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Subhas Chandra Bose (January 23, 1897 - August 18, 1945) also known as Netaji, was a Orissa born and Bengal based Indian 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.
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He was educated at the Protestant European School and the Ravenshaw Collegiate School in Cuttack, now in Orissa, the Scottish Church College, Calcutta and the University of Cambridge . He had resigned from the prestigious Indian Civil Service, despite scoring the fourth place on the merit list, as he wanted to serve his nation, then a colony of the British. Bose was once president of the Indian National Congress. He was elected for a second term against the wishes of senior party official Mohandas 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.
At 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 3500 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. At a time when none in Germany dared to criticise Hitler, 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.
A testament to Bose's organizational acumen and his vision, the Indian National Army consisted of some 45000 regular troops, a separate women's army unit named after Rani Laxmibai (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 countries: 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 Irish Free State sent a note of congratulations to Bose. This government had participated as a delegate or observer in the now defunct 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.
Though his role in collaborating with the Axis has been criticised by many Western commentators, he is recognized by many today, especially in India, as having taken a heroic stance against oppressive British imperialism.
At the time of the start of the Second World War, great controversy 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 principle: "The enemy's enemy is a friend".
Bose and the unit's heroism is still remembered among many nationalist Indians. It is also fondly remembered by some Japanese and Indian historians who see Japanese efforts to support Bose as supporting the view that it was fighting a war on behalf of the oppressed peoples of Asia.
Though his role in collaborating with the Axis has been criticised by many Western commentators, 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 therefore saw little difference between the fundamentally oppressive nature of either British imperialism or Axis's fascism. Both represented civilizational conflict not merely between the West and East, or the Occident and the Orient , but between the Oppressor and Oppressed, between the Us and the Other.
What is often ignored by the Western and Western inspired scholars is 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 , and thereby cementing the Great Divide between Hindus and Muslims and resulting in Partition, whose after effects can be felt to this day.
It is precisely due to this dichotomy that 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) and the clarion call of the I.N.A "Jai Hind" or "Victory to India" after India's national anthem.
Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport, located in Dum Dum, West Bengal, near Kolkata (Calcutta) is named after him.
Bose 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.
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