had long been thinking in terms of early Dominion Status. For Subhas, the demand of Dominion Status appeared to be too short of his dream of full freedom. To the utter astonishment of everybody he roared before the Commission. ‘India shall be free, the only question is when’? For this bold statement he incurred the displeasure of the Mahatma who rebuked Bose in the sharpest language such of which was never before heard in the public from Gandhiji
The year 1927 brought Subhas closer to Jawaharlal Nehru at the annual session of the Indian National Congress, which was held at Madras. They formed the Independence of Indian League and under their joint effort, resolution for ‘Complete Independence’ was passed. In the next year due to the opposition of Gandhi the resolution to reiterate the demand for Complete Independence could not be approved. Thus Bose’s proposal was defeated. In 1929 to separate Nehru from Subhas, Gandhiji nominated Jawahar as the President of Indian National Congress. The Mahatma was happy as he thought that Bose would be ineffective without support from Jawaharlal. But Subhas a different stuff altogether, despite opposition both from Nehru and Gandhi declared 1929 to be the year of preparation for a massive civil disobedience movement.
In the subsequent events that immediately followed the same sort of ambivalence in the relationship between these two leaders are clearly discernible. Subhas praised Gandhiji for Dandi March and Salt Satyagraha (1930). He wrote nostalgically ‘The march of Dandi – an event of historical importance which will rank on the same level with Napoleon’s march to Paris’. He particularly admired Gandhiji success in involving women into the freedom movement. At the same time Subhas severely criticized Gandhiji’s participation in the Second Round Table Conference in London. Bose was much perturbed by the way Gandhiji played his cards at the Round Table Conference. Gandhiji should have spoken, he felt, at the Round Table Conference, with a firm voice.
In 1937, Gandhiji felt that Bose was a force to be reckoned with and hence he should no longer be neglected. He was further convinced that Subhas alone could be an instrument in the split of the Congress. Hence he decided to elect Subhas as the president of the Indian National Congress even when Subhas was not a member of that party. In the 51st session of the Congress held at Haripura in 1938, Subhas was unanimously elected as the President. Unfortunately both for the Congress and the country, the alliance between Bose and Gandhi remained precarious. Subhas not only condemned Gandhi’s favourite Charakha but gave a call to modernise India. He called upon the people to get united for an armed struggle against the Britishers.
At the presidential election in January 1939, Subhas was vigorously opposed both by Gandhi and Nehru. Nevertheless, he has achieved a decisive victory over his opponent Dr. Pattabhi Sittaramayya, Gandhi’s nominee by 1580 to1375 votes. Gandhiji openly declared that Sitaramayya’s defeat was his defeat. He said that Subhas’s references to his colleagues were unjustified and unworthy. He remarked that since Subhas had criticized his colleagues as ‘rightists’, it would be most appropriate on his part to choose a homogeneous cabinet and enforce his action. At the Tripuri Congress, Bose as the president made a clear proposal that the Indian National Congress should immediately send an ultimatum to the British Government demanding independence within six months. It was opposed by the Gandhian wing and Nehru. In the midst of the hostile situation Subhas resigned the Presidentship of the Congress on 29th April, 1939, and immediately proceeded to form a radical party bringing the entire left wing under one banner. In this connection, it would be most appropriate to mention that – Bose’s innate devotion and respect for Gandhiji remained as firm even though his path was diverging. He clearly stated ‘it will always be my aim and object to try and win his confidence for the simple reason that it will be tragic for me if I succeed in winning the confidence of other people but fail to win the confidence of India’s greatest man’.
Subhas had his ‘last long and hearty talk with the Mahatma on 20th June, 1940.’ He had pressed Gandhi to launch the struggle taking advantage of the critical position of the British in the Second World War. He told that it was the most opportune time and it was impossible to think of any other situation in which India could start the struggle. Mahatma replied, ‘why do you think that we cannot get better opportunities later on ? I am sure we will have many such opportunities. Whether England wins or loses the war, she will be weakened by it; she will have no strength to shoulder the responsibilities of administering the country, and with slight effort on our part she will have no alternative but recognise India’s independence’.
The whole nation was aroused when Subhas Bose made his spectacular escape on 17th January, 1941 (it was the day fixed for his trial for sedition) while under house detention at Calcutta and finally reached Germany in order to lead struggle for freedom from outside. Gandhi, on his part, could never endorse Subhas Bose joining with the Axis powers. Even outside India, Bose remained unshaken in his deep allegiance to Gandhiji. His praise and devotion for Gandhi were again obvious in his broadcast on Gandhiji’s birthday on 2nd October, 1943. ‘The service which Mahatma Gandhi has rendered to India is so unique and unparalleled that his name will be written in letters of gold in our national history for all time’.
Even Gandhiji, while differing from the extreme methods of Subhas Bose, had utmost admiration for his unique effort for India’s freedom. On one occasion Gandhiji wrote to Subhas, ‘regarding our love for the country and determination to achieve freedom, you are second to none. Your sincerity is transparent. Your spirit of self- sacrifice and suffering can not be surpassed by anybody’. In another occasion in a conversation with an American journalist, on the eve of launching the Quit India Movement, Gandhiji defended Bose as ‘a patriot of patriots’. Netaji’s last broadcast on 6th July, 1944 addressed to Gandhiji through Azad Hind Radio, was like a brilliant report in which he described how ‘the high esteem in which you are held by patriotic Indians outside India and by foreign friends of India’s freedom, was increased a hundred fold when you bravely sponsored the Quit India Movement in August 1942′. Concluding his speech he fervently sought the blessings of Gandhi, Father of our Nation, in this holy war of India’s liberation we ask you for your blessings and good wishes.’
During 1945 and 1946, Gandhiji came to know a lot about the exploits of Subhas and his Indian National Army. While addressing the INA prisoners he paid unreserved tributes in hailing Bose as ‘Netaji’. He also paid unqualified tribute to the INA. ‘The greatest among its achievements was to gather together, under one banner, men from all religions and races of India, and to infuse in them the spirit of solidarity and oneness, to the utter exclusion of all communal and parochial sentiments. It is an example which we should all emulate.’ It is thus clear from the above that both Gandhiji and Subhas discussed all the problems that confronted them, honestly realised their differences. Their relationship was based on truthfulness, transparency, sacrifice and suffering. No wonder, they had the deepest concern for each other till the end .
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.