Subhas Chandra Bose and the Red Fort trials that changed the Raj

Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) — 'Netaji', Congress president turned leader of Free India abroad, head of the Azad Hind government and supreme commander of the INA. Mahatma Gandhi — the rival whose method Bose rejected, yet whom Bose publicly called 'Father of the Nation' from Rangoon radio. Rash Behari Bose — the elder revolutionary in exile who founded the first INA and handed it to Subhas in Singapore in July 1943. Captain Lakshmi Sahgal (née Swaminathan) — the doctor who commanded the all-woman Rani of Jhansi Regiment, one of the war's few female combat units. Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Sahgal and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon — a Muslim, a Hindu and a Sikh, the three INA officers Britain court-martialled together at the Red Fort, a trio whose very composition unified Indian opinion. Jawaharlal Nehru — who, extraordinarily, donned a barrister's gown after decades to appear for the defence. Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck — the British commander-in-chief who, reading the public mood, remitted the sentences. Historians Sugata Bose (His Majesty's Opponent) and Leonard A. Gordon (Brothers Against the Raj) anchor the serious scholarship on his life.

Bose's logic was cold and simple: the enemy of my enemy is my ally. He did not admire fascism — his own politics were left-leaning and secular — but he judged that only a great military power fighting Britain could put a real army at India's disposal, and in 1943 that meant Germany and Japan. This is the genuinely uncomfortable core of his story, and it should not be smoothed over. He accepted help from regimes running death camps and brutal occupations, and his soldiers advanced under Japanese command in a Japanese campaign. Bose insisted the Azad Hind government be a sovereign partner, not a puppet, and it declared war on Britain and the United States in its own name. But the dependence was total. The INA had no independent supply, artillery or air cover; it moved where and when the Japanese Fifteenth Army moved. So its fate was tied to Japan's. When the 1944 Imphal offensive collapsed under Allied airpower, monsoon disease and severed supply lines, the INA collapsed with it. Bose gambled that a foreign army could deliver freedom faster than Gandhi's patience. The gamble failed militarily — and left a moral debt historians still argue over.

Myth: Bose surely did not die in the 1945 crash. The evidence is genuinely contested. Japanese records, eyewitnesses and doctors describe him dying of burns after a plane crashed at Taipei on 18 August 1945; his ashes rest at Tokyo's Renkoji temple. The Shah Nawaz Committee (1956) and the Khosla Commission (1970) accepted the crash, but the Mukherjee Commission (2005) concluded he did not die there and that the ashes are not his — a finding the government rejected. Claims that he lived on as the ascetic 'Gumnami Baba' in Uttar Pradesh remain unproven. The honest verdict: most historians accept the crash, but official India never fully closed the file. Myth: Bose was a fascist. No serious scholar accepts this; his politics were secular and left-leaning. But it is equally false to airbrush the alliance — he did knowingly partner with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and that moral cost is real and debated. Myth: The INA won India its freedom by fighting. It did not win militarily. What moved history was the political shockwave of the Red Fort trials — not the battlefield.

Behind the strategy were tens of thousands of ordinary people. The INA drew captured soldiers of the British Indian Army who chose Bose over the prison camps, and volunteers from the Tamil, Sikh and other overseas Indian communities of Malaya and Singapore — rubber-plantation workers, shopkeepers, clerks. Whole families gave sons; some gave daughters. The Rani of Jhansi Regiment enrolled young women who had never left their towns, drilled them with rifles, and marched them toward a homeland many had never seen. On the Imphal front the human cost was catastrophic: far more INA soldiers died of starvation, malaria and dysentery in the retreat through the Burmese jungle than of enemy fire, and the survivors staggered back skeletal. For the diaspora that had funded and filled the army, the defeat was a private grief repeated across thousands of households. Yet those same people had, for the first time, seen Indians of every religion and region serve under one flag and one command as equals. That memory — of an army where a Muslim, a Hindu and a Sikh stood as brothers — outlived the battlefield disaster and fed straight into the unity the Red Fort trials would later ignite.

In purely military terms, Bose lost. The INA never liberated more than a sliver of Manipur, its Imphal campaign ended in a rout, and by mid-1945 its units were surrendering across Burma and Malaya. Yet in the long run his defeated army achieved politically what it could not achieve in battle. The Red Fort trials turned captured 'traitors' into national heroes overnight and forced the British to confront the terrifying possibility that the Indian Army itself was no longer reliable. Independent India then spent decades unsure how to place him: honoured with statues and stamps, but kept at arm's length from the official Gandhi–Nehru narrative, his files sealed and his death a running controversy. That distance has closed sharply. In 2021 his birthday, 23 January, was declared 'Parakram Diwas'; in 2022 a 28-foot black granite statue of Bose, sculpted by Arun Yogiraj, was unveiled under the India Gate canopy in Delhi, on the very spot a British king-emperor's statue once stood. The man Britain tried as a traitor now sits at the ceremonial heart of the republic — a reversal that says as much about India's changing self-image as about Bose himself.

The big lesson of Bose is that history rarely rewards intentions cleanly. He wanted freedom and pursued it with total courage, yet chose allies whose crimes stain the effort, and lost every battle he fought. And still he mattered enormously — because his soldiers, on trial for their lives at the Red Fort in 1945–46, did what a decade of politics had not: they fused Hindu, Muslim and Sikh outrage into one demand, brought crowds into the streets, and made the British doubt whether Indian troops would keep firing on Indians. When the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in February 1946, London saw the writing on the wall. That is the honest measure of Bose — not a flawless hero and not a villain, but a man whose failed war and contested death nonetheless helped crack the empire's confidence. To understand him is to hold several truths at once: the bravery and the bad bargain, the military defeat and the political victory, the sealed files and the granite statue at India Gate. A nation mature enough to keep all of them in view learns more from Netaji than one that flattens him into a slogan.