Bose The Military Dimension- A Military History of Ina and Netaji

This book is a 125thAnniversary tribute to Bose and his INA. It is a path breaking book that seeks to evaluate Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose as a military leader and assess the combat performance of the Indian National Army (INA) in WWII and its significant impact on the Freedom Struggle.

Netaji was instrumental in India getting her freedom. The book has gone into great details about each & every engagement fought by the INA. The INA was the primary catalyst that inspired the military revolts of 1946 that ultimately forced the British to quit. For the first time, the author has examined the events of 1946-especially the revolts in the Royal Indian Navy and the British Indian Army in great detail. He has cited British sources to prove that these revolts were primarily instrumental in forcing the British to leave in such a tearing hurry merely two years after they won the WWII. This book seeks to reopen the significant historical debate about how India got her freedom. A succession of court historians have tried to craft a narrative that India had obtained her freedom entirely by the soft power of Ahimsa/non-violence; that hard power had no role to play whatsoever. This is a huge sacrilege. As per the INA’s official history, the force had a total strength of 60,000. Of these, 26,000 were killed in action. This is an enormous scale of sacrifice. The pity is that the Nehruvian dispensation treated these men as traitors. There is as yet no memorial for these martyrs. The INA veterans were not taken back into the Army (on Mountbatten’s advice) and denied their war time pensions. Any nation that seeks to gloss over the martyrdom of 26,000 of its soldiers erodes the very basis of its nationhood. The problem arose from the Nehruvian dispensation’s quest for political legitimacy. This denial of the use of force was thus pushed to inordinate lengths. Nehru claimed that India needed no armed forces and deliberately starved them of resources. He laid most exaggerated emphasis on pacifism even at the cost of national interests. India had to pay a major price for Nehru’s quest for political legitimacy. The toll this exaggerated pacifism took, was seen by the whole world in the military disaster of 1962. Fortunately that served as a major wake up call for the onset of realism in India. The problem is that India’s pre and post-independence histories form a seamless whole. They cannot be seen in isolation. Where a nation state is going depends a lot on where it came from. That is why this seminal debate on how India gained independence is vital for our future.

There is also the dark secret about what finally happened to Bose. The author is pessimistic about the unearthing of the real truth as many critical Indian files have been destroyed. To get at the whole truth, we need access to Russian, Japanese and British archives. The author has analysed a wealth of data. It leaves us with some most disconcerting and horrible speculations about what happened to the man who in truth, got us our freedom. This book seeks to carry out a professional assessment of the INAs stellar combat performance against overwhelming odds and analyses the visionary and inspiring leadership of Bose as a self-taught military leader in the genre of Mao of China and Giap of Vietnam. The author concludes that Bose ranks on par with these globally famous self-taught military leaders who led from the front and proved to be great strategists.

Maj Gen (Dr) G D Bakshi is a combat veteran with considerable experience in Kargil, Kishtwar and Rajouri sectors of J&K. He is a renowned military historian and a prolific writer who has written over 40 books. He is India’s most popular commentator on TV on matters of military.

This book is most timely as it comes in the 125th Birth Anniversary of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. This is a path breaking book in many respects. To the best of my knowledge and belief, it is the first book by a former general that seeks to carry out a professional appraisal of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose as a military leader and India's first "Supreme Commander". It also seeks to objectively evaluate the military performance of the Indian National Army (INA) to validate the success of the military motivational model it was premised on.

The INA was based on the motivational power of "militant nationalism". In that it resembled the German Whermacht and the Imperial Japanese Army, far more than the British Indian Army. Though the bulk of its soldiers were former prisoners of war from the colonial British Indian Army - it had done away entirely with its ethnicity based Regimental model of motivation and shifted to an All-India All-Class model of organisation. The emotive fuel for fighting in the INA came entirely from militant nationalism.

So, did this model work in actual combat? The author has done pain-staking research and marshalled an array of combat records, memoirs and data to prove that despite the highly adverse circumstances, the INA units and formations put in stellar combat performances. In the Imphal-Kohima campaigns - the INA units kept pace with the hard marching Imperial Japanese Army in its infiltration and envelopment manoeuvres. They retained their combat cohesion even when units were decimated to the extent of 60-80 per cent. The best tribute came from the enemy. Peter W. Fay records a conversation between Maj Gen Gracy (the then GOC 20 Indian Division) with Col Prem Sahgal of the INA.

**Contents and Sample Pages**