Person · nationalist leader · India

Subhas Chandra Bose

Date

1897–1945

Function

Authority & administration

Confidence

Not assessed

Location

22.573, 88.364

Worth knowing

The INA's military campaign failed at Imphal and Kohima in 1944, but the Red Fort trials of its officers in 1945 produced the largest political mobilisation of the decade and the naval mutiny that followed it — which weighed on the British decision to leave more than the campaign itself ever did.

About the place

Placed at Calcutta, where he was a municipal chief executive, Congress leader and finally a prisoner under house arrest until his escape in January 1941. His campaign was fought in Burma and Manipur, and his ashes are at a Tokyo temple.

Connections (6)

• Life routeTokyo

  Bose left Germany by submarine in February 1943, transferred to a Japanese boat off Madagascar, and reached Tokyo in June, where he secured Tojo's backing for an Indian force raised from prisoners of war. He went on to Singapore to take command of the Indian National Army and proclaim the Azad Hind government. He died in a plane crash at Taipei in August 1945, and his ashes are still at the Renkoji temple in Tokyo, three inquiries and eighty years later.

• CampaignKangla Fort, Imphal

  The INA advanced with the Japanese Fifteenth Army into Manipur in March 1944 and reached the outskirts of Imphal, where Kangla Fort — the old Meitei royal seat, then a British garrison — was the objective. The campaign broke on the monsoon, on air supply and on the defence at Kohima, and the retreat cost more lives than the fighting. It is the only sustained military action fought on Indian soil in the Second World War.

• Alternative toJawaharlal Nehru

  Bose was elected Congress president in 1938 and re-elected in 1939 against Gandhi's candidate, then forced out within months when the working committee resigned under him. Nehru, who agreed with him about socialism and disagreed about method and about Gandhi, did not back him. Six years later Nehru put on a barrister's gown to defend Bose's officers at the Red Fort — which is the whole relationship in two episodes.

• Met atAdolf Hitler

  Subhas Chandra Bose met Adolf Hitler at the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia on 27 May 1942. Bose had reached Berlin via a U-boat from Madagascar after escaping house arrest in Calcutta in January 1941 and spent 1941-43 raising the Indian Legion (Legion Freies Indien) from Indian POWs captured in North Africa. Hitler was unenthusiastic about an Indian political project, offered no public endorsement, and in February 1943 the German Navy transferred Bose to a Japanese submarine off Madagascar for the onward voyage to Tokyo and the Azad Hind government.

• Proclaimed atCathay Building, Singapore

  At the Cathay Building on 21 October 1943 Subhas Chandra Bose read the proclamation of the Provisional Government of Azad Hind, taking the oath of office as Head of State, Prime Minister and Minister of War. The cabinet he announced included Captain Lakshmi Sahgal as Minister for Women's Organisations — the first time an Indian government anywhere included a woman at cabinet rank. He signed his first state papers that evening as 'Netaji' from the Cathay's third-floor office.

• Headquartered atSingapore

  Subhas Chandra Bose arrived in Singapore in July 1943 via Japanese submarine, assumed command of the Indian National Army at a Padang rally on 5 July, and on 21 October proclaimed the Provisional Government of Azad Hind from the Cathay Building — his working headquarters as Head of State, Prime Minister and Minister of War. Singapore remained the Azad Hind capital until the INA's march on Imphal in early 1944; the Memorial to the Unknown Warrior of the INA that Bose consecrated at Esplanade Park was dynamited by the returning British in October 1945.

On these journeys

• INA — Southeast Asia to Imphal

Sources

Wikipedia, “Subhas Chandra Bose”. Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent (2011); the Netaji Papers and the reports of the Shah Nawaz, Khosla and Mukherjee commissions.

• Wikipedia — Subhas Chandra Bose