Should history be falsified, distorted, suppressed or erased to suit the ideological or personal preferences of those in power? Should important, even proud, chapters in the annals of India’s past interactions with the world be consigned to oblivion just because the government of the day does not want citizens to admire the heroes who scripted them?

These questions become pertinent when we consider India’s non-participation in the grand parade that Beijing’s Tiananmen Square witnessed on September 3. The parade, which caught worldwide attention, commemorated the 80th anniversary of China’s victory in its resistance against an eight-year-long war (1937-45) imposed by Japan. 

Some historians claim the resistance lasted 14 years since Japan first attacked Manchuria in China in 1931. Its full-scale war on China began on July 7, 1937 and ended on September 2 1945, when a defeated Japan formally surrendered. Thus, China was the earliest victim of Japanese aggression and fought against it for the longest period.

Most Indians believe the Second World War was a purely European affair. This is because Japan’s wars in Asia are glossed over in our school curriculum. But we should remember that its invasion of China, and its military conquests elsewhere in south-east Asia were an integral part of the Second World War since imperialist Japan had joined the Axis Powers – Germany and Italy – against the Allied Nations, which included the United Kingdom, France, Soviet Union, USA and China. Just as the Soviet Union suffered the heaviest losses in the European and Eurasian theatre, China suffered the highest amount of deaths and destruction in Asia. 

Japan’s war crimes: Nanjing massacre and ‘comfort women’

Japan’s wars claimed 24 million lives; over half of them were Chinese casualties. A large part of China lay in ruins. Chinese forces – both the Kuomintang army under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist army led by Mao Zedong – fought heroically to vanquish the Japanese.

Japan’s war crimes against China are well-documented. Its most infamous atrocity was the Massacre of Nanjing in December 1937. Within a span of six weeks, the Japanese army conducted a campaign of rape and mass murder, killing nearly 300,000 people in and around the city. The term ‘comfort women’ has perpetuated the shameful memory of Japan’s wars in Asia. Its imperial army forced tens of thousands of women, mostly from Korea, but also from China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Burma and other counties into sexual enslavement for the gratification of its soldiers. 

Japan’s imperialist expansion had begun much earlier. After defeating China in the first Sino-Japanese war in 1894-95, it annexed Taiwan from the former. It also ruled Korea as a colony from 1910 to 1945. Its attack on China in 1937 marked the second Sino-Japanese war. 

After initial intrusions into China, Japan made spectacular gains against the British and allied armies in South-East Asia. Occupying Burma from 1942-45, Japanese troops also came to the doorsteps of India and attempted to capture Kohima and Imphal. Had China succumbed to Japan, India too could have faced the flames of the war on its soil.

China’s successful resistance to Japanese aggression contributed greatly to the final outcome of the Second World War. By keeping most of the Japanese armed forces restricted to Chinese territory, China made it impossible for Japan to send its troops to join Hitler’s army in the European region. It also hindered the Japanese plan to invade Siberia, thereby sparing the Soviet Union the burden of defending itself in the east, at a time when it was locked in a life-and-death war to repulse Hitler’s aggression in the west.

Imperial Japan’s recklessness can be also gauged from its surprise aerial attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. Over 2,400 Americans were killed in this strike. The United States lost no time in declaring war on Japan and formally entered the Second World War on the side of the Allies. 

The Pearl Harbour misadventure led to the US committing a bigger war-crime – it dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6th and 9th August, 1945. President Truman stated, "The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbour. They have been repaid manifold". This forced Emperor Hirohito to announce the surrender of Japan on 15th August. The formal surrender ceremony was held on September 2, bringing the deadliest war in human history to an end.

Beijing’s victory parade: What message did Modi send by not attending it?

Lessons of history, if not recalled for the edification of new generations, are lost in the dark depths of time. As a result, mankind repeats the horrors of the past. The 80th anniversary of China’s victory over Japan in the Second World War was an occasion that called for a befitting international commemoration. 

The global community had a duty to pay homage to the fallen soldiers, civilians and patriots of China, who defended their nation – and humanity at large – against Japanese militarism.

Responding to an invitation from Chinese president Xi Jinping, Russian president Vladimir Putin, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and leaders of over twenty other nations joined the victory parade in Beijing. India’s near and distant neighbours – Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Iran, Vietnam, Cambodia and others – were also present.  

Conspicuously missing among the global leaders at the parade was Prime Minister Narendra Modi – or any of his ministerial colleagues. India was only represented by its ambassador in Beijing. Neither Modi nor President Droupadi Murmu even sent greetings to President Xi Jinping on the occasion. 

In contrast, when Russia commemorated its own victory in the Second World War with a grand parade in Moscow on May 9, India was among the 29 countries that attended it. India’s representative at the event was Sanjay Singh, minister of state for defence, who was warmly welcomed by President Putin. Defence minister Rajnath Singh was scheduled to go, but he had to stay back in New Delhi on account of the Pahalgam terror attack, which had taken place on April 22. 

What message did Modi send to China by not attending the Beijing parade, which took place soon after the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Tianjin? Indeed, what message did he send to China by first visiting Japan on August 29-30 before going to attend the SCO summit? Would India take it lightly if a foreign dignitary visited Pakistan first before coming to New Delhi? 

In Tianjin, Modi was seen in a highly convivial setting, in the company of Xi and Putin. The photograph of the Indian prime minister holding the hands of the Chinese and Russian presidents had gone viral in the global media, causing intense unease in Washington and other western capitals. 

Modi’s non-participation in China’s victory parade has gladdened those Indian and American commentators who are opposed to normalisation of India-China relations. They have interpreted it as his way of appeasing Japan, USA and Australia, and telling them that India is very much a part of the anti-China Quad forum. One of them, C. Raja Mohan writing in The Indian Express, has said, “Tokyo, unsurprisingly, urged countries not to attend.”

There is nothing wrong in India having friendly relations with today’s Japan. Many countries, including China itself, seek good relations with Japan. The international community has established good relations with today’s Germany while not condoning Hitler’s crimes during the Second World War. Similarly, having good relations with today’s Japan does not mean we should turn a blind eye to the horrors committed by imperialist Japan in the past.

History is a mirror. It shows a nation its moral character in times when humanity suffers its worst tragedies and celebrates its greatest triumphs. If Modi’s India views itself in the mirror of history, it will find that, during British colonial rule, an unfree and impoverished India had shown exemplary moral courage in condemning imperial Japan and standing in solidarity with China. 

The support extended to China by the party leading our freedom movement, the Indian National Congress (much-maligned today for allegedly sacrificing India’s national interests) was not merely verbal. Here, I would like to highlight five signposts of that solidarity, which, unfortunately, have been erased from the memory of today’s generation in India.

First, Dr Dwarakanath Kotnis. In September 1938, the Indian National Congress sent a five-member medical mission to China to help Chinese soldiers and people. The hero of this mission was Dr Kotnis, a graduate from a medical college in Bombay. He worked tirelessly in the most arduous wartime conditions and ultimately died on Chinese soil on December 9, 1942. He was only 32. 

Mao Zedong mourned his death by saying: "The army has lost a helping hand, the nation has lost a friend. Let us always bear in mind his internationalist spirit.” Zhou en-lai, who later became China's prime minister, said: "Dr Kotnis is a symbol of friendship between the great Chinese and Indian nations and a shining example of the Indian people, who are taking an active part in our common struggles against Japanese militarism and world fascism.”Shantaram, a famous Bollywood filmmaker of yester-decades, immortalised this bond with his 1946 film ‘Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani’. Many Indians may have forgotten him now, but Dr Kotnis, because of his self-sacrifice, remains a household name in China more than eight decades after his death. Whenever top Chinese leaders visit India, they make it a point to meet members of Dr Kotnis’ family.

Second, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. The medical mission to China was a joint initiative of Nehru and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who had become president of the Indian National Congress in 1938. Nehru’s writings in those years are replete with expressions of support to Chinese people. “China fights not for herself alone but for the freedom of all peoples in Asia… Her struggle is our struggle,” Nehru declared in a speech in 1942. Soon after Japan’s invasion of China, the Indian National Congress under Nehru’s leadership decided to observe ‘China Day’ against Japanese aggression and to boycott Japanese goods. Congress held public meetings in many cities across India.

In response, in November 1937, Zhu De, the legendary commander in chief of the Mao-led Eighth-Route Army, wrote to Nehru. He expressed the gratitude of the Chinese people to India for its support and sympathy. He also stated that if the Japanese succeeded in colonising China, no European colony in Asia could gain freedom for many years. 

Nehru did something even more courageous – he visited war-torn China in 1939 to personally convey the sympathy and solidarity of Indians with our neighbour. He spent nearly 15 days, mostly in Chongqing, which was then the base of the war efforts of the Kuomintang (Nationalist) Government of China, headed by Chiang Kai-shek. Nehru wanted to travel to Yanan to meet Mao Zedong, but he had to return to India due to the outbreak of the Second World War. 

When I went to Chongqing two years ago, I tried to visit places associated with Nehru’s visit to the city in 1939. Unfortunately, I was told that there is nothing in the city to keep that memory alive. China should commemorate Nehru’s visit to Chongqing in a befitting manner.

Third, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore. He, like Nehru, had great admiration and respect for Japan. However, he was pained by its imperialist ambitions and its imitation of Europe in the use of violence. Japan's invasion of China in 1937 shattered his dream of the Unity of Asia. 

The Nanjing Massacre provoked Tagore to tell the Japanese: “I have deep love for your as people, but when as a nation you have your dealings with other nations you can also be deceptive, cruel and efficient in handling those methods in which western nations show such mastery.” 

It is apposite to mention here a famous exchange of letters in 1938 between Tagore and Yone Noguchi, a renowned Japanese poet. Noguchi criticised Tagore for supporting China. He insisted that Japan did not commit aggression against Chinese people. Rather, he claimed, it was Japan’s selfless mission to liberate them from the tyranny of Chiang Kai-shek, from foreign (European) oppression as well as from the threat of communism. “Believe me,” he wrote to Tagore, “it is the war of ‘Asia for Asians’… for establishing a new great world of Asiatic continent”.

What Tagore wrote in reply was prophetic. “I speak with utter sorrow for your people; your letter has hurt me to the depths of my being. I know that one day the disillusionment of your people will be complete… China is unconquerable, her civilisation is displaying marvellous resources; the desperate loyalty of her peoples, united as never before, is creating a new age for that land. Caught unprepared by a gigantic machinery of war, hurled upon her peoples, China is holding her own; no temporary defeats can ever crush her fully aroused spirit. Faced by the borrowed science of Japanese militarism which is crudely western in character, China’s stand reveals an inherently superior moral stature. And today I understand more than ever before the meaning of the enthusiasm with which the big-hearted Japanese thinker [Kakuzo] Okakura assured me that China is great.”

Fourth, Subhas Chandra Bose. Modi never tires of idolising Bose, but he would not like Indians to know what the revolutionary Congress leader thought of China. It is well known that Bose saw in the Second World War an opportunity to reach out to Britain’s enemies – Germany and Japan – and achieve India’s freedom with their help. 

He was an admirer of Japan. Japan did help him in many ways. But he never endorsed Japan’s invasion of China. The Nanjing Massacre had shocked him. In an article, "Japan's Role in the Far East" (originally published in the Modern Review in October 1937), he wrote: 

“Japan has done great things for herself and for Asia. Japan has shattered the white man's prestige in the Far East and has put all the Western imperialist powers on the defensive—not only in the military but also in the economic sphere. She is determined to drive out the Western powers from the Far East. But could not all this have been achieved without imperialism, without dismembering the Chinese Republic, without humiliating another proud, cultured and ancient race? No, with all our admiration for Japan, where such admiration is due, our whole heart goes out to China in her hour of trial." (‘The Essential Writings of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’. Sisir K. Bose and Sugata Bose (eds.). Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1997 p. 190. Italics mine.)

Bose also had cautionary advice for India. With an indirect admonition of Japan, he said: "Standing at the threshold of a new era, let India resolve to aspire after national self-fulfilment in every direction – but not at the expense of other nations and not through the bloody path of self-aggrandizement and imperialism." 

Sugata Bose, a renowned Harvard historian and grandson of Subhas Bose’s brother Sarat Chandra Bose, provides more information in this regard in his 2024 book ‘Asia After Europe ─ Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century’. In November 1943, Netaji Bose travelled to Nanjing and immediately proceeded “to pay his homage at the mausoleum of Sun Yat-Sen”, a Chinese revolutionary who founded the Kuomintang party and established the Republic of China in 1911. On the night of November 20, 1943, Subhas Chandra Bose gave a 45-minute radio address to the Chinese people, in which he paid glowing tributes to Sun as “a friend of India, a firm supporter of Indian independence and a strong opponent of British Imperialism”. 

On another occasion, Bose insisted that “the Indian people really sympathise with China and the Chinese people”. He said: “Every Indian should be true to the cause of India and likewise every Chinese should be true to the cause of China.” He even cited Mahatma Gandhi’s statement in 1942 that “if India were free he would have gone on a mission to bring peace between China and Japan”.

Nirmola Sharma, a research scholar at the Delhi-based Institute of Chinese Studies, provides another fascinating piece of information about Bose’s two visits to China in 1943 and 1944. “On the day Subhas Chandra Bose reached Shanghai, 3,000 Indian residents in Shanghai had assembled in the Bund area carrying the national flag of India, and shouting slogans of ‘Long Live Gandhi, Long Live Nehru, Long Live Bose’.” 

When Bose was invited to address the faculty and students at Tokyo University in November 1944, he urged Japan to "avoid a selfish and short-sighted policy, and work on a moral basis". 

Fifth, and most important, Mahatma Gandhi. In his hundreds of letters, speeches and interviews during the period between 1937 and 1945, we see numerous instances when Gandhiji condemned Japan’s war on China and affirmed his sympathies with the people of China. 

To better appreciate the significance of the stand he took, it is necessary to recall the critical historical context in which he did so. When Japan attacked China, started capturing British colonies in South-East Asia and even began advancing towards India, there were some Indians who thought we should seek Japan’s help to drive out the British and gain freedom. Bose was one of them. Gandhiji stoutly opposed this thinking. 

He said: 

“It is folly to suppose that the aggressors can ever be benefactors. The Japanese may free India from the British yoke, but only to put in their own instead. I have always maintained that we should not seek any other power's help to free India from the British yoke.

We should have to pay a heavy price, if we ever consented to take foreign aid as against the British. … I have no enmity against the Japanese, but I cannot contemplate with equanimity their designs upon India. Why do they not realize that we as free men have no quarrel with them? Let them leave India alone. And if they are well-intentioned, what has China done to deserve the devastation they have wrought there?"

Gandhiji, though he was deeply committed to Asian unity and peace in Asia, believed that enslavement of India by the British had prevented India from adequately helping the Chinese and bringing the Japanese war of aggression to an end. But there were some Chinese leaders, Chiang Kai-shek being the most prominent among them, who thought that India could best help China by temporarily suspending the freedom movement and helping Britain, an ally of China in the Second World War, in its war efforts.

In a visit facilitated by the British, Chiang Kai-shek came to India in February 1942 and met many Indian leaders. He also had a five-hour-long meeting with Mahatma Gandhi in Calcutta. 

His main purpose was to seek British help in defeating the Japanese forces. He therefore advised the Congress to soften its anti-British stance. However, Gandhiji could not be persuaded to support Britain, unless there was a firm guarantee of India's freedom. 

There were also differences between the two leaders on the concept of violence versus nonviolence. Therefore, Gandhiji later wrote in a letter to Vallabhbhai Patel: “I would not say that I learnt anything from Chiang Kai-shek, and there was nothing that we could teach him.”

Whatever his differences with Chiang Kai-shek, they never diminished Mahatma Gandhi’s admiration for China and his fraternal feelings towards Chinese people. This is evident from a historic letter he wrote on 14 June 1942 to Chiang Kai-shek. (Harijan, 21 June 1942, CWMG Vol. 76, p. 318). 

In it he recalled his close association with Chinese people during his years in South Africa. “I knew them first as clients and then as comrades in the Indian passive resistance struggle. I came in touch with them in Mauritius also. I learnt then to admire their thrift, industry, resourcefulness and internal unity. …I have thus felt greatly attracted towards your great country and, in common with my countrymen, our sympathy has gone out to you in your terrible struggle.”

He added: “Because of this feeling I have towards China and my earnest desire that our two great countries should come closer to one another and co-operate to their mutual advantage, I am anxious to explain to you that my appeal to the British power to withdraw from India is not meant in any shape or form to weaken India's defence against the Japanese or embarrass you in your struggle. India must not submit to any aggressor or invader and must resist him. I would not be guilty of purchasing the freedom of my country at the cost of your country's freedom. That problem does not arise before me as I am clear that India cannot gain her freedom in this way, and a Japanese domination of either India or China would be injurious to the other country and to world peace.”

“Very soon,” Gandhiji said to the Chinese leader, “you will have completed five years of war against Japanese aggression and invasion and all the sorrow and misery that these have brought to China. My heart goes out to the people of China in deep sympathy and in admiration for their heroic struggle and endless sacrifices in the cause of their country's freedom and integrity against tremendous odds. I am convinced that this heroism and sacrifice cannot be in vain; they must bear fruit. To you, to Madame Chiang and to the great people of China, I send my earnest and sincere wishes for your success.”

The closing lines of Gandhiji’s letter will forever stand as the finest expression of the noble goal that must guide the relationship between the world’s two ancient civilisational-nations. “I long for the day when a free India and a free China will co-operate together in friendship and brotherhood for their own good and for the good of Asia and the world.”

Not to be trapped in the past, but to create a peaceful future for the world 

The purpose of recalling the above-mentioned events that took place over eight decades ago is not to carry forward the animosities of the past to the present. Japan of today is unrecognisably different from its imperial avatar. Its miraculous post-war recovery inspired countries around the world, including India and China. No less impressive is its rich cultural heritage. Hence, there is every reason for India to forge the best of friendly relations with today’s Japan. The same is true about today’s Germany.

Rather, the purpose of this article is to remind ourselves of a proud legacy of our freedom struggle – namely, that India always stood on the side of Dharma (right) and not Adharma (wrong). This legacy should guide India’s foreign policy now and in the future. To forget this is to legitimise a foreign policy that, for example, sees nothing wrong in silently supporting new genocidal war crimes of the kind Israel is currently perpetrating on defenceless Palestinians in Gaza. As the example of imperial Japan shows, a narrow and self-centred interpretation of “national interest” can lead to grave crimes against humanity.

To forget our own proud legacy also renders India weak and vulnerable when the world faces new dangers to peace. After all, imperial, hegemonistic and bullying tendencies have not disappeared with the end of the Second World War. 

Militarism is raising its ugly head in many places, near and far. Institutions and forums for peaceful resolution of disputes are being undermined with impunity. At a time like this, India and China must not follow the examples of western or Japanese imperialists in a bid to become global superpowers. Nor should we perpetuate our own rivalries with a militaristic mindset. Asia and the world cannot breathe easy if India and China, both rising powers in the 21st century, fail to normalise our bilateral relations. Hence, it is important to remember, in the context of the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, that India and China, guided by their civilisational wisdom, have a mandate of history to create a world of peace, cooperation and shared progress for all.

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