द इण्डियन स्ट्रगल / भारतीय स्वाधीनता संग्राम (नेताजी सुभाष चन्द्र बोस - ऐतिहासिक विश्लेषण)

THE GANDHI-IRWIN PACT AND AFTER 231 and I naturally shared their feelings. But after coming out, I realised that the Pact was a settled fact and there was no possibility of preventing its ratification at the Karachi Con- gress. The only question that we had to decide was whether we should put up an insignificant opposition at Karachi, or whether we should refrain from dividing the House while disapproving of the Pact. Before coming to a decision, I considered it advisable to meet the Mahatma personally. I therefore undertook a journey to Bombay which also enabled me to gauge public feeling in the provinces through which I passed. At Bombay I had long conversations with the Mahatma. After criticising the Pact, the point that I urged was that we would be prepared to support him as long as he stood for independence—but the moment he gave up that stand, we would consider it our duty to fight him. At the end, the Mahatma gave me the following assurances:¹

1. He would ask the Karachi Congress for a mandate to bind the hands of the Congress Deputation to the Round Table Conference.
2. That mandate would contain nothing that was not consistent with the status of independence for which the Lahore Congress had declared.
3. He would use all his influence and strain every nerve to secure amnesty for those who had been left out in the Pact. From Bombay the Mahatma left for Delhi and I travelled in the same train with him. This gave me a further oppor- tunity not only of supplementing our talks at Bombay but also of observing how the public were reacting to the Pact. From the ovation he received everywhere, it was quite apparent that his popularity had reached the high-water mark. It had surpassed even the record of 1921. At Delhi, no sooner did we arrive than we received a bombshell in the shape of news to the effect that the Government had decided to execute Sardar Bhagat Singh and two of his comrades in the Lahore ¹ I also learnt from the Mahatma that he had voluntarily withdrawn the demand for an inquiry into the police atrocities,