Sarat Chandra Bose, born in 1889, a barrister by profession and the second son of Janaki Nath Bose was the elder brother or “mejda” of Subhas Chandra Bose. He went to London in 1912 to study law. Like Subhas he also studied in Presidency and Scottish church college. He had talked to the principal of Scottish Church College to arrange for Subhas’s education after the incident in Presidency. He later gave up his extremely well paid profession and joined the independence movement after Subhas was arrested and sent to Mandalay jail in 1925. Sarat was briefly in the same prison (Jabbalpur) with Subhas in 1932. He was a member and later president of the Bengal Provincial Congress and also joined the Fazlul Haq Government as a minister after Subhas had left India. But soon he was arrested by the British Government on trumped up charges of conspiracy against the Government and from 1941 to 1945 he was in prison. He was only released before the INA trials in 1945, was in charge of the INA relief committee in Calcutta and was also a member of the CWC. He was made a minister of the provincial Government of Pandit Nehru in 1946. He later resigned over his protest against the cabinet mission plan to partition Bengal and worked actively for a united Bengal province as a last ditch attempt to save Bengal from partition and put a roadblock on Jinnah’s plan. He formed the Socialist Party by taking charge of the Subhaswadi fraction of the forward Bloc. He firmly believed that Subhas was alive and in 1949 he wrote an article in the Nation paper that Subhas was in Red China, waiting to return to India. He had sent Muthuramalingam Thevar to China to meet Subhas, as per Thevar’s claim in 1956. Sarat Chandra Bose had married Bibhavati Dey, an outstanding lady and had several children of whom notable were Sisir Kumar Bose, and Amiya nath Bose.
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