Subhas Chandra Bose Forms the Indian National Army
Subhas Chandra Bose, twice elected president of the Indian National Congress in the late 1930s but sidelined after clashing with Gandhi over strategy, escaped house arrest in India in 1941 and travelled via Afghanistan and the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany, before relocating to Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia in 1943. There, Bose took command of the Indian National Army (INA), an armed force recruited primarily from Indian soldiers captured by Japan after the fall of Singapore in 1942, along with Indian expatriates resident in Malaya and Burma. Bose also proclaimed a Provisional Government of Free India (Azad Hind) in exile, recognised by Japan and several Axis-aligned states, and the INA fought alongside Japanese forces in the 1944 Burma campaign, briefly crossing into northeastern India during the Battle of Imphal before being decisively repelled. The INA was militarily defeated alongside Japan by 1945, and Bose himself died in a plane crash shortly after Japan's surrender. Yet the subsequent British trial of captured INA officers at the Red Fort in Delhi in late 1945 provoked mass sympathy protests across India and mutinies within the British Indian armed forces, contributing directly to Britain's postwar calculation that continued rule of India had become militarily and politically unsustainable.
- Year: 1942 CE
- Category: Military
