Give me blood and I will get for you Freedom -Subhash Chandra Bose

Tum mujhe khoon do, maiy tumhe aazadi doonga.
Translated :- Give me blood and I will get you your freedom.
-Subhash Chandra Bose at a rally of Indians in Burma, July 4, 1944

Subhash Chandra Bose was one of the foremost freedom fighters of India.
This was the statement he made at the great rally where he was elected with acclaim as the leader of the freedom movement in East Asia. The speech infused new life to a movement which had been weakened by internal dissentions.


Friends! Twelve months ago a new programme of 'total mobilisation' or 'maximum sacrifice' was placed before Indians in East Asia. Today I shall give you an account of our achievements during the past year and shall place before you our demands for the coming year. But, before I do so, I want you to realise once again what a golden opportunity we have for winning freedom. The British are engaged in a worldwide struggle and in the course of this struggle they have suffered defeat after defeat on so many fronts. The enemy having been thus considerably weakened, our fight for liberty has become very much easier than it was five years ago. Such a rare and God-given opportunity comes once in a century. That is why we have sworn to fully utilise this opportunity for liberating our motherland from the British yoke.
I am so very hopeful and optimistic about the outcome of our struggle, because I do not rely merely on the efforts of three million Indians in East Asia. There is a gigantic movement going on inside India and millions of our countrymen are prepared for maximum suffering and sacrifice in order to achieve liberty.
Unfortunately, ever since the great fight of 1857, our countrymen are disarmed, whereas the enemy is armed to the teeth. Without arms and without a modern army, it is impossible for a disarmed people to win freedom in this modern age. Through the grace of Providence and through the help of generous Nippon, it has become possible for Indians in East Asia to get arms to build up a modern army. Moreover, Indians in East Asia are united to a man in the endeavour to win freedom and all the religious and other differences that the British tried to engineer inside India, simply do not exist in East Asia. Consequently, we have now an ideal combination of circumstances favouring the success of our struggle- and all that is wanted is that Indians should themselves come forward to pay the price of liberty. According to the programme of 'total mobilisation', I demanded of you men, money and materials. Regarding men, I am glad to tell you that I have obtained sufficient recruits already. Recruits have come to us from every corner of east Asia- from China, Japan, Indo-China, Philippines, Java, Borneo, Celebes, Sumatra, Malaya, Thailand and Burma…

You must continue the mobilisation of men, money and materials with greater vigour and energy, in particular, the problem of supplies and transport has to be solved satisfactorily.

We require more men and women of all categories for administration and reconstruction in liberated areas. We must be prepared for a situation in which the enemy will ruthlessly apply the scorched earth policy, before withdrawing from a particular area and will also force the civilian population to evacuate as was attempted in Burma.

The most important of all is the problem of sending reinforcements in men and in supplies to the fighting fronts. If we do not do so, we cannot hope to maintain our success at the fronts. Nor can we hope to penetrate deeper into India.

Those of you who will continue to work on the Home Front should never forget that East Asia- and particularly Burma- from our base for the war of liberation. If this base is not strong, our fighting forces can never be victorious. Remember that this is a 'total war'- and not merely a war between two armies. That is why for a full one year I have been laying so much stress on 'total mobilisation' in the East.

There is another reason why I want you to look after the Home Front properly. During the coming months I and my colleagues on the War Committee of the Cabinet desire to devote our whole attention to the fighting front- and also to the task of working up the revolution inside India. Consequently, we want to be fully assured that the work at the base will go on smoothly and uninterruptedly even in our absence.

Friends, one year ago, when I made certain demands of you, I told you that if you give me 'total mobilization', I would give you a 'second front'. I have redeemed that pledge. The first phase of our campaign is over. Our victorious troops, fighting side by side with Nipponese troops, have pushed back the enemy and are now fighting bravely on the sacred soil of our dear motherland.

Gird up your loins for the task that now lies ahead. I had asked you for men, money and materials. I have got them in generous measure. Now I demand more of you. Men, money and materials cannot by themselves bring victory or freedom. We must have the motive-power that will inspire us to brave deeds and heroic exploits.

It will be a fatal mistake for you to wish to live and see India free simply because victory is now within reach. No one here should have the desire to live to enjoy freedom. A long fight is still in front of us.

We should have but one desire today- the desire to die so that India may live- the desire to face a martyr's death, so that the path to freedom may be paved with the martyr's blood.

Friend's! my comrades in the War of Indipendence Today I demand of you one thing, above all. I demand of you blood. It is blood alone that can avenge the blood that the enemy has spilt. It is blood alone that can pay the price of freedom. Give me blood and I will get for you Freedom.



Maybe a litte of it's fire is lost in translation as tit was originally not delivered in english but this is one of the most fiery speeches given pertaining to India's indipendence.

isnt the last picture that of netaji in germany when he went to meet hiler

Some people say that his death was not true. He survived the plane crash and stayed in some place. Is it true?

teen van wrote:

isnt the last picture that of netaji in germany when he went to meet hiler

yes it is.

The Eye wrote:

Some people say that his death was not true. He survived the plane crash and stayed in some place. Is it true?

Three days after Japan's surrender ended World War II, a Japanese Mitsubishi Ki.21 medium bomber reportedly took off from Taihoku, a Taipei airfield. The most important of several VIPs on its passenger list was a man who was then one of India's most famous sons - Subhas Chandra Bose, or Netaji (or Revered Leader), of the anti-British Provisional Government of Free India.

To this day, Indians dispute passionately what happened next.

Most accept the official version of events: For reasons unknown, the plane burst into flames on take-off. Badly burnt, Netaji Bose died later that day - Aug 18, 1945.

What are said to be his remains - bone fragments, some teeth and parts of the skull and jaw - were taken to Tokyo and housed at the suburban Renkoji Temple.

Singapore also venerates him indirectly: A modest monument to his greatest accomplishment - the Indian National Army (INA), mobilised in Singapore in the early 1940s for the purpose of driving the British from India - occupies an honoured place on the Esplanade.

But evidence suggests that the story of Netaji Bose's death was an elaborate subterfuge. They can point to some fresh support: Earlier this year, an official Indian inquiry, the third since 1956, turned up evidence in Taipei indicating that whatever happened to Netaji Bose, he did not die in a plane crash that day. According to Taipei's current mayor, there are no official records of any such crash.

The conspiracy theorists have several alternative histories, all tortuous. One of the most quoted: Those death reports were a ruse by the leader, his aides and the Japanese to have him escape from victors' justice and flee unscathed to Manchuria. From there, say Netaji Bose's fans, he most probably made his way to the Soviet Union.

Dictator Joseph Stalin, whom he may have met in Moscow in 1941, probably kept him in safe custody, they say, for the day on which he could continue his life-long struggle against the British imperialists.

Fear of the mischief the anti-British firebrand would cause if he managed to get back to India kept Britain from following up various intelligence leads to Netaji Bose's whereabouts, those sceptical about the official story claim. And Bose's political rivals - those devious accomplices of the British, Mahatma Gandhi and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru - went along with the cover-up.

The Revered Leader is unlikely to be returning to Indian politics - if alive, he would now be 108. Nevertheless, books and newspaper articles, often passionately pro-Bose, continue to be written about India's most enduring political mystery.

Author Anuj Dhar (Back From The Dead: Inside The Subhas Bose Mystery; Manas Publications, 2005) tells The Straits Times: 'People may or may not like Netaji, but they have a right to know what happened to him - how he died and where.'

Recently, two developments have brought Netaji Bose back into the headlines.

First, there is a much-trumpeted three-hour-long movie with a US$5 million (S$8.3 million) budget. Bose: The Forgotten Hero took more than three years to shoot.

Second, the Indian government has extended for six more months the inquiry into the circumstances of Netaji Bose's death or disappearance. In Calcutta, on June 10, the Mukherjee Commission, named after its sole commissioner, retired Supreme Court Justice M. K. Mukherjee, will resume its inquiry, now six years long, into the affair.

Subhas Bose was born in 1896, the son of a well-to-do Bengali lawyer. After securing a Cambridge University honours degree, he returned to India and involved himself in left-wing politics.

A powerful orator, he was elected Indian National Congress president in 1938, but was soon forced to resign after a dispute with Mohandas K. Gandhi. Bose advocated the militant overthrow of British rule; Gandhi and acolyte Nehru preferred non-violent resistance.

Placed under house arrest by the British for his pro-Axis sympathies, he escaped in 1941 and, with clandestine German and Italian help, fled to Germany. From there on, as a biographer puts it, 'his life reads as though written for Hollywood'.

He saw Britain's war with Germany as a chance to wrest India from British rule. Thus in Berlin, this Indian nationalist sought an alliance with Adolph Hitler.

Their one meeting cannot have been very comfortable. In Mein Kampf, the German's racist sermon to his Nazi Party, Hitler had declared: 'Indian agitators...will never achieve (freedom from Britain).'

This view, the Fuhrer had written, was 'quite aside from the fact that I, as a man of Germanic blood, would, in spite of everything, rather see India under English rule than under any other'.

A German information officer's account of the meeting says that Hitler refused attempts by Bose to discuss Mein Kampf's offensive passage. The Fuhrer is reported also to have told the Revered Leader that India 'would not be able to rule itself for another 150 years'.

Nevertheless, Bose received permission to establish a Free India Centre in Berlin and recruit, for an 'Indian Legion', Indians in British uniform whom the Germans had captured, mostly in North Africa.

But the Nazis' racism got in the way of Bose's grander plans - for an Axis-Indian army on the European and Middle Eastern fronts. So he turned to the Japanese.

With his fellow-Asians, then promoting the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, he was somewhat more successful.

In 1943, in an extraordinarily hazardous journey across three oceans, German and Japanese U-boats delivered him to Singapore. Over Japanese-controlled Radio Singapore, he broadcast a stirring appeal to India and the Indian diaspora: 'Give me blood and I will give you freedom!'

At the Capitol Theatre on Oct 21, 1943, he proclaimed the creation of a Japanese-sponsored 'provisional government of Free India' and organised the INA, a force ultimately comprising three divisions totalling about 30,000 troops. Both government and troops hailed him as 'Netaji', an honorific many Indians still use for him today.

Singapore's National Archives' oral history files hold recordings of INA veterans who speak emotionally of those heady days. At the archives last week, I listened to Sikh intelligence officer Mohinder Singh recall with pride and affection his leader's oratory at Singapore's Padang as he addressed troops who would soon be in combat.

'He was a great man, very popular, a great orator,' the old soldier recalled. 'He had a remarkable memory. He would speak first in Hindustani. Then he would repeat the speech word for word in English...But he knew little about military matters.'

In November 1943, the Japanese and the INA captured the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Suddenly, about two million (of about 400 million then) Indians were no longer under British rule.

Netaji moved his headquarters to Yangon. Four months later, spurred by his war cry Chalo Delhi! (On to Delhi!) the INA crossed the Myanmar border and raised its flag on Indian soil.

But the moment did not last long. Unknown to the Japan-Free India alliance, the British had cracked Axis codes. When the INA infiltrated fifth columnists into India, the British picked them up. British forces also acquired air superiority.

Moreover, according to Mr Mohinder Singh, the British, playing for time, were soon joined by a South Asian ally for which the Japanese were unprepared. 'That was 'General Monsoon',' said Mr Singh. 'The Japanese were running out of supplies, and the rains turned their supply routes into mud.'

Even before two atomic bombs in August 1945 ended the war, Japanese and Indian forces in South-east Asia were effectively at a standstill. But the Japan-India axis put a brave face on events. In the war's last months, a large cenotaph dedicated to an 'Unknown Warrior' of the INA was raised on the Esplanade.(in Singapore)

Several months after the British returned to Singapore, their army dynamited the pillar. Erected on the site by Singapore's National Heritage Board in 1995, the new INA monument is thus, in the words of one tourist brochure, 'a monument to a monument'.
Mr Mohinder Singh told the National Archives that he believed the official story of his leader's death - that he perished in the plane crash. But the recording adds an intriguing detail in support of the notion that Bose might have been trying to reach out to the Russians.

The Soviet Union did not declare war on Japan until Aug 9, 1945. Before this had happened, Mr Singh told his interviewer, a 'Japanese admiral (in Singapore) suggested to Netaji that he might find the Soviet Union would help India'.

Of course, if Bose had been making his way to Manchuria and then Russia on Aug 18, he could not have been unaware that Moscow now stood with the British-American allies against Japan. But that has not stopped rumours of the Indian being spotted in the Soviet Union over the past half-century.

According to India's Outlook magazine, scholars from Calcutta's Asiatic Society researching India-Soviet ties in Moscow came across recently declassified Soviet files 'that hinted at Bose having been in the USSR after 1945'. One of the scholars, Dr Purobi Roy, was quoted as saying Soviet military archives mentioned Stalin and foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov discussing in 1946 whether Bose should stay in the Soviet Union or leave.

The quest for the truth continues. The Mukherjee Commission has now taken evidence from 127 witnesses and depositions.

The commission's priority will be visiting Russia. Author Dhar told The Straits Times: 'They already have evidence in the form of official papers, affidavits, depositions, etc, all hinting that an inquiry in Russia is most necessary.'

Teraraptor do you also think that the evidences provided are real?

the evidences provided are real but not conclusive
for eg. a sanyasi whose name i forgot (somehing like mahadev) was hought to be bose in hiding and n investigati this. proof was found but it was not conclusive enough to prove this in a court of law.

hmm maybe sometime in future we might come to a real conclusion.