15 May, a day celebrated across the Indian Subcontinent. During the Second World War II, the Empire of Great Japan had steamrolled the fractured Republic of China with unexpected ease. Japan then swept over French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and British Malaya and Singapore (carefully avoiding the American Philippines). By 1942, Japan had begun her campaign against the British Raj itself. Burma fell first, then -- to the surprise of many -- Calcutta. It seemed that many in the British Indian Army had come to see Japan more favourably than the British; and among the loyal sepoys, the Famine had left them too starved and ill-supplied to mount a decent defense. Subhas Chandra Bose -- the Bengali militant and fascist collaborateur, who had formed the so-called "Free Indian" government-in-exile in Japanese-occupied Singapore -- proclaimed his movement to be the legitimate government of India, and was made the Prime Minister of a Japanese puppet-state. After the fall of Calcutta, the Imperial Japanese Army and their "Free Indian" allies marched west into the Indian heartland, taking key cities like Patna, Ayodhya, Benares, and Lucknow. Delhi was poised to fall. And the British, busy with problems in far-away Europe, were powerless to stop them.
Just beneath the surface, however, discontent was brewing. It soon became clear to many Indians that the Japanese were no better than the British, and had no interest in ending the policies which caused the Famine; indeed, the Famine only worsened as the Japanese Army came through India, maintaining the same repressive policies while also raiding for supplies. Additionally, although Bose himself might not have been a Hindu nationalist, he was certainly willing to make common cause with them. The "Government of Free India" committed many atrocities and pogroms against Muslims, Buddhists, lower-caste Hindus, women, and other vulnerable populations, most infamously the anti-Muslim massacres at Dhaka and Murshidabad. The Mahabodhi Temple -- the holiest site in Buddhism, which contains the Bodhi Tree under which the Buddha sat and achieved enlightenment -- was destroyed in a fire; whether the Bose Government was responsible for this is still disputed by historians, but they certainly received the bulk of the blame.
In March 1943, a coalition of Indian princes led by the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Nawab of Bhopal, the Khan of Kalat, the Maharajah of Mysore, and the Maharajah of Gwalior secretly convened in Hyderabad to discuss what to do. It was clear their British overlords weren't going to give them any support, and the situation with the Calcutta Government was spiralling out of control. Sectarian violence and famine wracked all of India, and the Japanese Army committed atrocity after atrocity. The Indian nationalist movement was fractured between the Indian National Congress and the Free Indian Government, and between Gandhi and Bose, it certainly appeared that Bose would come out on top. Something had to be done.
A secret army was assembled, made up of volunteer subjects of several princely-states. On the 15th of May, this Indian Imperial Army -- under the joint-leadership of Subedar-General Sayyid Bahadur Ala-ud-Din Khan (a Muslim) and Risaldar-General Govind Shivaji Idaiyar (a Hindu) -- marched from Mysore to the offices of the British Presidency in Madras, with an order that the President hand over his territories to the new Empire of Hindustan. It was a fait accompli; the British had no choice but to surrender the Madras Presidency, thus granting the Empire of Hindustan rulership over the entirety of southern India. This was mutiny, treason; but there was really nothing the British could do at this point. The Princely States pulled their troops from the British Indian Army to bolder their own, and employed their army to drive out the Japanese, the Indian fascists in Calcutta, and eventually the rest of the British. "Madras Day" is celebrated to this day in the Empire of Hindustan as their independence day.
The Clockroach
