Netaji- Subhash Chandra Bose

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I suggest to the Admins to take all the posts related to Netaji & Savarkar and put it in the Netaji thread.


Here is some info I found on the Indian Army during World war II.
It is a Pakistani site, so I cannot vouch for its reliability:

http://defencejournal.com/sept99/martial-races.htm

Here are some quotes from there:

"The Indian Army expanded from about 189,000 in October 1939 to 2,500,000 by 1945. In 1939 there were 78 infantry battalions, 20 Gurkha battalions, 18 Cavalry units. The officer strength was 3,000 British; 1,115 Indian. By 1945 these were about 34,500 British, 15,740 Indian officers, of all classes."


"Annexure B shows the composition of the British Indian Army. It will be noticed that the percentage of Muslims decreased after 1 January 1942 not because of paucity of volunteer recruits but because of Government of India policy, as the demand for Pakistan built up 1940 onwards."


Some of the numbers are not consistent.

In 1940 Muslims were 37.635% and Hindus were 37.518%. So both were equal at the start of the war.

The site says - "Muslims as a whole constituted a quarter of the Indian Army as of 1947".

But if we look at the table titled Annexure B, the Muslim percentage in 1945 is listed at 32.016%. The Hindu percentage is listed as 46.488%.

Further in 1945 Sikhs were only 6.740%, despite their claims of being a martial race. Also the Gurkhas are listed separately from the Hindus at 7.390%.

The total number of soldiers in the table adds up to 1,436,840 for 1945.
Why is this lower than the 2.5 million figure stated earlier?


The total number of soldiers falls down to 373,570 by 1947.
The Muslim percentage also goes up in 1947 to 36.210% and Hindus go down to about 41%.

Sikhs also go up to 9%.