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Posted: 27 Dec 2022

Taken: 26 Dec 2022

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Keywords

Image and excerpt •
INCARNATIONS •
Author •
Sunil Kilnani •
Bose •
Second excerpt •
CHURCHILL'S SECRET WAR •
Madhushree Mukarjee - Author •

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this photo by Dinesh

Bose addresses a rally at the Cathay Theatre, Singapore, 1943 (Nirvan Thivy Collection, courtesy a National Archives of Singapore)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhas_Chandra_Bose

www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6MJdQ_5iZQ


www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n9c9qdZoVI


www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml3Cl0SPZ8c
Comments
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . . Just after midnight, on January 17, 1941, he pulled off one of the boldest political escapes of the twentieth century. . . . he jumped into a waiting car in the disguise of a Pathan Muslim merchant. He was in Peshawar, heading for Kabul, before the British realized he was gone. Then it was on to Moscow and, in a second disguise, to Berlin, Now he could seek out Hitler, raise an army, and start a war.

In the four years that followed, Bose’s life would have many twists and turns at the caper that brought him to Berlin. Yet it would end in failure: death in a plane crash just days after the surender of his final ally, Japan.

. . . . Yet Bose, had been driven by magical thinking, inspired magical ideas in others. Outside India, the reputatin he had gained seemed decidedly off : a man who sought to work with the Nazis and who later chose to fight alongside the Japanese Imperial army, rates today as a national hero, his name affixed to airports, schools, and stamps. The vitality of his hold on the national imagination is manifest in other ways: after his death, he was periodically “discovered” alive -- as a prisoner in a Soviet concentration camp, as a Chinese military officer, and as a Indian sadhu, a holy man with miraculous power. It took three official commissions, the last one in 2006, to certify that he had actually died in 1945 ~ Page 282

. . . . He read German idealist philosophy and Henri Bergson, and came directly to politics through the works of the spiritual nationalist Sri Aurobindo Ghose. Aurobindo, twenty five years older than Bose, was a hero of Calcutta’s radical youth. He had abandoned the Indian Civil Service to become a leader of the Swadeshi movement until, disillusioned by its moderation, he turned to plotting terrorist acts. “It was in the voice of Aurobindo,” Bose later said, “that we heard the message of political freedom for the first time.”

Aurobindo and other Bengali thinkers made Bose confident in the face of British racial arrogance. In 1916, having retaliated physically against a British professor’s maltreatment of a classmate, Bose was chucked out of college. Still, after getting his degree at another college, he traveled to the dark heart of England to cram fo the Indian Civil Service examinations. It was his father’s idea, and while derived some pleasue from the experience -- “Nothing makes me happier than to be served by the whites . . . . -- he resigned from the service just weeks after securing a coveted post. ~ Page 282

In 1942, Joseph Goebbels, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels the Nazi chief of propaganda, made an excited if somewhat underevidenced entry in his diary: “Bose’s appeal has made a deep impression on world opinion.” Bose not in Berlin after scarpering from his Calcutta house arrest, had just given his first shortwave radio broadcast, telling listeners in India and elsewhere that the “enemies of British imperialism are today the natural allied of India.” He added, “We shall heartily cooperate with all those who will help us in overthrowing the common enemy” ~ Page 284

The fascists having failed him, he decided to escape to Soviet Russia. A few months later, just days after the Japanese surrender, and with the Soviets now also at war with Japan, he boarded a plane heading to Russian territory (exactly where remains unclear). But as it took off after a fuel stop in Taipei, it crashed and burned. ~ Page 287
3.7 years ago. Edited 3.7 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
INCARNATIONS
3.7 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
For two years, Subhas Bose had resided in Berlin. He had married the woman he loved, fathered a daughter -- and utterly failed to arouse German enthusiasm for the cause of Indian independence. The Nazis were mired in the Soviet union, so the army that Bose had raised from the ranks of captured Indian soldiers had no hope of reaching their homeland via Afghanistan. And although the Hapanese and the Italians urged a joint Axis declaration promising freedom to Indians and Arabs, Hitler continued to refuse. According to historian Milan Hauner, he was still concerned that if the United Kingdom perceived its empire to be threatened by Germany, its will to resist would be increased. He did, however, agree tht bose should travel to Asia, where he would be of more use.On May 27, 1942, Bose had an audience with the fuhrer. In response to his request for more substantive support, Hitler launched into an interminable lecture, the essence of which was that he could do nothing. Bose then asked him to repudiate passages in ‘Mein Kumpf’ that were contemptuous of Indians. That prompted another monologue -- ending with the assertion that Indian natives would take one or two centuries merely to achieve unity among different factions. By the time the interview was over, any illusions that Bose had entertained about the fuhrer’s rationality was gone. He told colleagues that Hitler reminded him of a Fakir or Ipi, a Pakhutan war lord he had met on his treak to Kabu,l “with whom it was practically impossible to have a discussion on any topic even for a few minutes.” All that Bose got out of the long-awaited meeting was a cigarette case. ~ Page 177

CHURCHILL'S SECRET WAR
3.6 years ago. Edited 3.6 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
The fate of Subhas Chandra Bose is one of the enduring mysteries of the war. British intelligence reported in late August that he had been badly burned in an airplane crash in Taiwan on August 18,1945, days after Japan’s surrender, and had died that night. It appears that Bose had been flying from Bangkok to Tokyo, via Siagon, along with an associate and several Japanese officers. He planned to eventually reach the Soviet Union, which he hoped would aid his struggle in Indian freedom. After departing Siagon, the aircraft had halted in Taipei for an hour, and immediately after takeof from there the left engine had broken off. The aircraft had banked and dived to the ground from a height of between twenty and thirty meters. Bose was seated near gasolin tanks, was splashed with the fuel, and caught fire.

Special Operations Executive agents were all over Southeast Asia at the time, and the assassination order against Bose seems to be still have been in effect -- which raises the possibility that the aircraft had been tempered with. A spy in British service, known as Agent B1189, had infiltrated the Indian National Army’ upper echelons. He may have been able to convey Bose’s travel plans in time for SOE agents to sabotage the plane. ~ Page 254
3.6 years ago.

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