Azad Hind

Book excerpt: This volume of Netaji Bose's collected works covers perhaps the most difficult, daring and controversial phase in the life of India's foremost anti-colonial revolutionary. His writings and broadcasts of this period cover a broad range of topics, including: the nature and course of World War Two; the need to distinguish between India's internal and external policy in the context of the international war crisis; plans for a final armed assault against British rule in India; dismay at, and criticism of, Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union; the hypocrisy of Anglo-American notions of freedom and democracy; the role of Japan in East and South East Asia; the reasons for rejecting the Cripps offer of 1942; support for Mahatma Gandhi and the Quit India movement later that year and reflections on the future problems of reconstruction in free India.