Rash Behari's Second War

The man who set the Ghadar date in 1915 spent thirty years in Japan building the next army. This chapter follows the second war he started: Udham Singh in London, the first INA at Farrer Park, the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, the Red Fort trial, and the sailors who painted Quit India on the walls of HMIS Talwar and took seventy-eight ships.

Lessons in this chapter

• Tokyo, 1942 — Thirty years in a Tokyo bakery, a bomb thrown at a Viceroy, and the day an old man gave his army away
• Caxton Hall — The afternoon Udham Singh shot Sir Michael O'Dwyer in London, the twenty one years that led to it, and the court statement the judge ordered nobody to print
• The Walk to Kabul, January 1941 — The Kirti Kisan man who walked Subhas Chandra Bose out of India in January 1941, and then worked for five intelligence services at once
• The Free India Centre, Berlin — The journalist Bose left in charge of Azad Hind Radio and three thousand soldiers who never reached India
• The First INA — The captain who raised an army from prisoners of war at Farrer Park in February 1942, and dissolved it in December rather than let Japan own it
• The Rani of Jhansi Regiment — A doctor with a clinic for plantation workers in Singapore raised a thousand-strong women's regiment in four months, and went on running out of forgotten firsts for the next seventy years.
• Red Fort, November 1945 — Lieutenant Colonel Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon stood court martial at the Red Fort with Prem Sahgal and Shah Nawaz Khan, and the country's answer took the sentence away.
• Quit India, on the Talwar — The night a telegraphist painted Quit India on a wooden platform, and the five days in February 1946 when the Empire's own fleet stopped taking orders

Back to Kranti Veer: From Chittagong to the Navy (1930-1947)