Indian History Quiz: Subhas Chandra Bose and the INA

The correct answer is A, Singapore. Bose reached South-East Asia in 1943, took charge of the Indian Independence League and the Indian National Army at Singapore on 4 July 1943, and on 21 October 1943 proclaimed the Provisional Government of Free India, the Azad Hind Government, in the same city. He became its Head of State, Prime Minister and Minister of War and Foreign Affairs, and the government soon declared war on Britain and the United States.

Option B, Russia, is wrong: Bose only passed through Moscow in 1941 on his way to Germany and got no help there. Option C, Japan, was the ally that recognised the Azad Hind Government first, and Bose reached Tokyo in May 1943, but the proclamation was not made there. Option D, Germany, is where he spent 1941 and 1942, setting up the Free India Centre and the Indian Legion, two years before the Provisional Government was formed.

The correct answer is B, Subhash Chandra Bose. In a broadcast on Azad Hind Radio in 1944, Bose addressed Mahatma Gandhi as the Father of the Nation and asked for his blessings for the Indian National Army's fight. Though the two differed sharply on method, Bose always treated Gandhi as the leader of the nation, and the title has stuck in common use ever since.

Option A, Jawaharlal Nehru, worked closely with Gandhi and called him many things in his writings, but not this title first. Option C, Sarojini Naidu, is remembered as the Nightingale of India and as the person who called Gandhi a Mickey Mouse in jest; she did not coin this title. Option D, Chandra Shekhar Azad, died in 1931 at Alfred Park in Allahabad, well before the broadcast. A related fact worth remembering is that Rabindranath Tagore is credited with giving Gandhi the title Mahatma.

The correct answer is C, Subhas Chandra Bose. After winning the Tripuri presidential election of 1939 against Pattabhi Sitaramayya and then resigning in April that year, Bose founded the Forward Bloc on 3 May 1939 as a left wing within the Congress, meant to gather all radical and anti-imperialist forces for an immediate struggle.

Option A, Mahatma Gandhi, led the Congress itself and supported Sitaramayya in that very election, so he founded no rival group. Option B, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, was among the Working Committee members who declined to serve under Bose and stayed with the Congress leadership. Option D, Jawaharlal Nehru, shared many of Bose's socialist views and had chaired the National Planning Committee set up by him, but he did not join the Forward Bloc and remained in the Congress. Bose was later debarred from holding Congress office for three years.

The correct answer is C, Mohan Singh. The first Indian National Army was raised in 1942 by Captain Mohan Singh from Indian prisoners of war captured at the fall of Singapore, with the support of the Japanese army. It was dissolved in December 1942 after a breakdown of trust with the Japanese command.

Option A, Rash Behari Bose, was the revolutionary of the Ghadr days who led the Indian Independence League from Bangkok and handed over its leadership and the army to Subhas Chandra Bose, but he did not raise the force. Option B, Bhagat Singh, was hanged in 1931, eleven years before the INA was formed. Option D, Subhas Chandra Bose, revived and reorganised the army after taking charge at Singapore on 4 July 1943, and became its supreme commander, which is why he is often wrongly named as the one who raised it.

The correct answer is C, the Rani of Jhansi Regiment. Bose raised this all-women fighting unit in 1943 and named it after Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, the heroine of the revolt of 1857. It was commanded by Captain Lakshmi Swaminathan, a doctor from Singapore who is better known by her later name, Lakshmi Sahgal, and its recruits came mostly from Indian families settled in Malaya and Burma.

Options A, B and D name queens who have no connection with the Indian National Army. Rani Padmini, or Padmawati, belongs to the traditions of Chittor; Didda was a queen of Kashmir in the tenth century; and Ahilyabai Holkar ruled Malwa from Maheshwar in the eighteenth century and is remembered for rebuilding temples. None of them gave a name to any INA formation, whose other units were the Gandhi, Nehru, Azad and Subhas brigades.

The correct answer is A, Cuttack, in present-day Odisha. Bose was born there on 23 January 1897, the ninth child of Janakinath Bose, a lawyer who practised in the town, and his school years were spent at the Protestant European School and the Ravenshaw Collegiate School in Cuttack. The Government of India declared 23 January as Parakram Diwas in 2021.

Option B, Calcutta, is where he studied at Presidency College and the Scottish Church College, where he lived at Elgin Road and from where he escaped in 1941, and where he was Mayor in 1930, but it is not his birthplace. Option C, Dhaka, had no part in his life, though the family's ancestral village of Kodalia lay in undivided Bengal. Option D, Midnapore, is a district of West Bengal that figures in revolutionary history for other reasons altogether.

The correct answer is B, Pattabhi Sitaramayya. Bose stood for a second term in 1939 against the wishes of Gandhi, who had put forward Pattabhi Sitaramayya, and won by 1,580 votes to 1,377. Gandhi described the result as his own defeat, most of the Working Committee refused to serve under Bose, and he resigned in April 1939 and founded the Forward Bloc the following month.

Option A, C. Rajagopalachari, was a senior Congress leader of Madras and later the first Indian Governor-General, but he was not the candidate here. Option C, Abul Kalam Azad, presided over the Congress from 1940 and held office through the Quit India years and the transfer of power negotiations. Option D, Rajendra Prasad, had been president at the Bombay session of 1934 and later chaired the Constituent Assembly. Only Sitaramayya was Bose's rival at Tripuri.

The correct answer is C, Rangoon, in Burma, now Yangon in Myanmar. The Indian National Army had shifted its headquarters from Singapore to Rangoon in January 1944 for the Imphal campaign, and it was in Rangoon on 4 July 1944 that Bose made the speech in which he asked his countrymen for blood in exchange for freedom.

Option A, Singapore, is where he took charge of the army on 4 July 1943, gave the call Chalo Delhi and proclaimed the Provisional Government on 21 October 1943, which is why the city is the common wrong answer here. Option B, Tokyo, is where he arrived in May 1943 and met the Japanese Prime Minister. Option D, Berlin, is where he ran the Free India Centre and Azad Hind Radio from 1941 to 1943. The two famous slogans belong to two different cities and two different years.

The correct answer is C, Moirang. Colonel Shaukat Malik of the Indian National Army raised the tricolour at Moirang, a town near Loktak Lake in Manipur, on 14 April 1944. The place now holds the INA Memorial and museum, and the event is remembered as the first hoisting of the flag of free India on Indian soil by the army.

Option A, Imphal, was the main objective of the 1944 offensive, but the siege failed and the town was never taken. Option B, Kohima, in Nagaland, saw the other great battle of that campaign, and the Japanese and INA retreat from Imphal and Kohima in mid-1944 broke the advance. Option D, Ukhrul, is a hill district of Manipur through which the campaign passed but where no such flag ceremony took place. Moirang is the answer examiners look for.

The correct answer is B, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Japanese, who had occupied the islands in 1942, transferred them in name to the Azad Hind Government in December 1943, and Bose renamed them Shaheed and Swaraj, meaning the martyr and self-rule. He visited Port Blair and hoisted the flag there on 30 December 1943. In practice the Japanese military kept control of the islands.

Option A, Lakshadweep, in the Arabian Sea, remained under British control throughout the war. Option C, Singapore, was the seat of the Azad Hind Government but was Japanese-occupied territory, not Indian soil handed over to it. Option D, Manipur, was the theatre of the 1944 campaign, where the INA reached Moirang, but it was never handed over to the Provisional Government. The renaming of the islands is the fact asked in papers.

The correct answer is A, the Red Fort in Delhi. The court martial of the three officers, a Muslim, a Hindu and a Sikh, opened at the Red Fort in November 1945, and the Congress set up an INA Defence Committee whose counsel included Bhulabhai Desai, Tej Bahadur Sapru, Asaf Ali, Kailash Nath Katju and Jawaharlal Nehru. The men were convicted of waging war against the King, but the sentences were remitted because public feeling had become too strong to ignore.

Option B, Fort William in Calcutta, was the headquarters of the Eastern Command and held no such trial. Option C, the Cellular Jail at Port Blair, had held revolutionaries of an earlier generation, among them Veer Savarkar and the Chittagong and Lahore conspiracy prisoners. Option D is wrong because the proceedings were a court martial, not a case in a High Court.

The correct answer is A, Mohammad Ziauddin. On the night of 16 and 17 January 1941 Bose left the Elgin Road house in Calcutta, where he was under house arrest, dressed as a Pathan insurance agent of that name, and travelled by way of Gomoh in Bihar and Peshawar to Kabul, and from there through Moscow to Berlin. The escape is remembered as the Mahanishkraman, the great departure.

Option C, Orlando Mazzotta, was a later alias: Bose travelled on an Italian passport in that name on his way from Kabul into Europe, so it belongs to the next stage of the journey, not to the night of the escape from Calcutta. Options B and D, Abdul Rahman and Rahmat Khan, are not names he used. The usual trap in this question is to pair the Calcutta escape with the Italian passport name.