Who assumed the command of the Indian National Army and gave famous battle cry, 'Chalo Delhi'?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, Subhash Chandra Bose. On 4 July 1943, two days after reaching Singapore, Bose took over the leadership of the Indian Independence League and of the revived Indian National Army at a ceremony in the Cathay Building. He had left Calcutta in disguise on the night of 16 January 1941, slipping his house internment at Elgin Road, and travelled through Afghanistan and the Soviet Union to reach Berlin on 2 April 1941, where he raised the Free India Legion from Indian prisoners of war taken in North Africa and set up Azad Hind Radio. He left Germany on 8 February 1943, crossed by submarine, reached Tokyo on 11 May 1943 and met the Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, and arrived in Singapore in July 1943. Unlike his predecessors he refused to take a military rank; his soldiers and the Indian civilians of South-East Asia called him Netaji. On 21 October 1943 he proclaimed at Singapore the Provisional Government of Free India — Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind — holding himself the offices of Head of State, Prime Minister, Minister of War and Minister of Foreign Affairs, and on 23 October 1943 that government declared war on Britain and the United States. The INA's regiments were named for the men Bose was fighting alongside and against in Indian politics: the Gandhi, Nehru, Azad and Subhas Brigades, plus the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, a women's combat unit. From the advanced headquarters at Rangoon the army moved north with the Japanese Operation U-Go towards Imphal and Kohima in 1944, and in April 1944 opened its first headquarters on Indian soil at Moirang in Manipur. 'Chalo Delhi' — 'Dilli Chalo', on to Delhi — was the call Bose gave those columns; the destination was the Red Fort, where, in a turn nobody planned, his officers were put on trial in 1945-46 instead. His other and more famous exhortation, 'Give me blood, and I shall give you freedom', is attached by different accounts to two different occasions — the Singapore ceremony of 4 July 1943 and a rally of Indians in Burma on 4 July 1944 — so treat the date as unsettled rather than memorising one of them. Bose died on 18 August 1945 of third-degree burns after his overloaded plane crashed in Japanese-held Taiwan.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The strongest distractor, because he is the man who handed the command over. A veteran of the 1912 Delhi conspiracy — the bomb thrown at Viceroy Lord Hardinge in Chandni Chowk on 23 December 1912 was part of a plot he headed — he had lived in self-exile in Japan since the First World War and led the Indian Independence League, the political body to which the first INA was made subordinate. In 1943 he and the Japanese agreed to cede the leadership of both the League and the army to Subhas Chandra Bose. He led the parent organisation, never the marching army, and the slogan is not his.  (b) He really did command an Indian National Army — the first one. A captain of the British Indian Army captured in Malaya, he founded it in 1942 with Major Iwaichi Fujiwara of the Japanese F Kikan and took the rank of general. But his relations with the Japanese broke down over their intentions towards the force, and in December 1942 he dissolved the army himself and ordered his men back to the prisoner-of-war camps. That first INA was defunct months before any march on Delhi; the army that raised the cry was the one Bose revived in July 1943.  (c) A senior INA commander, never its commander-in-chief. From February 1943 he served as Chief of General Staff under Lt Col J. R. Bhonsle's military bureau, and he later led the 1st Guerrilla Regiment, the Subhas Brigade. His fame is post-war: he was one of the three officers — with Prem Kumar Sahgal and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon — in the first and most celebrated of the Red Fort courts-martial of 1945-46. He commanded a brigade inside Bose's army; he did not assume command of the army.

Concept: There were two Indian National Armies, and almost every trap on this topic lives in the gap between them. The FIRST INA was raised in 1942 out of the tens of thousands of Indian prisoners of war the Japanese took when Singapore fell, organised by Captain Mohan Singh with Major Iwaichi Fujiwara of the Japanese F Kikan intelligence mission. It was placed under the political authority of the Indian Independence League, whose overall leadership rested with Rash Behari Bose in Tokyo, and its Indian officers extracted assurances of Japanese non-interference precisely because they feared being used as a puppet force. When those assurances proved hollow, Mohan Singh dissolved the army in December 1942. The SECOND INA is the one history remembers. Subhas Chandra Bose took charge of it and of the League on 4 July 1943 at Singapore, and it changed character: civilians joined alongside the prisoners of war — traders, barristers, plantation workers from the Indian diaspora in Malaya and Burma — roughly doubling its strength to something in the range of 40,000 to 50,000, and it acquired a women's combat unit, the Rani of Jhansi Regiment. It fought as a declared allied army in the Japanese U-Go offensive of 1944 rather than as a fifth column, which Bose had refused. Militarily it failed at Imphal and Kohima; politically it detonated after the war, when the Red Fort trials turned three convicted officers into a national cause and shook British confidence in the loyalty of the Indian Army.

State PCS 2025 Q77 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q77 — History PYQ with Answer