Appearance
6.22 — Bose, Bhagat Singh and the Armed Stream
On 8 April 1929 two young men threw two bombs from the visitors' gallery into the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi. The bombs were deliberately low-powered and thrown into an empty section of the floor. Nobody was killed. The men threw leaflets, shouted Inquilab Zindabad — long live the revolution — and stood still and waited to be arrested.
Bhagat Singh's own explanation, given in court, was that they wanted a stage. The leaflet quoted the French anarchist Vaillant: it takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear.
He was 21. He was hanged two years later at 23, and he is, by most measures of popular recognition in India today, at least as well known as anyone in the previous chapter.
This chapter covers the stream that rejected Gandhi's method — what it actually argued, what it achieved, and the honest assessment of the man whose army fought alongside the Japanese.
Bhagat Singh as a thinker
He is remembered as a bomb-thrower and he was primarily a reader.
Born 1907 in Punjab into a family already involved in politics — an uncle had been a Ghadar activist — he was twelve when Jallianwala Bagh happened and visited the site.
He joined the Hindustan Republican Association and renamed it the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, inserting the word deliberately. The programme was not simply expelling the British. His writings state repeatedly that replacing British masters with Indian ones would change nothing for the peasant and the worker, and that the goal was the overthrow of the exploitative structure itself.
In prison he read continuously — Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Bakunin, Upton Sinclair, Victor Hugo, Bertrand Russell — and his prison notebook, which survives, is a record of a serious autodidact.
His essay Why I Am an Atheist, written in jail in 1930, is a genuine piece of argument. He addresses the charge that his atheism was vanity, sets out the problem of evil, argues that belief in God is a consolation that makes suffering bearable and therefore makes it endurable rather than fixable, and states that he would rather face the gallows without the comfort. He was 22 when he wrote it.
The killing. In 1928 Lala Lajpat Rai led a protest against the Simon Commission, was struck by police lathis, and died some weeks later. Bhagat Singh and his associates set out to kill the police superintendent responsible and shot the wrong officer, a junior man named John Saunders. This is a documented case of mistaken identity and Bhagat Singh acknowledged the killing.
The trial. He used the courtroom deliberately as a platform, refused to defend himself in the conventional sense, and conducted a 116-day hunger strike demanding that Indian political prisoners be treated as political prisoners rather than as ordinary criminals — better food, books, clothing. His fellow striker Jatindranath Das died on the 63rd day, and the funeral procession in Calcutta was enormous. The strike won most of its demands and made Bhagat Singh a national figure.
He was hanged on 23 March 1931, along with Sukhdev and Rajguru, and Chapter 6.21 covers the argument about Gandhi's role.
Why he endures. He was young, articulate, and he wrote things that can be read now without embarrassment. He was explicitly secular and anti-caste — his writings attack untouchability and communalism directly, and he insisted the revolution was against exploitation, not against a nationality. And he chose to be captured, which converted a violent act into a public argument.
The other armed actions
The Chittagong armoury raid, 1930. Surya Sen, a schoolteacher, led about sixty-five people — including several teenagers — in a coordinated attack that captured the police and auxiliary force armouries in Chittagong, cut telegraph lines and destroyed railway track, aiming to hold the town. They could not find the ammunition, withdrew to the hills, and were largely destroyed in a battle at Jalalabad hill. Sen was captured in 1933, tortured, and hanged.
Two of the participants were young women, Pritilata Waddedar and Kalpana Datta, and Pritilata led a subsequent attack on a European club and took cyanide rather than be captured, aged 21.
The Kakori conspiracy, 1925 — a train robbery to fund the movement — led to the hanging of Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaqulla Khan, a Hindu and a Muslim who were close friends and whose joint execution became a symbol of composite nationalism.
Assessing the armed stream on results. It did not free India, and its leaders mostly knew it would not. What it did was maintain the psychological fact that the Raj was resisted and could be attacked, produce martyrs whose memory sustained the movement, and force the government into repression that cost it legitimacy. The revolutionaries themselves generally understood their function as inspirational rather than military, and said so.
Subhas Chandra Bose
Bose is the most difficult figure in this Part to assess fairly, and the difficulty is genuine rather than political.
The break with Gandhi. Bose was elected Congress president in 1938 and again in 1939, the second time defeating Gandhi's chosen candidate in a contested vote. Gandhi took the result as a personal defeat, the Working Committee resigned, and Bose was left unable to function and resigned. He then founded the Forward Bloc.
The disagreement was substantive. Bose held that Britain would never leave voluntarily; that the moment of Britain's weakness — a European war — was the moment to strike; and that a free India would need a strong centralised state and rapid industrialisation. Gandhi held that means determine ends and that a movement founded on violence would produce a violent state.
Escape. Under house arrest in Calcutta in 1941, Bose grew a beard, disguised himself, slipped past the surveillance, travelled overland through Afghanistan to the Soviet Union with an Italian passport, and reached Berlin. It is a genuinely remarkable piece of tradecraft.
Germany, 1941–43. He met Hitler once, raised an Indian Legion from prisoners of war captured in North Africa, and broadcast to India on Azad Hind Radio. He got very little practical support, and he grew frustrated with German indifference to Indian independence and with the racial content of Nazi ideology, which insulted Indians directly.
The submarine transfer. In 1943 he travelled from Germany to Japanese-held Asia by submarine — a German U-boat to Madagascar, transferring at sea to a Japanese submarine. It is one of only a few civilian transfers between submarines of two navies in the war.
The Indian National Army. Formed initially in 1942 from Indian prisoners of war taken at Singapore, it was reorganised under Bose's command in 1943 and reached a strength of around 40,000, including the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, an all-women combat unit — which was genuinely without precedent in Asia at the time.
He declared the Provisional Government of Free India (Azad Hind) in Singapore in October 1943, which was recognised by the Axis powers and their allies. His slogan was Tum mujhe khoon do, main tumhe azadi dunga — give me blood and I will give you freedom.
The military campaign failed. The INA fought alongside Japanese forces in the Imphal and Kohima campaign in 1944. It was a catastrophe — the offensive was under-supplied, the monsoon arrived, and Japanese and INA forces suffered enormous losses to starvation and disease as much as to combat. Imphal and Kohima are among the most decisive defeats the Japanese army suffered.
Bose died on 18 August 1945 in a plane crash at Taipei. Several official inquiries — the Shah Nawaz Committee in 1956, the Khosla Commission in 1970, and the Japanese government's own records — concluded he died in the crash. The Mukherjee Commission in 2005 dissented, and its finding was not accepted by the government. Conspiracy theories persist and none has produced evidence that survives examination. This book states the position: the weight of evidence supports death in the crash, and the belief that he survived has been politically durable in Bengal for eighty years.
The Axis question, faced directly
This is the criticism, and it should not be softened.
Bose allied with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Germany was conducting the Holocaust. Japan's conduct in China, Korea, Southeast Asia and toward prisoners of war was atrocious — the Nanjing massacre, the comfort women system, the Burma railway on which Indian labourers died in large numbers.
Bose's own stated reasoning, which is documented: he was a nationalist seeking any instrument that would remove British rule; he described himself as a socialist and repeatedly said he took help where it was offered without endorsing the helper; and he had earlier tried to obtain Soviet support.
Three things to weigh.
He did not have full information about the Holocaust, as almost nobody outside Europe did in 1941–43. This is a partial mitigation and not an exoneration; the Nazi regime's racial ideology and treatment of Jews in Germany was public knowledge by 1938.
His practical relations with Japan were adversarial in specific ways — he insisted on the INA being under Indian command, on Indian civilian administration in territory taken, and on Indians in Japanese-held territory being treated as allies rather than subjects, and he pressed these points repeatedly.
And the counterfactual matters. Had the Axis won, India would have exchanged one imperial ruler for a considerably worse one. Bose's calculation assumed he could use them and discard them, and there is no evidence he had any means of enforcing that.
The honest assessment: a genuine patriot of great personal courage who made a strategic bet on the worst regimes of the twentieth century, which failed militarily, and whose principal effect on Indian independence came not from the alliance but from what happened afterwards.
The INA trials, and why they mattered more than the campaign
In November 1945 the British put three INA officers on trial for treason at the Red Fort in Delhi — deliberately choosing a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh to demonstrate even-handedness.
It was a catastrophic misjudgement.
The public reaction was enormous. Congress formed a defence committee including Nehru, who put on his barrister's robes for the first time in decades. Demonstrations, strikes and riots followed across India. The men were convicted and their sentences were immediately remitted, which satisfied nobody and demonstrated that the government could not enforce its own verdict.
And the effect on the armed forces was the decisive part. Indian soldiers, sailors and airmen — the instrument by which Britain actually held India — saw men being tried for fighting for Indian independence and saw the entire country on their side.
The Royal Indian Navy mutiny, February 1946. It began over food and racial abuse on a shore establishment in Bombay and spread within days to around 78 ships and 20 shore establishments, involving some 20,000 ratings, with sympathy strikes in the air force and among Bombay's workers. It was ended by Congress and League leaders urging the mutineers to surrender, which they did on assurances that were only partly honoured.
The strategic conclusion drawn in London was straightforward. A British government report and the assessments of the Commander-in-Chief in India concluded that the Indian armed forces could no longer be relied upon to suppress a nationalist movement. Britain had 40,000 British troops in India and 2.5 million Indians under arms. Without the second number the first is meaningless.
Attlee announced in February 1947 that Britain would leave by June 1948. Mountbatten advanced it to August 1947.
How to weigh the streams
The mass movement and the armed stream are usually presented as rivals, and the more useful reading is that they operated on different mechanisms and both mattered.
The mass movement made India ungovernable by consent, made the Raj internationally indefensible, and built the organisation that inherited the state.
The armed stream, and Bose specifically, broke the loyalty of the instrument — and no empire survives when its own army's reliability is in question.
And the war did the rest. Britain in 1945 was bankrupt, had a Labour government committed to domestic reconstruction, was under American pressure, and had just been shown that its Indian forces were no longer certain.
Anyone who tells you one of these alone produced independence is simplifying. Chapter 6.21 gave the same conclusion from the other side.
Where this shows up in your life
Bhagat Singh is on posters, on T-shirts and in films, and his popularity has grown steadily — partly because he was young and articulate, partly because he was explicitly secular and anti-caste, and partly because both left and right in Indian politics claim him, usually by quoting only the parts they like.
Bose is the object of a permanent political contest. A statue of him now stands at India Gate in Delhi; his files were declassified in 2015–16; and the belief that he survived remains widespread in Bengal.
The INA's slogan Jai Hind is India's standard patriotic salutation, used at the end of official speeches — which means the everyday phrase comes from Bose's army.
What the next page covers
Independence came with a partition that displaced somewhere between 10 and 20 million people and killed somewhere between several hundred thousand and two million. Chapter 6.23 covers it properly — how the demand for Pakistan developed and when it became irreversible, the Cabinet Mission plan that nearly avoided it, Direct Action Day, the reasons the timetable was advanced by ten months, how Radcliffe drew the line and why it was published after independence, and an honest accounting of who bears what share of the responsibility.