Subhas Chandra Bose
‘Give me blood, and I shall give you freedom!’
—Subhas Chandra Bose
The government considered him one of the most dangerous freedom fighters and arrested him at the slightest excuse. His house in Calcutta was kept under constant police surveillance. In spite of it Subhas Chandra Bose and his nephew Sisir managed to slip out one day and drive across north India to far off Peshawar. Then began an adventure that made him the hero of Indians and a legend called Netaji.
Subhas Chandra Bose was born on 23 January 1897 into a Bengali family in Cuttack, Orissa. His father Jankinath was a public prosecutor and became a member of the Bengal Legislative Council. A brilliant student, Subhas joined the Presidency College in Calcutta but was expelled after he beat up a professor for making racist remarks. He then studied at the Scottish Church College to graduate in philosophy and then went to Cambridge to study at Fitzwilliam College. In 1920 he stood fourth in the Indian Civil Service (ICS) examination but decided not to join the ICS as he was deeply inspired by the nationalist movement at home. He met Gandhi immediately after returning to India and joined the Indian National Congress. Gandhi suggested that he should work with Chitta Ranjan Das, a successful barister and nationalist, and Das became Subhas Chandra’s mentor. During the Non-cooperation campaign Subhas Chandra and Jawaharlal Nehru were the most popular among the young leaders of the party as they led demonstrations and travelled across the country addressing meetings.
Unlike Nehru, Bose was not impressed by Gandhi’s absolute faith in non-violence. Bose was always attracted to more radical activities and was close to many of the revolutionaries of Bengal. Unlike Nehru who worked closely with Gandhi, he chose to work with C.R. Das who was a member of the Swaraj Party within the Congress. In 1921 he was arrested for the first time when he led a demonstration against the visit of Edward, the Prince of Wales, to India. This was the first of eleven jail sentences that he would endure in the following two decades. In 1924, when Das became the mayor of Calcutta, Bose was elected the alderman on a huge salary. He used most of the money for charitable work and for the organization of the party. Later he was also elected the mayor of the city. For a while he was the principal of the National College that later became Jadavpur University. This college had been started for students who had been expelled for joining the Swadeshi Movement. An earlier principal had been Aurobindo Ghose.
Right from the start Bose had radical views on the strategy to be followed in the freedom struggle. The government always suspected him of being involved in terrorist activity and, like Nehru, he had socialist views when it came to matters of economic reforms. For a while he was exiled to the jail in Mandalay in Burma where another firebrand Bal Gangadhar Tilak had spent six years. In 1933 the government sent him into exile again and he spent three years in Europe. Like Nehru again, he met many intellectuals and political leaders including Benito Mussolini of Italy, Eamon de Valera of Ireland and Romain Rolland from France. At this time Bose married an Austrian, Emilie Schenkl, and they had a daughter.
On his return to India Bose was elected the president of the Congress at the Haripura session in 1938. Gandhi and he respected each other but could not agree on their ideology. Bose had always been one of the loudest critics of Gandhi’s strategy of non-violence and now the ideological conflict between the two spilled over into the functioning of the party. Bose considered himself the representative of militant politics and was never open to discussion or compromise. The Congress had always been an umbrella organization that tolerated many opposing views under a common purpose that united it. And one of the strongest uniting threads was their commitment to Gandhi’s path of non-violence. It was a party that worked through consensus, but now Bose was openly dividing the party between the rightists who followed Gandhi and the leftists who agreed with him. This reminded people of the split between the Moderates and the Extremists, and made many members extremely uncomfortable.
Things came to a head when next year, at the Congress session at Tripuri, he decided to stand again for president and managed to defeat Gandhi’s candidate Pattabhi Sitaramayya by a small margin. Gandhi frankly admitted that he saw it as a personal defeat. In his presidential address Bose declared that he wanted the Congress to give a six-month notice to the government to agree to immediate independence or launch a mass civil disobedience campaign. Which, most irrationally, he wanted Gandhi to lead! Gandhi felt the country was not ready for such a campaign and withdrew from the session. Then most of Gandhi’s followers who were members of the Working Committee, like Patel and Maulana Azad, threatened to resign. Finally realizing that he couldn’t possibly operate with such widespread rebellion in the ranks, Bose resigned.
As Rajendra Prasad was elected president in his place, Bose started a new party—the All India Forward Bloc—within the Congress, to follow his radical agenda. The division in the party in 1939 was one of the most serious crises the party had faced since the split between the Moderates and Extremists in 1907. Such a split would have pleased the government and spelt disaster for the freedom movement. Bose was trying to force the party into a radical and potentially violent campaign that it was not ready to undertake. He was also frankly critical of some of the leaders like Patel, Nehru and Azad and that did not go down well with the members. Nehru tried hard to mediate between the two groups but gave up when Bose refused to listen.
At this time the Second World War broke out and Bose felt that India should take advantage of Britain’s preoccupation with the war and need for Indian support to demand independence. He was planning mass civil disobedience to protest against India being included in the war but Gandhi did not agree with the plan. The government, nervous about further protests, arrested him, but Bose went on fast in prison and nearly died. Forced to release him, the government put him, virtually under house arrest in Calcutta.
On 19 January 1941 Bose and his nephew Sisir managed to leave the house and drove away in a car. They reached Peshawar and were helped by Afghans to cross the border. Bose grew a beard and wore Afghan clothes, but as he couldn’t speak Pushto, he pretended to be deaf and mute. Helped by the German secret service, he crossed into Russia using the passport of an Italian nobleman Count Orlando Mazzotta. When he arrived in Moscow he discovered that the Soviets, who were fighting the war on the side of the Allied nations (which included Britain), were not too keen to get involved. The Soviets put him on a plane to Berlin.
The Germans, part of the Axis nations fighting the Allies, were more interested and offered him the opportunity to make radio broadcasts, and he began to make speeches on the Azad Hind Radio from Berlin. At this time the BBC reported that he was dead at which he began a broadcast saying, ‘I am Subhas Chandra Bose who is still alive and talking to you.’ His plan was to build an army with the Indian soldiers who had been captured by Germany in North Africa and march towards India through Afghanistan. He also managed to meet Hitler and other Nazi leaders. However, it became clear pretty soon that Hitler, busy with his plans to invade Russia, was not too keen to support such an ambitious plan.
In 1943 a disappointed Bose travelled by a German submarine to reach Japan and got a warmer welcome, even meeting the Japanese Prime Minister Tojo. By then the Japanese had swept across Southeast Asia. They had captured British colonies like Singapore and a large group of Indian soldiers were now prisoners of war in Japanese camps. The Indian National Army (INA) was originally formed with these soldiers in 1942 by Captain Mohan Singh and was later taken over by the Indian Independence League established by Rash Behari Bose. Rash Behari was a revolutionary who had been living in exile in Japan for many years. He now handed the INA to Subhas.
The INA or the Azad Hind Fauj, with thousands of soldiers and volunteers, was organized into a proper army with the help of the Japanese. It even had a women’s unit called the Rani Lakshmi Bai regiment. Bose established a provisional government of Free India and gave the call ‘Dilli Chalo!’ to his troops. In their advance through Burma, the INA fought beside the Japanese. The Andaman and Nicobar islands were captured and Bose renamed them Shaheed and Swaraj. He was escorted everywhere by the Japanese and was not aware of the real situation on the islands. After occupation the Japanese had imprisoned many Indian freedom fighters in the Cellular Jail and were even torturing them.
The Japanese army reached the borders of Assam and Bose raised the Indian tricolour at the town of Moirang in Manipur as the army laid siege to Kohima and Imphal. The INA soldiers fought bravely and Bose hoped that Indian soldiers in the Allied army would desert and join him but that did not happen. Then the tide turned as the Germans were defeated in Europe and the Japanese began to retreat. Conditions worsened during the monsoons as food supplies dried up and the soldiers struggled against a hostile terrain. After being defeated at Kohima the Japanese surrendered and with them the INA also lost their war of independence.
No one really knows how Bose died. He is said to have died in a plane crash over Taiwan on 18 August 1945. However, for many years, rumours circulated that he had survived and reappeared in India. Bose’s final fate has remained one of the enduring mysteries of the war. All through this extraordinary adventure spanning continents, Indians had listened and prayed for him. Bose’s popularity had soared with every victory of the Azad Hind Fauj. So when three officers of the INA—Dhillon, Shah Nawaz and Sehgal—were put on trial at the Red Fort for treason, lawyer-politicians Bhulabhai Desai and Nehru came forward to defend them. Because of their huge popularity they were not punished though they were cashiered from the army.
Rabindranath Tagore called him ‘Desh Nayak’; to the people he was their ‘Netaji’. Gandhi was sure he was alive and would come back one day. During the war years most of the nationalists were in jail and it was the exploits of Subhas Chandra Bose and the INA that kept the freedom movement alive in the minds of the people. His bravery and charisma were unquestionable and he was a hero for young Indians. People listened eagerly to his broadcasts and followed the movements of the INA. He was a man of great personal courage and sincere patriotism who inspired many to join the struggle for freedom.
Bose’s patriotism was undeniable but the question remains if his decision to ally with Germany and Japan would have brought us freedom or replaced one colonial power with another. Indian freedom fighters were ill-treated in the Andamans, and then when the tide turned against them, the Japanese abandoned the INA soldiers to starvation and death. After all, ironically, the Japanese were also an imperialist power and had never given freedom to any country that they had conquered. Subhas Chandra Bose remains one of the most tragic heroes of our freedom struggle.