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Categories: Indian freedom fighters | Indian history | People of Kolkata | 1897 births | 1945 deaths Subhash Chandra BoseSubhas Chandra Bose (January 23, 1897 - August 18, 1945) also known as Netaji, was a prominent leader of the movement to win independence from British rule. Bose helped organize and later lead the Indian National Army put together with Indian prisoners-of-war and plantation workers from Singapore and Southeast Asia.
Early lifeHe was educated at the Protestant European School and the Ravenshaw Collegiate School in Cuttack, now in Orissa, the Presidency College, Calcutta, the Scottish Church College, Calcutta and the University of Cambridge . He resigned from the prestigious Indian Civil Service, despite placing fourth on the merit list, to join the freedom movement. Bose was once president of the Indian National Congress. He was elected for a second term against the wishes of Mahatma Gandhi, who supported Pattabhi Sitaramayya. Although Bose won the election, Gandhi's continued opposition led to the resignation of the Working Committee which further put pressure on Bose to finally resign. After having left the Congress Bose formed a separate party, the All India Forward Bloc. Actions during the Second World WarIn GermanyAt the start of World War II, Bose traveled to Germany where he joined the Special Bureau for India under Adam von Trott zu Solz, broadcasting on the German-sponsored Azad Hind Radio. He founded the Free India Centre in Berlin and established the Indian Legion, (consisting of some 4500 soldiers) from Indian prisoners of war who had previously fought for the British in North Africa. The Azad Hind legion was attached to the Waffen SS, and they swore their allegiance to Hitler and Bose for the independence of India. Recent research has shown that after the Normandy landings, the French resistance and military openly shot unarmed and surrendered Indian legionaries who had tried to escape to neutral Switzerland, in defiance of the norms of the Geneva Convention in 1944. Though there were a few incidents of the rape which its German liaison officers claimed that they were unable to control, on the whole it was a disciplined unit. Bose had openly criticised Hitler's treatment of Jews, annulment of democratic institutions in Germany and Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. Disappointed with the support for Indian independence from Hitler, he travelled by submarine around the Cape of Good Hope to Imperial Japan, which helped him to raise his army. This was the only civilian-transfer across two different submarines of two different navies in World War II. In JapanA testament to Bose's organizational acumen, the Indian National Army consisted of some 85000 regular troops, a separate women's army unit named after Rani Lakshmi Bai (in a regular army, the women's army unit was the first of its kind in Asia), who gave her life in the First War of Independence in 1857. These were under the aegis of a regular government, with its own currency, court and civil code, named the "Provisional Government of Free India" (or the Arzi Hukumate Azad Hind) and recognised by nine states: Germany, Japan, Italy, Croatia, Nationalist China, Siam, Burma, Manchukuo and the Philippines. On the declaration of its formation in Singapore, President Eamon de Valera of the neutral Irish Free State sent a note of congratulations to Bose. This government had participated as a delegate or observer in the Japanese-controlled so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. En route to India, some of Bose's troops assisted in the Japanese victory over the British in the battles of Arakan and Meiktila, along with the Burmese National Army led by Ba Maw and Aung San. In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal and India's northeastern towns of Kohima and Imphal, where the Provisional Government was established, the I.N.A. was forced to pull back due to sudden withdrawal of Japanese air cover with Japan's retreat following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Collaborationist or Patriot?Though his role in collaborating with the Axis has been criticised by many commentators, he is still considered by many, as having taken a heroic stance against oppressive British imperialism. At the time of the start of the Second World War, great divisions existed in the Indian independence movement about whether to exploit the weakness of the British to achieve independence. Many felt that any distinctions between the political allegiances and ideologies of the warring factions of Europe were inconsequential in the face of the possibility of Indian independence, and that it was immensely hypocritical of the British to condemn pro-democracy Indians for allying themselves with anti-democratic Axis forces when the British themselves showed so little respect for democracy or democratic reforms in India. Though Bose did ally himself with the Axis powers, there is little to suggest he shared anything approaching their doctrines of racial superiority; instead it appears he was motivated to join them largely out of political pragmatism i.e., on the logic "The enemy's enemy is a friend". It is perhaps best to view his actions through the prism of realpolitik, though whether he genuinely believed that a Japanese-occupied Asia would respect the neutrality of an independent India is unfortunately unknown. Re-evaluation of Netaji
The projection of Bose as a collaborator has been criticised by many commentators, who claim that what many fail to see is the fundamentally oppressive nature of the British rule in India. Nothwithstanding the democratic credentials of Britain and the United States in their own countries, they did not extend it to their colonies. Bose himself claimed he could see little difference between the fundamentally oppressive nature of either British imperialism or Axis's fascism despite having lived in Colonial India, democratic Britain and Fascist Germany. What many Western and Western inspired scholars fail to see was that the Indian National Army, or Azad Hind Fauz (in Hindustani) was an organization devoid of any of the divisive energies of provincialism, casteism, communalism, bigotry, parochialism, religious fundamentalism, orthodoxy due to social obscurantism and social intolerance, which in their wake, have more often than not, caused harm to India's secular and socio-cultural fabric. However certain degrees of caste and religious prejudice existed. There was also significant dissent among the volunteers of the Free Indian Legion of the Waffen-SS because the Germans organised the unit on meritocratic rather than caste and religious lines. Gandhi called Bose the "Patriot of Patriots" (Bose had called Gandhi "Father of the Nation"). He has been given belated recognition in India, by renaming Calcutta's civil airport and a university in his name. Many of the ideals of Bose have been adopted in independent India like the adoption of Rabindranath Tagore's "Jana Gana Mana", the national song of the Provisional Government of Azad Hind as independent India's National Anthem, the adoption of Hindi as India's national language, the tricolour of India's national flag (inspired partly from the flag of the Azad Hind Fauz). Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport, located in Dum Dum, West Bengal, near Kolkata (Calcutta) is named after him. Bose was posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award in 1992, but it was later withdrawn in response to a Supreme Court of India directive following a Public Interest Litigation filed in the Court against the "posthumous" nature of the award. The Award Committee could not give conclusive evidence of Bose's death and thus it invalidated the "posthumous" award. DeathBose is supposed to have died in a plane crash over Taiwan while flying to Tokyo. However, his body was never recovered, and conspiracy theories concerning his possible survival abound. One such claims that Bose actually died in Siberia, while in Soviet captivity. Mr. Harin Shah, an Indian journalist, visited Taipei and was shown a plane crash site (supposedly of Bose's plane). Photos can be found at [1] However, in an Indian investigation into his death, Taiwan told the inquiry that Bose could not have died in a plane crash in the country, stating that there "were no plane crashes at Taipei between 14 August and 20 September 1945." [2] Despite this testimony three separate Indian government investigations have concluded that Bose died in the plane crash, although a fourth one-man board convened in 1999, the Mukherjee Commission, will not issue its conclusions until 14 May 2005. Important people met by BoseIndians
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