Subash Chandra Bose and Rash Behari Bose

The Boses in Japan

This is not a meeting for conspiracy plot or strategy to sacrifice weaker and smaller countries, or to deceive weak and small neighbors. This meeting is the one for the released peoples of nations to create new order in this region in the world based on the dignified reciprocity principle and mutual support based on sovereignty, justice and international relations (Subhas Chandra Bose, Tokyo Saiban Kenkyu kai, 1948 158-159).    

It was the desire to liberate the motherland that forced Rash Behari Bose (1886-1945) and later Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose (1886-1945) to come to Japan in the first half and middle of the twentieth century, but the lure of the land and a subtle twist of fate never allowed them to either return to their motherland or see it liberated. Both Rash Behari and Subhash Chandra were victims of a fate that prevented them from doing heroic deeds though Rash Behari is still admired as a hero in Japan while Netaji is revered as hero at home. Both the Boses used the rising aspirations of the Indian nationalists and the grand imperial ambitions of the Japanese government to create a favorable public opinion for both the Indian freedom struggle and their own leadership in Japan. They were aided by the rich Japanese nationalists groups in Japan and the expatriate Indian community in Germany who supplied both money and connections to propagate their ideas and ideologies through the printing press and the publishing industry. Though the Boses possessed dreamy idealism and quixotic vision of liberating their country by destabilizing the British Empire, they were not alone in their thinking. The Japanese nationalists, thinkers and politicians also believed in essentialist ideas of nationhood and history and felt that if Japan could defeat a European power like Russia a century ago, it was not difficult for it to team up with the Indian revolutionaries and defeat the British in India and from thence rule the world.