Subhash Chandra Bose
Subhash Chandra Bose ( Bengali সুভাষ চন্দ্র বসু Subhāṣ Candra Basu , , in historical English spelling also Subhas Chandra Bose ; called: Netaji (" leader "); * January 23, 1897 in Cuttack , Odisha ; † unknown, since 18 August 1945 in Taipei, Japan) was chairman of the Indian National Congress (INC) and a leader of the Indian independence movement.
After meeting Gandhi , he joined the INC in 1921, rose quickly, and was elected mayor of Calcutta in 1930. Because of his commitment to independence, he was sentenced to several terms in British prisons and later placed under house arrest. In contrast to his internal party rivals Gandhi and Nehru, Bose wanted to use military means to achieve India's independence and finally fled India in 1941 to seek military aid abroad. After several unsuccessful negotiations, in 1944 (at the time of World War II ) he became a co-founder and leader of the so-called Indian Legion , a task force subordinate to the German Waffen-SS and formed from Indian volunteers, and later the Indian National Army , an auxiliary force of the Japanese army . Because of this, Bose's methods are still controversial in India to this day, despite the admiration for independence.
Life
Subhash Chandra Bose was born into a Bengali Hindu family in Cuttack in what was then the province of Bengal, the ninth of fourteen children. His parents were Prabhavati Devi and Janakinath Bose. The father was a wealthy lawyer. The son first attended, like his siblings, the local school run by a Baptist mission and from 1909 the Ravenshaw Collegiate School in Cuttack. After graduating from school in 1913, he briefly began studying at the Presidency College in Calcutta. He then moved to the Scottish Church College of the University of Calcutta , where he obtained a BA in philosophy in 1918 . In 1919 he traveled to England to continue his studies at Cambridge. In doing so, he complied with the wish of his father, who wanted his son to work in the Indian Civil Services , the higher administrative service in British India. However, despite having passed the exams, he broke off the training because it seemed unacceptable to him to work as an employee of the colonial power in his own, colonized country, and returned to India on April 23, 1921.
In his youth, Bose was heavily influenced by the teachings of Swami Vivekananda . He met Mahatma Gandhi in 1921 and joined the Indian National Congress (INC). Under Gandhi's mediation, he worked for the Bengal Chittaranjan Das , whom he later referred to as his political teacher. Bose developed great organizational talent. He eventually rose to the position of mayor in the city administration of Calcutta and became the leader of the youth wing of his party. Bose's strongly anti-British stance earned him eleven prison terms of up to three years between 1920 and 1941.
In 1927 he was elected together with Jawaharlal Nehru General Secretary of the Congress Party and chairman of the Bengali INC Provincial Committee. More radically than the other leaders of the Indian National Congress , Bose insisted on immediate and comprehensive sovereignty for India. He managed to win over younger members of the party leadership like Nehru for his position, so that this goal was finally included in the party program. He came into opposition to Gandhi's ideas.
From 1933 to 1936 Bose stayed in Europe, where he met Benito Mussolini , Edvard Beneš , Clement Attlee and Romain Rolland , among others . He was convinced that India's freedom could only be achieved with foreign policy support. In addition, he believed in the necessity of an initially strongly authoritarian leadership of independent India on the model of Kemal Ataturk's Turkey .
Subhash Chandra Bose married the Austrian Emilie Schenkl (1910–1996) in Bad Gastein in 1937 . In 1942 his daughter, Anita Bose-Pfaff , who later became a university professor from Augsburg, was born. He protested to the National Socialist German government against the German race laws , which also affected Indians living in Germany.
With the approach of World War II , Bose warned Indians and British alike against drawing India into war. Bose was elected chairman of Congress twice during this period, in 1937 and 1939, with the second election prevailing against the candidate supported by Mahatma Gandhi. After his second election, he attempted a resolution to force the British to hand over India to the Indians within six months, under threat of a militant revolt. He encountered strong resistance in his own ranks and thereupon resigned from his post. Bose founded the All India Forward Bloc party stream in 1939 .
On September 3, 1939, the British Viceroy Lord Linlithgow declared, without consulting the leading Indian political forces, that after the outbreak of war, India was also on the side of Great Britain. As a result, the governments of the Congress Party resigned in the seven provinces of India they ruled and Bose initiated a mass movement against the use of Indian resources and soldiers for the war on the side of the British Empire . He was arrested again; After his hunger strike , the British placed him under house arrest because they feared rioting should something happen to him while in custody.
In 1941 Subhash Chandra Bose first fled to Kabul . He reached the German Reich by land via Moscow (where he asked in vain for support). British plans to liquidate Bose on the trip failed. In February 1942 he made a radio speech calling for the "liberation of India". Bose sought support for India's independence from the German rulers.
The Nazi leadership had reservations about the Indian independence fighters and refused to make an official declaration on India's independence. After a few unsuccessful attempts and under the supervision of Adam von Trott zu Solz , he managed to meet Foreign Minister Ribbentrop on May 29, 1942, and then Adolf Hitler . He took a negative stance, but finally agreed to form a volunteer corps from Indian prisoners of war, the Legion “Free India” , which was to fight first on the German side and possibly later in India. Incidentally, Hitler referred Bose to the Japanese , who had come much closer to India on the Asian continent and who had already occupied Dutch, British and French colonies . Bose recruited volunteers for his idea from among the Indian prisoners of war. The Indian Legion was then set up in Annaburg in Saxony-Anhalt and in Königsbrück in Saxony (early 1944 on the site of the military training area there ) and placed under the command of the Waffen SS . The Indian soldiers wore Wehrmacht uniforms and many also wore turban . They took their oath of allegiance to both Hitler and Bose.
On February 8, 1943, Bose left Germany from Kiel on the U 180 submarine for Japan, was taken over by the Japanese submarine I-29 near Madagascar on April 28, 1943 and received benevolently in Japanese-occupied Singapore. He was declared leader of the Indian Army, a Japanese auxiliary force consisting of approximately 40,000 Indians from Singapore , who were recruited from British prisoners of war and Indian plantation workers in Southeast Asia and which he expanded into the Indian National Army (INA). Subhash Chandra Bose founded a government in exile on October 21, 1943 under the name Azad Hind (Free India), which was recognized by the Axis Powers . The Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, which belongs to India, was handed over pro forma to Bose and the INA by the Japanese government, but this had no practical consequences.
During the great Bengal famine in 1943 , Bose offered the British colonial government the delivery of rice from Japanese-occupied Burma . This relief operation was rejected by the British government; about two million Bengali died. The Japanese, themselves not very interested in India, since they were now weakened by the war and their own defeats against the Western allies in the Pacific, left the regiment to the allied Indians, who marched from Burma with three divisions across the Indian border and participated in the Japanese spring offensive in 1944 participated. The Japanese surrender after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war and Japanese ambitions in Asia. The Indian National Army inevitably surrendered at the same time.
death
Bose was in Singapore at the time and was planning to fly to Tokyo in August, before Japan surrendered . His plane is said to have crashed over Taiwan on August 18, 1945 and his body was cremated on the spot. Speculations about Bose's whereabouts in India were nonetheless loud; his death has been denied many times. Based on a statement by the Taiwanese government that there were no plane crashes on Taiwanese territory between August 14 and September 20, 1945, according to an Indian conspiracy theory, Bose is said to have perished in Soviet captivity in Siberia . However, there is no sufficient evidence for this. According to other reports, the overloaded aircraft crashed on take-off and the loaded fuel went up in flames. Bose died the next day from the burn injuries suffered.
The report of a commission of inquiry into Bose's whereabouts was handed over to the Indian government in November 2005.
Reception and aftermath
When Burma was retaken by British troops in 1945, there were fraternization scenes between Indians in the British Army and the INA, which was previously run by Bose. The generals of the Indian National Army were brought to justice by the British colonial power; however, there was no conviction because the British feared nationwide protests. In addition to mass demonstrations, there was a mutiny in the Royal Navy. For the first time, Indian nationalism had spilled over to Indian soldiers, who had previously been considered brave and loyal. The British therefore issued a general amnesty for members of the army.
While Bose's contribution to Indian independence, especially to the freedom consciousness of Indians, is undisputed today, the means he preferred are still controversial. However, he became a legend especially in his Bengali homeland and is still respectfully referred to as Netaji (roughly: revered leader).
The international airport of Kolkata in the suburb Dum Dum is now called Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport , a university was also named after him. The hymn Jana Gana Mana , already used by the provisional government of Azad Hind , was adopted as the national anthem of the State of India , as was the tricolor of the Indian national flag . Numerous statues by Subhash Chandra Bose have been erected all over India, but especially in West Bengal .
For a long time after independence, Bose received little public attention from the Indian government. A posthumous award of the Bharat Ratna to Bose by the Indian government in 1992 was withdrawn because the evidence of his death was not provided and thus, according to a directive of the Supreme Court of India, the posthumous nature of the award was deemed unfounded.
In 2005 Bose's activities in Berlin during the 1940s became the subject of the theater project Call cutta by the Rimini Protokoll group . There have been several film adaptations of Bose's life, the first in 1950 by Bimal Roy and most recently in 2005 by Shyam Benegal .
In his article The Forgotten Freedom Hero. Jochen Reinert summarized Subhas Chandra Bose's controversial commitment to independence in 2007:
“Subhas Chandra Bose's commitment to the liberation of India from British colonial rule is controversial. Although Nehru was a close comrade on the left wing of the Indian National Congress, his legacy is still difficult to this day. One reason for this is Bose's efforts to win Nazi Germany as an ally against the British. "
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Jochen Reinert: Subhas Chandra Bose's controversial commitment to independence. Federal Agency for Civic Education, accessed on January 18, 2007 .
- ↑ Jan Kuhlmann: Subhas Chandra Bose and the India policy of the Axis powers contemporary history. Verlag Hans Schiler, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89930-064-5 , p. 227 ff. Minutes of the meeting: Andreas Hillgruber (Ed.): Statesmen and diplomats at Hitler. Part 2. Confidential records of conversations with foreign representatives 1942–1944. Bernard & Graefe, Verl. Für Wehrwesen, Frankfurt am Main 1970, ISBN 3763750843 , pp. 80–86. The date is also corrected here: not May 27, but May 29, 1942.
literature
- Mihir Bose: Raj, Secrets, Revolution. A life of Subhas Chandra Bose. Grice Chapman Publishing, London et al. 2004, ISBN 0-9545726-4-5 .
- Sugata Bose: His Majesty's Opponent. Subhas Chandra Bose and India's struggle against Empire. Belknap, Cambridge MA et al. 2011, ISBN 978-0-674-04754-9 .
- Marshall J. Getz: Subhas Chandra Bose. A biography. McFarland & Co., Jefferson NC et al. 2002, ISBN 0-7864-1265-8 .
- Jan Kuhlmann: Subhas Chandra Bose and the India policy of the Axis powers. 2nd, unchanged edition, epubli, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-8442-3736-8 .
- Anton Pelinka : Democracy Indian Style. Subhas Chandra Bose and the Creation of India's Political Culture. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick NJ et al. 2003, ISBN 0-7658-0186-8 .
- Hugh Toye: Subhash Chandra Bose. The Springing Tiger. Jaico, Mumbai 1991.
- Hans-Bernd Zöllner: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Subhas Chandra Bose and contemporary Germany under National Socialism 1933–1943 (= history. Vol. 25). Lit, Hamburg et al. 2000, ISBN 3-8258-4478-1 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Subhash Chandra Bose in the catalog of the German National Library
- Newspaper article about Subhash Chandra Bose in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
- The forgotten freedom hero. Subhas Chandra Bose's controversial commitment to independence , by Jochen Reinert, Federal Agency for Civic Education (BpB). Extensive literature references, comprehensive presentation
- Status of the investigations into Bose's death ( Memento from April 12, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
- Interview with Anita Bose-Pfaff about her father from rediff.com ( Netaji's daughter speaks! From May 11, 2005 on several subpages)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bose, Subhash Chandra |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bose, Subhas Chandra |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Leader of the Indian independence movement |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 23, 1897 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Cuttack , Orissa |
| DATE OF DEATH | after August 18, 1945 |