A Government in Exile

Subhas Chandra Bose — twice Congress president, Gandhi's most brilliant and most impatient rival — chose the other road entirely. Escaping British house arrest in Calcutta in 1941, he travelled by way of Kabul and Berlin to Japanese-held Singapore, where in 1943 he took command of the Indian National Army, raised from captured Indian soldiers, and proclaimed the Provisional Government of Azad Hind — Free India. Women fought too, in the Rani of Jhansi Regiment under Captain Lakshmi Sahgal.

'Give me blood, and I shall give you freedom,' Netaji promised, and with the war cries 'Chalo Dilli' and 'Jai Hind' the INA marched with the Japanese to the gates of India, planting the tricolour at Moirang in Manipur before the terrible sieges of Imphal and Kohima broke the advance. Bose died in an air crash in 1945 — a death many Indians long refused to believe.

That same year, 1943, Bengal starved. Rice denied, boats seized, prices let run wild while export and provisioning continued — some three million people died in a famine that owed more to policy than to nature. Between the INA's tricolour at Moirang and the dead of Calcutta's pavements, whatever moral claim the Raj still made for itself was finished.