Letter to the Indian National Congress
(April 5, 1943)
Gentlemen of the Indian National Congress:
After the beginning of China’s War of Resistance Against Japan, your honorable
Congress dispatched a medical team to China to participate in our War of
Resistance, thereby showing very great friendship for China. All five members of
this medical team worked in the Eighth Route Army. For four years, the
comrades of the medical team trekked through the battlefields in North China,
shunning neither hardship nor danger. Their arduous efforts and extremely
valuable work allowed countless Chinese soldiers and civilians to see with their
own eyes the Indian people’s enthusiasm for helping China. While three of the
five members of the medical team returned to India at various times, Dr. Kotnis
died of illness in the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Border Region.1 Our army and our
people have lost a good friend, and the Indian people have lost an outstanding
fighter. It is a loss that we deeply mourn. Dr. [B.K.] Basu is now returning to
India, and we would like to take this opportunity to express our respectful thanks
to your honorable Congress and to the Indian people. At this time, when we are
striving for final victory in the worldwide anti-Fascist war, we hope that the two
great nations of India and China will unite even more firmly so as to cooperate
with all the other anti-Fascist countries in waging war, thereby to achieve the
destruction of fascism, the liberation of all the peoples oppressed by fascism, and,
simultaneously, the liberation of the Indian and Chinese nations, thus winning
independence for these two great nations.
With respectful salutations,
Mao Zedong
Zhu De

Notes
Our source for this document is Mao Zedong wenji, Vol. 3, p. 14, where it is reproduced from the original
preserved in the Central Archives.
1. For a detailed account of Dr. Kotnis’s four years in China, see An Indian Freedom Fighter in China: A
Tribute to Dr. D.S. Kotnis (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1983). Dr. Kotnis succeeded Norman Bethune as
director of the International Peace Hospital after Bethune’s death in 1939. Kotnis died in December 1942 of
epilepsy aggravated by overwork. See also above, note to the text of December 29, 1942.