In October 1943, Subhash Chandra Bose set up a provisional government of free India which was recognized by how many countries including Japan ?

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Correct — C, 9. The government in question is the Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind, the Provisional Government of Free India, which Subhas Chandra Bose proclaimed at the Cathay Building in Singapore on 21 October 1943, taking on himself the offices of Head of State, Prime Minister, Minister of War and Minister of Foreign Affairs. Nine states extended it diplomatic recognition, and the list is worth knowing rather than the number alone, because the list explains the number. Eight are named consistently across accounts: the Empire of Japan, Nazi Germany, the Italian Social Republic — that is, Mussolini's rump Salò state set up in September 1943, not the Kingdom of Italy, which had by then surrendered to the Allies — the Wang Jingwei government at Nanjing, Thailand, the State of Burma under Ba Maw, Manchukuo, and the Second Philippine Republic. The ninth is generally given as the Independent State of Croatia, and it is the one that drops out of shorter summaries, which is why the total sometimes appears as eight in careless retellings. What the list shows is that recognition came entirely from the Axis powers and from the governments the Axis had installed; no Allied or neutral state recognised Azad Hind, and Vichy France, though an Axis collaborator, never granted formal recognition. That is the honest measure of the enterprise: nine recognitions, all from one side of the war, and yet enough to give the government a claim to statehood that it exercised — it declared war on Britain and the United States within days, was granted nominal jurisdiction over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Bose hoisted the tricolour at Port Blair on 30 December 1943.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The figure a candidate arrives at by counting only the states he can name unaided — Japan, Germany, Italy, Burma and Thailand — and stopping. It omits the Nanjing regime, Manchukuo, the Philippines and Croatia, which are exactly the client governments that make the total nine.  (b) Lower still, and it corresponds to nothing in the record. It attracts candidates who remember only the principal Axis powers plus one Asian ally, and it is the option to reject fastest, since Bose's own government listed recognitions well beyond the major powers.  (d) The near-miss, and the most dangerous option on the paper because it is only one away. It is what you get by adding a tenth state to the list — most often Vichy France, which was an Axis collaborator but never extended formal recognition to Azad Hind. The recorded figure is nine.

Concept: The Provisional Government of Free India was an attempt to convert an army into a state. Bose escaped house internment at Elgin Road, Calcutta, on the night of 16-17 January 1941, travelled through Afghanistan and the Soviet Union to Berlin, raised the Free India Legion there from Indian prisoners taken in North Africa, and then crossed to South-East Asia by submarine, reaching Tokyo in May 1943 and Singapore in July. On 4 July 1943 he took over the leadership of the Indian Independence League and the revived Indian National Army, which Mohan Singh and Rash Behari Bose had first raised in 1942. The step from army to government came on 21 October 1943, and it mattered because a government can do things an army cannot: contract recognition, declare war, administer territory, issue its own currency and honours. Azad Hind did all four, at least nominally. Its brigades were named Gandhi, Nehru, Azad and Subhas, and it fielded the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, a women's combat unit under Lakshmi Sahgal. Its military effort ended with the failure of the Imphal-Kohima campaign in 1944, but its political afterlife was decisive: the Red Fort trials of INA officers in 1945-46 produced a wave of public sympathy that historians treat as one of the pressures on British withdrawal.

State PCS 2024 Q76 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q76 — History PYQ with Answer