Nehru, Bose, or… Maulana Barkatullah? Who was India’s ‘first prime minister’?

Nehru, Bose, or… Maulana Barkatullah? Who was India’s ‘first prime minister’?

Subject: History

Section: Modern India

Context:

• In a recent interview, actress-turned-politician Kangana Ranaut claimed that Subhas Chandra Bose, not Jawaharlal Nehru, was India’s first prime minister.

More on news:

• After being criticized, Kangana doubled down, citing the provisional government setup by Bose in 1943 as evidence of her claim. 

The Azad Hind government

• Subhas Chandra Bose proclaimed the formation of the Provisional Government of Azad Hind (“Free India”) in Singapore on October 21, 1943.
• The Azad Hind government claimed authority over all Indian civilian and military personnel in Britain’s Southeast Asian colonies (primarily Burma, Singapore, and Malaya) which had fallen into Japanese hands during World War II.
• To give legitimacy to his government, much like Charles de Gaulle had declared sovereignty over some islands in the Atlantic for the Free French, Bose chose the Andamans. 
• The Azad Hind government obtained de jure control over a piece of Indian territory when the Japanese handed over the Andaman and Nicobar islands in late December 1943, though de facto military control was not relinquished by the Japanese admiralty.
•  The government also handed out citizenship to Indians living in Southeast Asia, and 30,000 expatriates pledged allegiance to it in Malaya alone.

Bose in Port Blair Bose, looking at the Cellular Jail in Port Blair, Andaman.

• Diplomatically, Bose’s government was recognised by the Axis powers and their satellites: Germany, Japan, and Italy, as well as Nazi and Japanese puppet states in Croatia, China, Thailand, Burma, Manchuria, and the Philippines. Immediately after its formation, the Azad Hind government declared war on Britain and the United States.

Not the first provisional government

• Notably, 28 years before the Azad Hind government came into existence, the Provisional Government of India was formed in Kabul by a group known as the Indian Independence Committee (IIC).
• The IIC, with the help of the Ottoman Caliph and the Germans, tried to foment insurrection in India, mainly among Muslim tribes in Kashmir and the British India’s northwestern frontier.
• The IIC established a government-in-exile in Kabul under the presidency of Raja Mahendra Pratap, and prime ministership of Maulana Barkatullah, revolutionary freedom fighters who spent decades outside India trying to gather international support for Indian independence.
• Barkatullah was also one of the founders of the Ghadar movement, which began in California in 1913, and aimed to overthrow British rule in India. 
• Lala Har Dayal, one of the movement’s leaders put forth the following plan of action for the Ghadarites.
• While the movement was crushed in India by the end of the War, the Ghadarite left a strong and lasting impression on Indians and the British.
• The Kabul provisional government was one of many moves orchestrated byGhadarite revolutionaries.

About Barkatullah:

• Mohamed Barakatullah Bhopali, known with his honorific as Maulana Barkatullah (7 July 1854 – 20 September 1927), was an Indian revolutionary from Bhopal.
• While in England he came in close contact with Lala Hardayal and Raja Mahendra Pratap, son of the Raja of Hathras. 
• He became a friend of Afghan Emir and the editor of the Kabul newspaper Siraj-ul-Akbar.
• He was one of the founders of the Ghadar Party in 1913 at San Francisco. 
• Later he became the first prime minister of the Provisional Government of India established on 1 December 1915 in Kabul with Raja Mahendra Pratap as its president.

Acts of defiance & political necessity, not actual governments:

• Setting up provisional governments, and governments-in-exile, has long been a way for resistance movements to gain political legitimacy. 
• For example, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) in Dharamshala. 
• The very purpose of this government-in-exile is to challenge the legitimacy of the Chinese occupation of Tibet. 
• By running a parallel government which claims to represent the will of the Tibetan people, the CTA keeps the flame of resistance burning, even when brutal repression and government-sponsored Han migration in Tibet has made things difficult.
• Similarly, both the 1915 and 1943 provisional governments were, more than anything else, symbolic acts of defiance against British rule in India, made with certain political considerations in mind.
• Bose proclaimed the Azad Hind government in order to legitimize his armed struggle against the British.
• By proclaiming a provisional government, he gave his army legitimacy in the eyes of international law — they were not just mutineers or revolutionaries, but soldiers of a duly constituted government.
• Crucially, citizenship oaths taken by Azad Hind Fauj officers were produced during the 1945-46 Red Fort trials as evidence of legality of their actions.
• The Kabul provisional government was, on the other hand, proclaimed to establish the seriousness of IIC’s intentions, which it hoped would help gain the support of the Afghan Emir, who remained neutral but faced unrelenting pressure from the British to crack down on anti-colonial revolutionaries.
• In 1917, it even reached out to the Soviets, and as a government-in-exile right on India’s borders, posed a looming threat to the British.

That being said, neither of the two can, in any seriousness, be called the Government of India. This is for two main reasons:

• First, both these governments failed to gain widespread international recognition.
• While some countries did recognise and support them, they did so for their own motives.
• After the World Wars (in which the British emerged victorious), this support swiftly vanished.
• Second, both these governments never controlled Indian territory. 
• While Bose did officially hold the Andamans, effectively, the islands were still under Japanese occupation. 
• So was all the territory in the Northeast captured (briefly) by the combined Indian and Japanese armies. 
• The Kabul government never set foot on Indian soil, and in all seriousness, was a government only on paper until its dissolution in 1919.