Parakram Diwas 2025: Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose inspecting and INA regiment. Agency PhotoTake a look at the essential concepts, terms, quotes, or phenomena every day and brush up your knowledge. Here’s your knowledge nugget for today.
(Relevance: Historical personalities and their contribution is very important for UPSC Prelims and Mains. In Prelims 2021, a question was asked on INA. Similarly in Mains, UPSC has asked about the evaluation of the contribution of Subhash Chandra Bose to India’s freedom. In 2016, it asked a comparative question between the approaches to the freedom struggle by Subhash Chandra Bose and Mahatma Gandhi.)
Since 2021, January 23, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s birth anniversary, has been observed as “Parakram Diwas,” or the Day of Valour. The government decided to celebrate Parakram Diwas to inspire the people of the country, especially the youth, to act with fortitude in the face of adversity as Netaji did and to infuse them with a spirit of patriotic fervour. This year marks Netaji’s 128th birth anniversary.
In 2021, the inaugural event took place at Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata. In 2022, a hologram statue of Netaji was unveiled at India Gate, and in 2023, 21 unnamed islands in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago were named after the 21 Param Vir Chakra Awardees. In 2024, the Prime Minister had inaugurated the event at the historic Red Fort in Delhi, the site of the INA trials.
1. Born to an upper-class Bengali family in 1897 in Cuttack, Subhas Chandra Bose was the ninth child of Janakinath and Prabhavati Bose. In 1909, he moved to Ravenshaw Collegiate School, where he completed his secondary education. After school, he entered the Presidency College in Calcutta in 1913, where he studied philosophy.
2. Afterwards, Bose went to Cambridge University to prepare for the Indian Civil Services (ICS) exam in 1920. Later, however, determined to join the struggle for India’s freedom, he abandoned the project and resigned from the ICS to join the Mahatma Gandhi-led national movement.
3. After reaching Bombay, now Mumbai, in 1921, he obtained an audience with Gandhi to get a better understanding of his plan of action. While he had great respect for the Mahatma, Bose left the meeting dissatisfied with the answers he received.
4. In 1938, he was elected Congress president in the Haripura session, where he tried to push for swaraj as a “National Demand” and opposed the idea of an Indian federation under British rule. He stood for re-election in 1939 and defeated Dr Pattabhi Sitaramayya, the Gandhi-backed candidate.
5. Bose tried to set up another working committee, but after being unable to do so, was forced to resign and was replaced by Rajendra Prasad. Within a week, he proposed the creation of the “Forward Bloc” within the Congress Party, in order to bring the radical-left elements of the party together.
6. He was arrested in 1940 before he could launch a campaign to remove the monument dedicated to the victims of the Black Hole of Calcutta, an incident when a number of European soldiers died while imprisoned in 1756. After going on a hunger strike, he was released from jail in December.
Mahatma Gandhi with Subhash Chandra Bose. Express photo
1. About the ideological divide between the two leaders, historian Satadru Sen notes that while “Gandhi was willing to wait a long time for Independence, Bose wanted immediate action, if not immediate results. Gandhi was anti-materialistic and hostile to modern technology, Bose saw technology and mass production as essential to survival and dignity. Gandhi wanted a decentralized society and disliked the modern state; Bose wanted a strong central government and saw the modern state as the only solution to India’s problems. And finally, Bose did not share Gandhi’s dedication to non-violence.”
2. Despite tensions between the two, Bose was well aware of the significance of a leader like Gandhi. He was the first to call him the “father of the nation” during an address from the Azad Hind Radio from Singapore in July 1944.
The INA and Bose
1. The INA was formed on February 17, 1942, two days after the British surrendered to Japanese forces in Singapore. It mostly comprised Indian prisoners of war (PoWs) captured by the Japanese during their Southeast Asia campaign.
2. Bose arrived in Singapore in July 1943 and took charge of the 12,000-strong INA on July 4.
For an enslaved people, there can be no greater pride, no higher honour, than to be the first soldier in the army of liberation — he told his troops the next morning, and immediately rejuvenated the army.
3. He gave the call of “Delhi Chalo” to INA to march on Delhi and liberate India from British rule. The INA crossed the Indo-Burma border and marched towards Imphal and Kohima in March 1944. The Chalo Delhi campaign ended at Imphal.
4. By 1945, the British had launched their own campaign to retake Burma, and the INA once again found itself in retreat. After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the war came to an end.
5. Bose wanted to stay with his troops for the surrender but was persuaded to leave by his subordinates. He died in a plane crash three days later.
1. It is commonly believed that Bose died shortly after a plane crash in Taipei in 1945. A report submitted on July 25, 1946 by Colonel (later Sir) John Figgess, an intelligence officer investigating Bose’s death, had confirmed he died in a Taihoku Military Hospital on August 18, 1945. The cause of death was heart failure resulting from multiple burns and shock following the plane crash.
2. Post-Independence, the Government of India constituted as many as three commissions to unearth the truth behind Netaji’s disappearance.
He was born on January 23, 1897 in Cuttack. (Designed by Gargi Singh/Express Archive)
3. In 1956, the central government appointed a three-man committee headed by Shah Nawaz Khan, a Member of Parliament and former Lieutenant Colonel in the Indian National Army, to probe Bose’s death. This committee also concluded that Bose had died in the crash.
4. Following rumours about Bose being alive, the Central government in 1970 set up a new commission headed by Justice G. D. Khosla, a retired chief justice of the Punjab High Court. This commission agreed with earlier reports of Figgess and the Shah Nawaz Committee on the main facts of Bose’s death.
5. In 1999, following a court order, the central government appointed retired Supreme Court judge Manoj Kumar Mukherjee to probe the death again. It mentioned that there was no strong evidence to prove that Bose died in the crash. The report was tabled in the Parliament on May 17, 2006, but the government rejected the findings.
6. In September 2015, the West Bengal government declassified 64 files on Netaji and made them available to the public. The Central government also started declassifying secret files on Netaji from January 23, 2016 onwards. Even the declassified files could not produce any strong evidence that Netaji was alive post-1945.
(Source: Respect despite the discord, Parakram Diwas, 5 things about life and times of Subhas Chandra Bose, Explained: How ‘Gumnaami’ has resurrected theories of Subhas Chandra Bose’s death)
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