Roads to Delhi 263
peace between China and Japan. He left Abid Hasan behind for a num-
ber of days to hold talks with representatives of the Chungking govern-
ment. By now, however, Chiang Kai- shek was being given a seat at the
high table of the Allies by Roosevelt and Churchill, and had little incen-
tive to respond to an overture from an Indian freedom fighter allied
with Japan.^51
In a tragic episode of Asian his tory, the British had used Indian sol-
diers and police against Chinese protesters in Shanghai and Nanjing
in 1924–1925. Tagore protested against this deployment following his
visit to Shanghai in 1924. A number of Sikh policemen continued to be
employed by the British, and a sizable Indian expatriate community
lived in Chinese port cities. Now, in 1943 in Shanghai, Bose recruited a
sig nifi cant number of volunteers, mostly Sikhs, for his Indian National
Army. Faced with the dif fi culty of transporting them to Southeast Asia,
he made arrangements to train these troops in China. Bose’s next stop
was Manila, the cap ital of the Philippines, whose in de pen dence Japan
had recognized in October. Though Manuel Quezon and Sergio Os-
mena had left the Philippines along with the American forces in early
1942, the majority of the Filipino elite and provincial administrators
had come to an accommodation with the Japanese occupiers. José Lau-
rel, the prime minster of the Japanese- recognized government, wel-
comed Bose in Manila. The relatively small Indian community in the
Philippines attended a meeting addressed by Bose and con trib uted
funds to the Provisional Government.^52
Upon his return to Singapore on November 25, 1943, Netaji plunged
into the final preparations for the march toward India. In the second
week of December, he made a final swing through Indonesia to garner
the support of Indians based in Jakarta and Surabaya on the island of
Java, as well as those living in Borneo and Sumatra. This tour com-
pleted Bose’s attempt to reach Indians living in nearly all parts of
Japanese- occupied Asia. While Japan was clearly the colonial aggressor
in Northeast Asia, with a dark record of oppression in Korea and
China, the situation in Southeast Asia was more complex. Even here,
the Chinese in Malaya and Singapore felt the brunt of Japan’s wartime
brutalities. Yet in this vast region Japan had also played an instrumental
role in defeating and destroying the mystique of Western imperial