Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army

A trap built directly into this chapter is the assumption that Subhas Chandra Bose founded the Indian National Army. He did not. The INA was raised in 1942 by Mohan Singh, an Indian Army officer, and Rash Behari Bose, a revolutionary long exiled in Japan, out of Indian prisoners of war taken after the fall of Malaya and Singapore. Subhas Chandra Bose arrived in Singapore only in July 1943, took over an organisation that already existed and was already in crisis, and rebuilt it. Getting that sequence right, who raised the INA, who reorganised it, and in what order, is what separates a candidate who has memorised "Bose, INA, 1943" from one who can actually answer a statement-based question built around it. This note follows Bose's own parallel wartime track, from his break with the Congress leadership in 1939 through his escape, his time in Germany, his takeover of the INA in Southeast Asia, and the campaign and trials that followed. It runs alongside, but separately from, Gandhi's India-based Quit India Movement of August 1942, a simultaneous but distinct domestic strand covered in its own chapter on this site.

From Congress president to Forward Bloc

Bose was elected President of the Indian National Congress unopposed at the Haripura session in February 1938. The break came the following year. At the Tripuri session in 1939, Bose stood again, this time against Pattabhi Sitaramayya, the candidate Gandhi had backed, and won by 1,580 votes to 1,377. Gandhi called Sitaramayya's defeat "more his own than the candidate's", and the bulk of the Congress Working Committee resigned in protest, leaving Bose to preside without a working majority behind him. The underlying dispute was as much about strategy as personality: Bose wanted the Congress to press the British with an early, time-bound ultimatum on independence, exploiting the gathering crisis in Europe, while Gandhi judged the country not yet ready for a fresh mass struggle. The impasse was settled procedurally rather than politically: G.B. Pant's resolution required the Congress president to nominate a Working Committee in accordance with Gandhi's wishes, which left Bose isolated within his own office. He resigned the presidency on 29 April 1939.

Days later, on 3 May 1939, Bose founded the All India Forward Bloc, a left-wing group operating within the Congress that pressed for immediate independence and a more militant line than the Congress leadership was willing to sanction. It gave Bose an independent political base, but it also marked his effective break from the Congress mainstream in the years immediately before the war. That break is the hinge this entire chapter turns on: everything that follows, the escape, the alliance with the Axis powers, and the INA itself, was Bose acting outside the Congress's own strategy of civil disobedience, not as an extension of it.

Escape to Germany, then Southeast Asia

By 1940 the colonial government had placed Bose under house arrest at his family home on Elgin Road in Calcutta. On the night of 16-17 January 1941 he slipped past the police watch, disguised and bearded, and left by car for Gomoh railway station, then in Bihar. From there he travelled overland towards the North-West Frontier, crossing into Afghanistan in the guise of a deaf-and-mute Pathan insurance agent in the final week of January. In Kabul he obtained a forged Italian passport in the name Orlando Mazzotta, and travelled on through Soviet Central Asia and Moscow before flying into Germany. He reached Berlin on 3 April 1941.

In Germany, Bose set up a Free India Centre in Berlin and, working with the German government, raised the Free India Legion (Indische Legion, also called the Legion Freies Indien) from Indian prisoners of war captured by German and Italian forces in North Africa. The Legion never grew into a significant fighting force: its strength peaked at roughly 4,500 men, and it saw limited action, mostly garrison duty on the Atlantic Wall in France rather than any campaign directed at India. It matters for the exam mainly as a marker of how modest Bose's German venture actually was in military terms, worth keeping distinct from the far larger force he would go on to lead in Asia. Bose's one meeting with Hitler, on 29 May 1942 in Berlin, was by most accounts unproductive: Hitler was evasive when pressed on the anti-Indian remarks in his own writing, and offered little beyond eventually agreeing to arrange Bose's passage east by submarine.

That passage began on 8 February 1943, when Bose left Kiel aboard the German submarine U-180. After a voyage of roughly three months around the Cape of Good Hope, he was transferred, mid-ocean off Madagascar, to the Japanese submarine I-29 on 28 April 1943, reportedly the only civilian transferred between submarines of two different navies during the Second World War. He landed in Japanese-held Sumatra in May 1943 and reached Singapore on 2 July 1943.

The Indian National Army and Azad Hind

The INA Bose inherited in Singapore already had a history. After the fall of Malaya and Singapore to Japan in early 1942, tens of thousands of Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army, out of roughly 45,000 taken prisoner, were organised into an army by Mohan Singh, working with Japanese intelligence officer Fujiwara Iwaichi, under the political umbrella of the Indian Independence League, which Rash Behari Bose headed. This first INA existed through the second half of 1942, but collapsed in December that year when Mohan Singh, resisting Japanese control over how the force would be used, was arrested and interned by the Japanese. Rash Behari Bose kept the League alive afterwards mostly as a caretaker, and it was in that depleted state that Subhas Chandra Bose took charge.

On 4 July 1943, two days after reaching Singapore, Bose formally received leadership of the Indian Independence League, and with it the INA, from Rash Behari Bose; he took the formal title of Commander-in-Chief on 25 August 1943. Bose reorganised and expanded the force, recruiting further from Indian prisoners of war and from the large expatriate Indian population of Malaya and Burma, and gave it a political wing to match: on 21 October 1943, in Singapore, he proclaimed the Provisional Government of Free India, Azad Hind, with himself as head of state, prime minister, and minister of war. The government was recognised within days by Japan, Germany, Italy, and their other Axis-aligned states, and it formally declared war on Britain and the United States. In November 1943 Japan transferred nominal control of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to Azad Hind; Bose renamed them Shaheed (martyr) and Swaraj (self-rule) and visited Port Blair on 29-30 December 1943 to hoist the Indian tricolour, though real military control of the islands stayed with Japan throughout.

The most distinctive unit Bose raised was the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, an all-women combat regiment, formed after Bose proposed it at a public meeting in Singapore in July 1943, named for the Rani of Jhansi who had fought the British in 1857. It was led by Captain Lakshmi Sahgal (born Lakshmi Swaminathan), and its recruits, drawn largely from Indian families settled in Malaya, were trained for combat rather than confined to nursing or auxiliary roles, before being moved towards the Burma front alongside the rest of the INA. It stands as one of the only all-women combat units fielded by any army in the Second World War, and is one of the more frequently tested specifics within this chapter.

The Imphal-Kohima campaign, Bose's death, and the Red Fort trials

Bose's INA got its one real chance to fight on Indian soil in 1944, when Japan's Fifteenth Army, roughly 85,000 strong and including a division of INA troops, launched an offensive from Burma towards Imphal and Kohima in India's north-east, intending to seize British supply bases and cut the road linking the two towns. Fighting ran from 8 March to 18 July 1944; INA units crossed into Indian territory at points along the border and briefly raised the Indian flag, the propaganda purpose Bose had hoped for, but the wider campaign turned into a rout. Cut off from resupply and pinned down by Allied air power, the Japanese force was forced into retreat, first at Kohima by mid-May and then at Imphal by 22 June. The campaign is counted among the heaviest defeats the Japanese army suffered in the entire war, with tens of thousands of casualties, and it opened the way for the Allied reconquest of Burma over the following year. For the INA specifically, the defeat at Imphal-Kohima ended any realistic prospect of fighting its way into India, and the retreat through Burma that followed cost the force further ground and men through 1944 and into 1945.

Bose did not long survive the collapse of his campaign. On 18 August 1945, days after Japan's surrender, he died from third-degree burns after the Japanese bomber carrying him to Tokyo crashed shortly after taking off from Taihoku airfield in Japanese-occupied Taiwan; he was taken to a military hospital in Taipei, where he died the same evening. The circumstances have never been free of dispute. Two Indian government inquiries, the Shah Nawaz Committee of 1956 and the Khosla Commission of 1970-74, both concluded that Bose died in the crash as reported. A later inquiry, the Mukherjee Commission, which reported in 2005, did not accept that conclusion, though it did not establish any alternative account of his death either. The exam-safe position is the one the two earlier, formally accepted inquiries reached, treating the matter as genuinely re-examined rather than settled beyond all dispute.

The INA's political afterlife proved more consequential than its military record. Between November 1945 and January 1946, the British held courts martial of INA officers at the Red Fort in Delhi, the most prominent being the joint trial of Colonel Prem Sahgal, Colonel Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, and Major General Shah Nawaz Khan, all former British Indian Army officers who had joined the INA after capture. Charged chiefly with waging war against the King, the trial opened on 5 November 1945 and drew a defence team that crossed party lines, including Bhulabhai Desai, Tej Bahadur Sapru, and Jawaharlal Nehru, who returned to the courtroom for the case. All three were convicted, but the scale of public protest and sympathy the trial provoked across the country, cutting across the Congress, the Muslim League, and communities that had until then stayed largely outside organised politics, made the sentences impossible to enforce: they were remitted, and the three men were released in early January 1946. Coming in the war's final months, alongside the Royal Indian Air Force and Royal Indian Navy mutinies that followed within weeks, the Red Fort trials did more to unsettle British confidence in continued rule than the INA's own defeated campaign ever had.

Quick revision points

• Bose did not found the INA. It was raised in 1942 by Mohan Singh and Rash Behari Bose from Indian prisoners of war taken after the fall of Malaya and Singapore; Bose took over leadership only on 4 July 1943, after reaching Singapore on 2 July 1943.
• Elected Congress president unopposed at Haripura (1938); re-elected at Tripuri (1939) against Gandhi's nominee Pattabhi Sitaramayya, but resigned on 29 April 1939 after the Pant Resolution left him isolated. Founded the All India Forward Bloc on 3 May 1939.
• Escaped house arrest in Calcutta on the night of 16-17 January 1941; reached Berlin on 3 April 1941. In Germany, raised the Free India Legion (peak strength about 4,500), which saw little real combat, and met Hitler on 29 May 1942, a largely unproductive meeting.
• Travelled by submarine from Kiel (8 February 1943), transferred mid-ocean to a Japanese submarine off Madagascar (28 April 1943), and reached Southeast Asia in May 1943.
• Proclaimed the Provisional Government of Free India (Azad Hind) in Singapore on 21 October 1943, with himself as head of state, prime minister, and minister of war; recognised by Japan, Germany, and Italy.
• Raised the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, an all-women combat unit, led by Captain Lakshmi Sahgal, one of the few all-women combat units of the Second World War.
• The Imphal-Kohima campaign (8 March to 18 July 1944), fought alongside Japan's Fifteenth Army, ended in defeat, one of the heaviest the Japanese army suffered in the war.
• Bose died on 18 August 1945 in a plane crash at Taihoku (Taipei), Taiwan. Two official inquiries (Shah Nawaz Committee, 1956; Khosla Commission, 1970-74) accepted the crash account; the Mukherjee Commission (2005) did not, without establishing an alternative.
• The Red Fort trials (November 1945 to January 1946) of Prem Sahgal, Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, and Shah Nawaz Khan ended in conviction but remitted sentences, after public protest that galvanised opinion against British rule far more than the INA's own campaign had.

Once the sequence is fixed, Mohan Singh raises the INA, Bose escapes to Germany separately, Bose then takes it over in 1943, the chapter's statement-based traps largely dissolve on their own.