His Majesty\'s Opponent. Subhas Chandra Bose and India\'s Struggle Against Empire

Roads to Delhi 259

from Ireland. Bose, however, was interested more in legitimacy than in
formal recognition of his sovereignty. This he pursued through an in-
teresting combination of claims to Indian territory and the allegiance
of India’s overseas citizens. Once Indian expatriate pa tri ot ism had ex-
pressed itself in the form of a government in exile, it felt the need for
territory as a mark of its legitimacy. Addressing fifty thousand Indians
assembled on the padang in Singapore on the afternoon of October 24,
Bose reminded them of the determination he had expressed on Au-
gust 15 to set foot “on the holy soil of India before the end of this year.”
“Mine was not an empty declaration,” he claimed, “or a mere boast.”^45
Preparations were well under way for his soldiers to cross into north-
eastern India and for his government to set up the civilian administra-
tion in liberated areas. Before his self- proclaimed deadline elapsed,
however, he would have to make do with a group of islands in the Bay
of Bengal, much the way Charles de Gaulle’s Free French initially
declared sovereignty over some islands off the French coast in the At-
lantic.
Territory was not the be- all and end- all of sovereignty. People were
more im por tant. The Provisional Government gave Indians domiciled
abroad the option of accepting Indian citizenship. The Provisional
Government of Free India was the first such experiment in conferring
citizenship anywhere in colonial Southeast Asia. Indians residing in
Southeast Asia were invited to sign the following oath printed on a
small blue card:

I, a member of the Azad Hind Sangh [Indian Inde pen dence League],

do hereby solemnly promise in the name of God and take this holy

oath that I will be absolutely loyal and faithful to the Provisional Gov-

ernment of Azad Hind, and shall be always prepared for any sac ri fice

for the cause of the freedom of our motherland, under the leadership

of Subhas Chandra Bose.

By June 1944, two hundred thirty thousand Indians took written oaths

of allegiance to the government in Malaya alone. These oaths were pro-

duced after the war during the Red Fort trial as legal evidence that the

war had been waged by a duly constituted government.^46