New Delhi: Subhas Chandra Bose, who is popularly known as Netaji-, is one of the most celebrated freedom fighters of India. The country on Thursday (January 23) celebrates his 124th birth anniversary. Netaji was born on this day in 1897, in Cuttack, Odisha, which was then a division of Bengal Province under British India, to Prabhavati Dutt Bose and Janakinath Bose.
The ninth of 14 children in his family, Subhas Chandra Bose earned BA in Philosophy from Scottish Church College, Calcutta. In 1919, Bose headed to London to take the Indian Civil Services (ICS) examination and stood at the fourth position, but he resigned citing the reason that he could not side with the British.
In 1921, Bose worked under Chittaranjan Das, a powerful politician in Bengal, and later started his own newspaper, Swaraj. In 1923, Bose was elected the President of the All India Youth Congress and also the Secretary of Bengal State Congress.
During the mid-1930s, Bose visited Europe, where he met Indian students and European politicians, including Benito Mussolini. When he returned to India, he got elected as President of Congress party in 1938. Bose later resigned from the Congress party's top post due to differences with Mahatma Gandhi and formed All India Forward Bloc.
Bose gave a call for a mass civil disobedience after the then Viceroy of India Lord Linlithgow declared that India will join the Second World War aw part of the Allied Alliance without taking into confidence the Congress leaders. After Gandhiji decided against supporting Bose's agitation, he started protest in Kolkata (then Calcutta) for the 'Holwell Monument'. He was first jained by the British, but released after he wentr on a seven-day hunger strike. He wss the kept under surveillance by the CID.
However, he managed to escape to Germany via Afghanistan and the Soviet Union in 1941 after catching a train from Gomoh station in Jharkhand (then Bihar). In 1943, Netaji traveled to Tokyo, Japan via submarines and formed a trained army of about 40,000 troops as the Indian National Army, which was first formed under Mohan Singh and Japanese Major Iwaichi Fujiwara. The INA comprised Indian prisoners of war of the British-Indian Army captured by Japan in the Malayan campaign and in Singapore.
In 1943, Netaji advanced to Rangoon, Myanmar after the capture of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, to make his way into India through Kohima and the plains of Imphal. The British Indian Army, however, retaliated to free Manipur, Kohima, and Imphal and killed almost half of the Japanese forces along with INA contingent in 1945.