Chapter 8: History: Forward Bloc and INA
In the summer of 1920 a young Indian sat the Indian Civil Service examination in London and came fourth. The Civil Service was the steel frame of British rule in India — a small, salaried, powerful body of officers who collected the revenue, ran the districts and answered, in the end, to the Crown. For an Indian family of modest means, a son in that service meant security for a lifetime. Subhas Chandra Bose, born at Cuttack in Odisha in 1897, had that security in his hand. In April 1921 he gave it up. He wrote to his elder brother, Sarat Chandra Bose, that a man could not take the government’s pay and serve his country at the same time; the two loyalties would pull in opposite directions. He resigned before he had served a single day, and sailed home to join a national movement that could promise him nothing. Nothing in that decision tells us what he would become. It does tell us how he thought. When a choice was hard, Bose preferred the sharper road to the safer one — and he took it early, alone, and in writing. Twenty-two years later, the same habit of mind would put him at the head of an army raised on foreign soil, in a war that half the world was fighting.
Diagram
Fig. 8.0-1 Caption: Subhas Chandra Bose photographed in uniform during his years in South-East Asia. Brief: Reproduce a documented archival photograph of Subhas Chandra Bose in military uniform. Label with his name and the years 1943–45. No decorative background; plain caption bar below.
8.1 Why Bose Looked For A New Path
The Forward Bloc and the Indian National Army were not born out of nothing. Both grew out of a disagreement inside the Congress about how freedom should be won, and how fast.
That disagreement had been building for nearly twenty years. It came to a head in 1939, in an election that Subhas Chandra Bose won and an office he then gave up. To understand why he left, we first have to see how he had worked within the Congress until then.
8.1.1 Subhas Chandra Bose In The National Movement
Bose joined the national movement in 1921 and began his political work in Bengal under Chittaranjan Das, the Calcutta lawyer who then led the Congress in the province. He was arrested and imprisoned several times over the next two decades, which was the ordinary experience of a Congress worker of his generation.
He did not always agree with the decisions of the Congress leadership. When Mahatma Gandhi suspended the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1922 after the violence at Chauri Chaura, Bose was among those who thought a movement at its height should not have been called off. He believed that pressure, once built, had to be used.
The chapter’s timeline sets out the main steps of his career in the Congress.
At the Calcutta session of 1928, Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru argued that the Congress should demand complete independence rather than dominion status, which would have left India inside the British Empire with a government of its own. The session settled on a compromise. Two years later Bose took part in the Civil Disobedience Movement and went to prison again.
In 1938 the Congress met at Haripura in Gujarat and elected Bose its President, unopposed. As President he pressed three ideas: national planning, unity within the movement, and the organisation of ordinary people into it. He set up a National Planning Committee, with Jawaharlal Nehru as its chairman, to work out what a free Indian government would actually do about industry, agriculture and poverty.
That last idea is worth pausing on. Bose was asking a question few in the movement were asking aloud in 1938 — not how to end British rule, but what should be built the day after it ended. A photograph of the Haripura session shows the ceremony of that moment.
Diagram
Fig. 8.1-1 Caption: Subhas Chandra Bose at the Haripura session of the Congress in 1938, where he was elected President. Brief: Reproduce a documented archival photograph of the 1938 Haripura session showing Bose as President-elect amid the crowd and decorations. Label the place and year. No cropping that removes the crowd.
A photograph like this one records a public occasion, and public occasions are designed to look united. Everything in the frame — the crowd, the decoration, the platform — was arranged to be seen. What the camera cannot reach is the committee room, where the arguments about method and pace were already running. Within a year those arguments would break into the open, and no photograph of 1938 would have told us they were coming.
8.1.2 The Differences With Gandhiji And The Congress Leadership
By 1939 Bose and Gandhiji differed on four questions that mattered. These were disagreements about method, not about the goal; both wanted the British to leave.
Economic direction. Bose wanted large-scale industry, planned and built by the state. Gandhiji wanted small-scale and village industry, so that the village could feed and clothe itself without depending on distant factories.
The pace of struggle. Bose held that the Congress should place a firm demand before the British with a time limit, and launch a mass struggle if it was refused. Gandhiji held that the movement was not yet prepared for another struggle of that size.
The princely states. About two-fifths of the land area of India lay under Indian rulers who governed under British protection rather than under direct British administration. Bose and the Congress left wing — the section of the party that wanted faster action and socialist economic policy — wanted the Congress to support the movements of the people in those states. Others feared this would spread the Congress too thin and open a second front it could not hold.
The coming war. As Britain moved towards war with Germany in 1939, Bose argued that Britain’s difficulty was India’s opportunity, and that the demand should be pressed exactly when it was hardest to refuse. Gandhiji was unwilling to strike at a country under attack, and looked instead for a settlement.
8.1.3 The Tripuri Session And The Resignation
In January 1939 Bose stood for re-election as Congress President for a second term. Gandhiji had tried to persuade him not to contest. When Bose stood anyway, Gandhiji supported Pattabhi Sitaramayya, and Bose won the election by a majority of votes.
Gandhiji then said publicly that the defeat of Bose’s rival was his own defeat rather than Pattabhi Sitaramayya’s. This was an unusual thing for a leader to say, and it made the result something larger than a contest between two candidates. It turned the election into a public statement about who held the confidence of the Congress.
Most members of the Congress Working Committee — the small executive body that runs the Congress between its annual sessions and decides its day-to-day policy — then resigned. A President without a working executive cannot function, and this was the difficulty Bose now faced.
The Congress met at Tripuri, in what was then the Central Provinces and is now Madhya Pradesh, in March 1939. Bose was seriously ill and had to be carried into the session. A resolution moved by Govind Ballabh Pant expressed the session’s confidence in Gandhiji’s leadership and asked the President to form his Working Committee in accordance with Gandhiji’s wishes.
That resolution settled the matter. Bose had the office and the votes; the resolution gave the direction of policy to someone else. The deadlock could not be resolved, and on 29 April 1939 Bose resigned the presidency of the Congress. Rajendra Prasad was elected in his place.
Bose did not leave the Congress at this point. He left its highest office, and began to organise the section of the party that agreed with him — which is where the Forward Bloc begins.
8.2 The Forward Bloc
8.2.1 The Founding Of The Forward Bloc, 1939
Within days of leaving the Congress presidency, Bose acted on the conclusion he had drawn from the deadlock. If the members who wanted faster action were scattered across the Congress, they would always be outvoted. If they were organised under one banner, they could not be ignored.
On 3 May 1939 he announced the formation of the Forward Bloc, a new organisation of the left wing built inside the Congress rather than against it. Its members were to remain Congressmen. The Bloc was meant to be a bloc — a group acting together within a larger body — and not a rival party.
The arrangement did not hold for long. In August 1939 the Congress leadership disqualified Bose from holding any elective office in the Congress for three years, after his Bloc organised protests against a Congress decision. The Forward Bloc, meant to work inside the Congress, was pushed steadily towards working outside it.
The diagram below shows the position the Bloc was designed to occupy.
Diagram
Fig. 8.2-1 Caption: The Forward Bloc was formed as an organised left wing within the Congress, not as a separate party. Brief: A simple schematic. One large outer circle labelled ‘Indian National Congress’. A smaller shaded circle inside it, touching the edge, labelled ‘Forward Bloc, founded 3 May 1939’. Arrow from the smaller circle to a caption strip reading ‘members remain in the Congress’. No portraits, no flags.
A schematic of this kind shows a design, not a strength. It cannot tell us how many members the Bloc actually had, how many Congress workers took it seriously, or how much of its support came from Bose’s own standing rather than from its programme. For that we would need membership records, local reports and newspapers of 1939, and those give an uneven picture.
8.2.2 Objectives Of The Forward Bloc
The Forward Bloc set out one immediate objective and one longer objective.
Its immediate objective was the liberation of India, to be won with the support of workers, peasants, youth and other organisations. The wording matters. Bose was naming the groups he thought a freedom struggle would have to rest on, and they were not the groups a party of lawyers and merchants would have named first.
Its longer objective was the establishment of a socialist state after independence — an order in which the state owns or directs the main means of production, and plans the economy so that wealth is shared more evenly. The Bloc named three measures by which it would build such a state.
Reorganisation of agriculture and industry on socialist lines.
Abolition of the zamindari system — the arrangement under which intermediaries held the right to collect revenue from land, and the cultivator paid them rather than the state.
Introduction of a new monetary and credit system.
Read together, the three measures answer the question Bose had been pressing since Haripura: what does a free government do on its first working day? His answer was that it must change who owns land, who controls industry, and who lends money — because independence that left those three untouched would change the flag and little else.
8.3 The Indian National Army
While Bose was organising the Forward Bloc in India, the Second World War was spreading eastward. In December 1941 Japan entered the war and drove through South-East Asia at great speed.
That advance did two things at once. It broke British power across a region where lakhs of Indians lived and worked, and it put tens of thousands of Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army into Japanese hands as prisoners. Out of those two facts the Indian National Army was made.
8.3.1 Indians In South-East Asia And The Indian Independence League
Indians had been settled across South-East Asia for generations — as traders in Singapore, as plantation workers and clerks in Malaya, as merchants and labourers in Burma and Thailand. They were subjects of the British Empire living far from India, and the war now cut them off from it entirely.
The map shows the region as it stood after the Japanese advance of 1941 and 1942.
Map
Map 8.1 Caption: South-East Asia in 1942, after the Japanese advance, showing the places where the Indian National Army was organised. Brief: Regional map of South-East Asia with the political boundaries of 1942, clearly labelled as boundaries of that period and not of today. Shade the areas under Japanese occupation by mid-1942. Mark and label Tokyo, Singapore, Malaya, Bangkok, Rangoon, Burma and the eastern frontier of India. Do not extend the map to show India’s present boundaries; state in the key that this is a historical map.
A map of occupation shows control on paper. It cannot show what that control felt like on the ground, or how divided the Indian population under it was. Some Indians in these territories organised at once for Indian independence; others kept their heads down, protected their businesses, or distrusted the Japanese entirely. The shading tells us who held the ports and roads, and nothing about what people in them believed.
The League Takes Shape
Indians in the occupied territories began forming associations to protect their own community and to work for India’s freedom. From these grew the Indian Independence League, a civilian organisation of overseas Indians in East and South-East Asia. Its most experienced figure was Rash Behari Bose, who had been living in Japan since 1915.
Largely through his efforts, a conference of Indian delegates met the Japanese High Command at Tokyo in March 1942. It decided to expand and strengthen the Indian Independence League, to raise under the League’s overall command an Indian National Army for the liberation of India, and to settle these decisions at a larger meeting at Bangkok.
That larger conference met at Bangkok in June 1942, with delegates from Malaya, Singapore, Burma, Thailand, Hong Kong, Manila and Java. It invited Subhas Chandra Bose, then in Europe, to come and lead the movement. It set up a Council of Action to control and guide the whole movement, elected Rash Behari Bose as its President, and appointed Mohan Singh Commander-in-Chief of the Indian National Army.
Notice what this order of business establishes. The army was placed under a civilian league, and the league invited a political leader from outside to head it. The men organising in 1942 wanted the force to be an Indian political movement with an army, not a Japanese unit with Indian soldiers.
8.3.2 Mohan Singh, Founder Of The INA
The idea of the Indian National Army (INA) was conceived in Malaya by Mohan Singh, an Indian officer of the British Indian Army. When the British forces retreated before the Japanese advance, he decided not to retreat with them and went instead to the Japanese for help.
This was a new proposal. The Japanese had until then encouraged civilian Indians to join anti-British organisations, but had no plan for raising a fighting force of Indians. Mohan Singh’s proposal was that the prisoners could become an army.
A prisoner of war is a soldier captured by the opposing side, whom the laws of war require to be held and not harmed. What happened at Singapore in February 1942 turned that legal category into a political question.
The organisers were aware of that second doubt, and tried to answer it. At meetings of Indian community leaders and Indian Army officers it was made clear that the INA would go into action only on the invitation of the Indian National Congress and the people of India. The army was to act for a national movement, not for a foreign command.
That first INA did not last. Disputes grew through 1942 between Mohan Singh and the Japanese command over how far the army would be independent and how it would be used. In December 1942 Mohan Singh was removed and the first INA was dissolved.
The men, the organisation and the idea survived the collapse. What the movement lacked was a leader with political standing in India itself — which is why the Bangkok invitation to Subhas Chandra Bose mattered so much.
8.3.3 Objectives Of The INA
The main objectives of the INA were the following.
To organise an armed revolution and to fight the British army with modern arms.
Since Indians could not organise an armed revolution from their homeland, the task had to be assigned to Indians living abroad, and particularly to Indians living in East Asia.
To organise a provisional government of Free India, in order to mobilise all the forces effectively.
Total mobilisation of Indian manpower and money for a total war.
The second and fourth objectives repay a second reading. The second is an admission: the British hold on India was tight enough that an armed rising had to be organised from outside it. The fourth uses the language of the world war then being fought — total war, in which a state mobilises its whole population and economy, not only its soldiers.
Taken together, the four objectives describe a movement that had decided armed struggle was possible and non-cooperation was not enough. That was a break with the method the Congress had followed since 1920, and the men who made it knew that it was.
8.4 The Contribution Of Subhas Chandra Bose
The Bangkok conference had invited Bose to lead the movement in East Asia. Getting there was itself a long undertaking, because he was under guard in Calcutta and the shortest routes ran through territory the British controlled.
8.4.1 The Escape From India And The Journey Eastward
In July 1940 Bose was arrested and held under the Defence of India Rules, the wartime regulations that allowed the government to detain people without trial. He went on a hunger strike in prison. As his health declined the government released him, and kept him under house arrest at his home in Calcutta.
In January 1941 he left that house in disguise, evading the police watching it. He travelled north-west through Peshawar and crossed into Afghanistan, and from there made his way through the Soviet Union to Germany, reaching Berlin in April 1941.
In Germany the Indian community greeted him as Netaji, meaning respected leader, and with the greeting Jai Hind, ‘victory to India’. He set up a Free India Centre in Berlin, spoke frequently on the radio urging Indians to rise against British rule, and raised a small Indian force from Indian prisoners of war held in Europe.
Germany, however, was thousands of kilometres from India, and Bose came to see that the movement with real weight was the one in South-East Asia. In February 1943 he left Germany by submarine, transferred at sea to a Japanese submarine, and reached South-East Asia in the middle of 1943.
8.4.2 Supreme Commander Of The INA
Bose arrived at Singapore in July 1943 and within days took charge of the Indian Independence League from Rash Behari Bose. In August 1943 he took over the Indian National Army as its Supreme Commander.
The army he inherited had collapsed once already. He rebuilt it. He established headquarters at Singapore and later at Rangoon, the capital of Burma, and opened recruitment beyond the prisoners of war to civilian Indians settled across South-East Asia — traders, clerks, plantation workers and their children.
One decision marked the reorganised INA out from every other army fighting the Second World War. Bose raised a women’s combat regiment, the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, commanded by Lakshmi Swaminathan, a doctor practising in Singapore. Its recruits were mainly the daughters of Indian families settled in Malaya and Burma.
Diagram
Fig. 8.4-1 Caption: Recruits of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment on parade in South-East Asia, photographed during the Second World War. Brief: Reproduce a documented archival photograph of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment in uniform on parade. Label the regiment and the years 1943–45. Avoid any cropping that isolates a single face for dramatic effect.
A parade photograph shows what an organisation wanted the world to see — that the regiment existed, that it drilled, that it was serious. It cannot tell us how many women served, how they were treated within the force, or what they thought they were joining. Much of what we know about that comes from what a few of them said and wrote long afterwards, in old age, about a period their families had reason to keep quiet about.
Bose gave the reorganised army its slogans and its call. Its battle cries were Delhi Chalo, ‘march to Delhi’, and Jai Hind. To his soldiers he gave the call, ‘Give me blood and I shall give you freedom’. The INA’s motto was unity, faith and sacrifice.
8.4.3 The Provisional Government Of Free India
An army needs a government to act for, if it is to be an army and not an armed band. On 21 October 1943, at Singapore, Bose set up the Provisional Government of Free India — a government of Azad Hind, or free India, claiming to speak for Indians until India itself was free. He headed it as Head of State, Prime Minister and Minister for War and Foreign Affairs.
The Provisional Government declared war on Britain and the United States. It was recognised by Japan, Germany, Italy, Burma and Thailand, and by other states allied to them. No country outside that group recognised it.
Its main task was to conduct the struggle that would expel the British and their allies from Indian soil. Its second task was to prepare the way for a permanent national government of Azad Hind afterwards.
On 6 November 1943 Japan handed the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to the Provisional Government, and Bose renamed them Shaheed and Swaraj — ‘martyr’ and ‘self-rule’. This was the first stretch of Indian territory the Provisional Government held. In practice the Japanese military continued to run much of the islands’ administration, and how far the Provisional Government’s authority there was real is a question historians still weigh.
In 1944 Bose shifted the headquarters of the Provisional Government from Singapore to Rangoon. The reason was geography: only a land border separated Burma from India, and from Rangoon the eastern frontier of India was within reach of his army.
8.4.4 The Campaign On India’s Eastern Frontier
The INA went into action in February 1944, advancing with Japanese forces towards India’s eastern frontier. It first captured Mowdok, an outpost south-east of Chittagong in what is now Bangladesh.
The main advance was directed at Imphal, in Manipur, and Kohima, in the Naga Hills. The map shows the ground over which it was fought.
Map
Map 8.2 Caption: The advance of the INA and Japanese forces towards Imphal and Kohima in 1944. Brief: Historical map of the India–Burma frontier region with the boundaries of 1944, clearly labelled as boundaries of that period and not of today. Mark Rangoon, Mandalay, Moirang, Imphal, Kohima, Ukhrul and Chittagong. Arrows showing the line of advance from Burma towards Imphal and Kohima. Key must state that this is a historical map of 1944 and does not show present boundaries.
The advance reached Ukhrul and Kohima and came within a few kilometres of Imphal. In April 1944 the INA flag was raised on Indian soil at Moirang in Manipur. Imphal itself was never taken, and the map’s arrows should not be read as territory secured — an arrow on a campaign map records a direction of attack, not a line that held.
Three things stopped the advance. The monsoon rains broke over hills with no proper roads, and supply columns could not get forward. Japanese forces were being pushed back hard by American and Allied forces in the Pacific, and could spare nothing more for this front. The INA itself depended on Japan for aircraft, artillery, ammunition and transport, and when Japanese supply failed, the INA’s failed with it.
The retreat that followed was worse than the advance. The British recaptured Rangoon in May 1945. INA soldiers were disarmed and made prisoners of war for a second time. Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945, and the surrender sealed the fate of the INA.
Bose left Rangoon for Bangkok and then flew towards Tokyo. On 18 August 1945 his aircraft crashed at Taihoku, in Taiwan. The Japanese official account states that he died of his injuries that day. Committees of inquiry appointed in India have examined the evidence since, and the question has remained a matter of public dispute, but no alternative account has been established from the surviving records.
8.4.5 The INA Trials And Their Impact
The INA had lost its campaign, its commander and its government within a single year. What followed in India was not what the British government expected.
In November 1945 the government put three captured INA officers on public trial by court martial at the Red Fort in Delhi. The three had earlier been officers of the British Indian Army, and the charge was waging war against the King.
The trials came at a moment when the country was already restless. National leaders imprisoned during the Quit India Movement had been released, and the war had ended.
In February 1946 the Indian naval ratings at Bombay, now Mumbai, rose in revolt, and similar risings followed at Karachi, Calcutta and Madras. The government put them down, but the political meaning was plain enough. The British had governed India for nearly two centuries with an army and a navy recruited mainly from Indians, on the assumption that those forces would obey.
That assumption was what the INA and the trials had shaken. British commanders now had to reckon with the possibility that Indian troops might not be relied on against Indians. The INA had failed as a military campaign and yet altered the political ground, which is not a common outcome for a defeated army.
8.5 Summary
Subhas Chandra Bose worked within the Congress from 1921. He took part in the Civil Disobedience Movement, argued at the Calcutta session of 1928 for complete independence rather than dominion status, and was elected Congress President at Haripura in 1938, where he set up a National Planning Committee under Jawaharlal Nehru.
By 1939 Bose and Gandhiji differed on four questions of method, though not on the goal.
- Bose wanted large-scale planned industry; Gandhiji wanted small-scale village industry.
- Bose wanted a firm demand with a time limit and immediate mass struggle; Gandhiji held that the country was not ready.
- Bose wanted the Congress to support the people’s movements in the princely states; others feared a second front.
- Bose held that Britain’s wartime difficulty was India’s opportunity; Gandhiji looked instead for a settlement.
Bose won the presidential election of January 1939 against Pattabhi Sitaramayya, but most of the Congress Working Committee resigned. The Tripuri session of March 1939 asked him to form his Working Committee according to Gandhiji’s wishes. Unable to govern the Congress on his own terms, he resigned the presidency on 29 April 1939.
On 3 May 1939 he founded the Forward Bloc, an organisation of the left wing built inside the Congress rather than against it. In August 1939 the Congress leadership disqualified him from elective Congress office for three years.
The objectives of the Forward Bloc were the following.
- Its immediate objective was the liberation of India, with the support of workers, peasants, youth and other organisations.
- After independence it would build a socialist state through the reorganisation of agriculture and industry on socialist lines, the abolition of the zamindari system, and a new monetary and credit system.
Japan’s advance through South-East Asia in 1941 and 1942 cut off large Indian communities from India and put tens of thousands of Indian soldiers into Japanese hands. Indians in the occupied territories organised the Indian Independence League, in which Rash Behari Bose, long settled in Japan, was the leading figure.
The idea of the Indian National Army was conceived in Malaya by Mohan Singh, an Indian officer of the British Indian Army, who is its founder. After the fall of Singapore in February 1942, about 45,000 Indian prisoners of war passed into his sphere of influence, and by the end of that year some forty thousand men had expressed willingness to join. The organisers stated that the INA would act only on the invitation of the Indian National Congress and the people of India.
The Tokyo conference of March 1942 agreed to raise the army under the League. The Bangkok conference of June 1942 set up a Council of Action under Rash Behari Bose, appointed Mohan Singh Commander-in-Chief, and invited Bose from Europe. The first INA was dissolved in December 1942 after disputes with the Japanese command.
The objectives of the INA were the following.
- To organise an armed revolution and fight the British army with modern arms.
- To assign that task to Indians living abroad, particularly in East Asia, since it could not be organised from the homeland.
- To organise a provisional government of Free India, in order to mobilise all the forces effectively.
- To mobilise Indian manpower and money totally, for a total war.
Bose was arrested in July 1940, escaped from house arrest in January 1941, and reached Berlin through Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. He broadcast to India from Germany, and in February 1943 travelled by submarine to South-East Asia, reaching Singapore in July 1943.
As Supreme Commander from August 1943 he rebuilt the INA, opened recruitment to civilians settled in South-East Asia, established headquarters at Singapore and Rangoon, and raised the Rani of Jhansi Regiment under Lakshmi Swaminathan. Its battle cries were Delhi Chalo and Jai Hind, and its motto unity, faith and sacrifice.
On 21 October 1943 he set up the Provisional Government of Free India at Singapore, which declared war on Britain and the United States and was recognised by Japan, Germany, Italy, Burma, Thailand and their allies. On 6 November 1943 Japan handed over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, renamed Shaheed and Swaraj, though the Japanese military continued to run much of the administration there.
The INA went into action in February 1944, captured Mowdok, reached Ukhrul and Kohima, and raised its flag at Moirang in Manipur, but never took Imphal. The monsoon, Japanese losses in the Pacific and the INA’s dependence on Japanese supply ended the campaign. Japan’s surrender on 15 August 1945 sealed its fate, and Bose died after an air crash at Taihoku on 18 August 1945, an account that has remained in public dispute.
The public trial of Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Kumar Sahgal and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon at the Red Fort from November 1945 turned the INA into a national cause across religious lines. Demonstrations and a defence fund forced the remission of the sentences, naval ratings rose at Bombay and other ports in February 1946, and the British could no longer assume the loyalty of Indian forces. The INA failed militarily and still altered the political ground.
8.6 Key Terms
Congress Working Committee — the small executive body of the Indian National Congress, which runs the organisation between its annual sessions and decides its day-to-day policy.
Court martial — a military court that tries members of the armed forces for offences under military law.
Forward Bloc — the organisation founded by Subhas Chandra Bose on 3 May 1939 to bring the left wing of the Congress together under one banner, while remaining inside the Congress.
Indian Independence League — the civilian organisation of Indians settled in East and South-East Asia, under whose overall command the Indian National Army was raised.
Indian National Army — the army of Indians, first raised from Indian prisoners of war in Malaya and Singapore in 1942, formed to fight for India’s liberation.
Left wing — the section of a party that presses for faster action and for socialist economic policy.
Netaji — ‘respected leader’, the title by which Subhas Chandra Bose was greeted by Indians in Germany and later in South-East Asia.
Prisoner of war — a soldier captured by the opposing side in a war, whom the laws of war require to be held and not harmed.
Provisional Government of Free India — the government of Azad Hind set up by Bose at Singapore on 21 October 1943, claiming the allegiance of Indians until India itself was free.
Socialist — describing an order in which the state owns or directs the main means of production and plans the economy so that wealth is shared more evenly.
8.7 Points to Ponder
The Forward Bloc was built inside the Congress and not against it. Can a group with its own programme and its own discipline stay part of a larger party, or does it become a rival simply by being organised?
The organisers of the INA said the army would go into action only on the invitation of the Indian National Congress and the people of India. Why would an army in the field want a political body’s permission before it fought?
The Provisional Government of Free India administered almost no territory and depended on another power for its weapons. What made it a government — its recognition by other states, its army, or its claim to speak for Indians?
Bose argued that Britain’s difficulty in 1939 was India’s opportunity. What does a movement gain, and what does it risk, when it times its demand to another country’s crisis?
The INA lost every campaign it fought, and yet the trial of three of its officers moved the whole country. What does this suggest about the relationship between military success and political effect?
Much of what we know about the Rani of Jhansi Regiment comes from what a few of its members said many decades afterwards. How should a historian weigh a recollection given so long after the event?
8.8 Objective Questions
The idea of the Indian National Army was conceived in Malaya by
- Rash Behari Bose
- Mohan Singh
- Shah Nawaz Khan
- Prem Kumar Sahgal [1 mark]
The Forward Bloc was founded in
- February 1938
- May 1939
- October 1943
- February 1946 [1 mark]
Which of the following was not an objective of the Forward Bloc?
- Liberation of India with the support of workers, peasants and youth
- Abolition of the zamindari system
- Introduction of a new monetary and credit system
- Recognition of the Provisional Government by the Axis powers [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: The Provisional Government of Free India was set up by Subhas Chandra Bose at ____________ on 21 October 1943. [1 mark]
Match the persons in Column A with their roles in Column B. [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Mohan Singh | i. Commander of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment |
| b. Rash Behari Bose | ii. Defeated candidate in the Congress presidential election of 1939 |
| c. Lakshmi Swaminathan | iii. Founder of the Indian National Army |
| d. Pattabhi Sitaramayya | iv. President of the Council of Action set up at Bangkok |
State whether the following statement is true or false: The Indian National Army captured Imphal in 1944 and advanced from there towards Delhi. [1 mark]
- Subhas Chandra Bose resigned from the presidentship of the Congress on 29 April 1939.
- Most members of the Congress Working Committee had resigned, leaving him without a working executive. a. (II) is the reason for (I) b. (II) contradicts (I) c. (I) is true but (II) is false d. (I) and (II) are independent of each other [1 mark]
- Subhas Chandra Bose shifted the headquarters of the Provisional Government from Singapore to Rangoon in 1944.
- Only a land border separated Burma from India, and the eastern frontier of India lay within reach from Rangoon. a. (II) is the reason for (I) b. (II) contradicts (I) c. (I) is true but (II) is false d. (I) and (II) are independent of each other [1 mark]
8.9 Check Your Concepts
Name the founder of the Indian National Army and state where the idea of such an army was conceived. [2 marks]
State any two objectives of the Forward Bloc. [2 marks]
Give reasons why Subhas Chandra Bose resigned from the presidentship of the Congress in April 1939, although he had won the election. [3 marks]
Differentiate between the Indian Independence League and the Indian National Army. [3 marks]
State the objectives of the Indian National Army. [4 marks]
Trace the chain of events by which Indian prisoners of war in South-East Asia became soldiers of the Indian National Army. [4 marks]
‘The Indian National Army failed as a military campaign and yet altered the political ground in India.’ Evaluate this claim, with reference to the Red Fort trials and what followed them. [5 marks]
Describe the contribution of Subhas Chandra Bose to India’s freedom struggle, from his arrival at Singapore in 1943 to the end of the campaign of 1944. [6 marks]
8.10 Show Your Skills
- Study the photograph described below and answer the questions that follow. A wartime photograph shows a body of young women in military uniform standing on parade in South-East Asia. A caption on the reverse records the unit’s name and the years 1943 to 1945.
- Name the unit shown and the officer who commanded it.
- Explain why Subhas Chandra Bose opened recruitment to Indians settled in South-East Asia, and not only to prisoners of war.
- State one thing this photograph cannot tell a historian about the unit, and name one kind of evidence that could. [4 marks]
- Study the map described below and answer the questions that follow. A historical map of the India–Burma frontier in 1944 shows arrows running north-west from Rangoon towards two places on India’s eastern frontier. Moirang, Ukhrul, Kohima and Imphal are marked.
- Name the two places towards which the advance of 1944 was directed, and one place at which the INA raised its flag on Indian soil.
- Give two reasons why the advance could not be sustained.
- An arrow on a campaign map shows a direction of attack. State what such an arrow does not tell you about the ground. [5 marks]
- Read the situation given below and answer the questions that follow. A school group visits a district museum. One case holds a printed proclamation dated 21 October 1943, issued at Singapore, together with a label about two island groups renamed Shaheed and Swaraj in November 1943. A student asks the guide how a government could be proclaimed while the British still governed India.
- Name the government whose proclamation is displayed, and state who headed it and in what capacities.
- Explain why the handing over of the two island groups mattered to that government.
- What evidence would a historian need in order to judge how far that government’s authority over the islands was real? [5 marks]