Subhas Chandra Bose

Bose followed Jawaharlal Nehru to leadership in a younger wing of the Indian National Congress. He rose to become Congress President in 1938, but was ousted in 1939. He was subsequently placed under house arrest by the British before escaping from India in 1940. Bose arrived in Germany in April 1941, where the leadership offered unexpected, if sometimes ambivalent, sympathy for the cause of India’s independence. By spring 1942, a German invasion of India became untenable, and Bose became keen to move to southeast Asia.

About Subhas Chandra Bose in brief

Bose followed Jawaharlal Nehru to leadership in a younger wing of the Indian National Congress. He rose to become Congress President in 1938, but was ousted in 1939. He was subsequently placed under house arrest by the British before escaping from India in 1940. Bose arrived in Germany in April 1941, where the leadership offered unexpected, if sometimes ambivalent, sympathy for the cause of India’s independence. By spring 1942, in light of Japanese victories in southeast Asia, a German invasion of India became untenable, and Bose became keen to move to southeast Asia. Identifying strongly with the Axis powers, and no longer apologetically, Bose boarded a German submarine in February 1943. Off Madagascar, he was transferred to a Japanese submarine from which he disembarked in Japanese-held Sumatra in May 1943. With Japanese support, he revamped theIndian National Army, then composed of Indian soldiers of the British Indian army who had been captured in the Battle of Singapore. The INA under Bose was a model of diversity by region, ethnicity, religion, and even gender, but his military effort was short-lived. The British Indian Army first halted and then devastatingly reversed the Japanese attack on India in late 1944 and early 1945. Almost half the Japanese forces and fully half the participating INA contingent were killed. Bose had earlier chosen not to surrender with his forces or with the Japanese, but rather to escape to Manchuria with a view to seeking a future in the Soviet Union which he believed to be turning anti-British.

He died from third-degree burns received when his plane crashed in Taiwan. Some Indians, however, did not believe that the crash had occurred, with many among them, especially in Bengal, believing that Bose would return to gain India’s Independence. The Indian National congress, the main instrument of Indian nationalism, praised Bose’s patriotism but distanced itself from his tactics and ideology, especially his fascism. The Raj, though never seriously threatened by the INA, charged 300 INA officers with treason, but eventually backtracked in the face of popular sentiment and of INA trials in its own end in the 1970s. The honorific Netaji, first applied in early 1942 to Bose in Germany by the Indian soldiers and by the German and Indian officials in the Special Bureau for India in Berlin, was later used throughout India. He continued his studies at the Collegiate Mission in Cuttack, like his brothers and sisters, in January 1902. He then shifted up to the Raven Mission, run by the Baptist Mission, which was run by Dutt Dutt and Janakinath Bose. In January 1902 he was admitted to the Protestant School in Cut tack, Orissa Division, Prabhavati Division, and continued studies at this school until 1909. His family was well to do, and he was the ninth in a family of 14 children in a Bengali family. He later went on to do the University of Calcutta.

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