Asian Angle | It’s Modi and Bose vs Gandhi and Nehru in India’s battle of legacies
- The Indian Prime Minister has officially recognised the efforts of war hero Subhas Chandra Bose. Why is this so controversial? Because it’s seen as a bid by Modi to appropriate the legacies of India’s freedom movement leaders
Indian Prime Ministers usually raise the national flag on Delhi’s Red Fort just once a year – on August 15, the country’s independence day – but Narendra Modi made an exception in 2018.
On 21 October, the Hindu nationalist leader raised the saffron, white and green tricolour on the Red Fort for the second time this year, to mark the 75th anniversary of the formation of a national government in exile by independence war hero Subhas Chandra Bose, popularly called “Netaji”, or leader.
Bose turned the Indian National Army (INA) from prisoners of war in Japanese captivity in Southeast Asia into a force he led into battle against India’s British masters in the closing stages of the second world war.
He then mysteriously disappeared after a reported plane crash in Taipei following Japan’s defeat.
The British provoked a countrywide revolt in 1945 as they tried some INA officers for sedition, only for the charges to be dropped in a bid to cool things down.
Historians say the “ghost of Bose” haunted the British because they could no longer count on the loyalty of their Indian soldiers, which observers say influenced Britain’s hasty exit from the subcontinent in 1947.
“It was Bose and not Gandhi who got us our freedom by striking the most decisive blow against the British by exposing that Indian troops were no longer loyal to them. This was the one single factor that influenced their withdrawal from India,” says retired major-general G.D. Bakshi in a recent book on the last years of British India. “ Bose lost the battle on the India-Myanmar frontier but won the war for India’s freedom.”