Tag Archives: Major Abid Hasan

Abid Hassan Safrani, freedom fighter who gave Jai Hind slogan

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Hyderabad, TELANGANA :

Abid Hassan, born in Hyderabad in 1912, hailed from a patriotic family.

Abid Hasan Safrani/COURTESY INDIANMUSLIMLEGENDS.BLOGSPOT.IN
Abid Hasan Safrani/COURTESY INDIANMUSLIMLEGENDS.BLOGSPOT.IN

Hyderabad :

This is the story of Abid Hassan Safrani who, not many may know, was not just the trusted lieutenant of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, but the Hyderabadi who had coined the magical slogan JAI HIND.

I have had the privilege of translating into English the Telugu book on the life of Netaji Bose by the late Ch. Acharya at the behest of the Freedom Fighters Association.

The following are excerpts from the book. Kindly read on:

“JAI HIND ”. No slogan had ever cast a greater spell on the nation than this. It had welded the people of this country of diverse languages, cultures, and faiths during the freedom struggle and filled them with a strong sense of patriotism. It continues to do so even now.

The man who coined this stirring slogan was Major Abid Hassan Safrani of Hyderabad, a close aide of   Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose.

It was adopted as the national slogan at Free India Centre’s first meeting in Berlin in November 1941. Then, it became a popular form of address and greeting.

Safrani was with Bose when he undertook the death-defying undersea journey from Germany to the Far East. Safrani recalled how calm and composed was Bose when enemy ships rained bombs on the submarine. Unmindful, he dictated notes to Safrani on the future course of his action.

Sisir Kumar, the nephew of Bose, gave more details of the adventure in his book, ‘INA in India Today’.

Abid Hassan, born in Hyderabad in 1912, hailed from a patriotic family. After graduating in engineering with distinction, he went to Berlin for higher studies.

Attracted by Bose’s freedom movement, he joined the Indian National Army. Recognising his leadership qualities, Bose gave Safrani ample scope to grow to his full potential.

Safrani could fluently speak several languages like English, German, French, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Telugu, and Punjabi. This enabled him to build excellent rapport with officers and men of the INA. Major Safrani headed the Gandhi Brigade in the INA. It consisted of men of exceptional courage and valour.

When they eventually surrendered to the British army at Imphal in North East India, top British officers could not help marvel at the bravery of Safrani and his men. He was imprisoned and put in solitary confinement with not even a window to allow light.

He mentioned this in a letter to his mother, Hassans had firm roots in nationalism. Abid’s father, Jaffer Hassan, was dean in Osmania University , and mother, Begum Amir Hassan, a staunch Gandhian. They inculcated patriotic feelings in their sons, Badrul Hassan and Abid Hassan, at a tender age.

All of them were very close to Mahatma Gandhi and used to visit his Sabarmati ashram. Fanatics threatened to kill them and throw their bodies into the Musi. Gandhi would send his secretary, Pyarelal, to railway station whenever the Hassans visited him. Badrul Hassan edited Gandhi’s “Young India” in 1925.

He remained a true Gandhian until his death in 1973. He wore khadi and led a spartan life in a small room.

Abid Hassan Safrani also imbibed these traits.

Begum Safrani was a unique personality who lived a full life(1870-1970). She gave away everything for the freedom of the country, including her paternal property. She was a close friend of Sarojini Naidu and was affectionately called ‘amma Jaan’ by Gandhi, Nehru, Netaji and Abul Kalam Azad.

“Abid Manzil”, their residence in Troop Bazaar, stands as mute testimony to the burning of foreign cloth in 1920 at the behest of Gandhi. In his book, Sisir Kumar Bose gave a graphic account of the escapades of Subhash Chandra Bose and Abid Hassan Safrani such as the submarine journey from Germany to Asia and the INA’s triumphal march through the forests of Imphal.

After the Second World War, Safrani was jailed for six years. Begum Amir Hassan, who did not expect anything in return for the services of the family, was much worried that her son might be sentenced to death in the Red Fort trial. Several INA men were shot dead for participating in the liberation movement. She met Gandhi, Nehru and Sarojini Naidu to plead for her son’s life.

Safrani got a last-minute reprieve after Prime Minister Nehru and Governor-General, Lord Mountbatten, intervened. Nehru had earlier visited a prison in Singapore where INA members were lodged. He spotted a man sitting aloof and asked if he was Safrani from Hyderabad . The man greeted him with “Jai Hind” and nodded ‘yes’.

After his release, an ailing Safrani returned to his “Dhoop Chaon” residence in Banjara Hills, Hyderabad and recuperated under the care of his loving mother and friends like Bankat Chandra, Elizabeth, and C.S. Vasu. He took up radio sales for a living, but with little success. He wrote a civil services examination and qualified for foreign service. He was personally interviewed by Jawaharlal Nehru .

He had served in Indian missions in a number of countries like Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Senegal, Zambia, Ivory Coast. Safrani was Indian Ambassador to Iraq when Jordan King Hashmath-e-Faizal, was killed in an army coup in 1957. The government drew heavy flak in Parliament for his absence in Baghdad at the crucial movement. Nehru defended Safrani. Safrani loved agriculture and raised a horticultural farm in Golconda . It was his practice to visit Netaji’s hometown, Calcutta, in January every year carrying fruit grown on his farm.

That was his way of remembering his mentor, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. He used to recall with moist eyes those memorable years with Bose. He died in 1984 but immortalized himself with the soul-stirring slogan he coined: Jai Hind. It would keep the Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and others together for centuries and strengthen national integration. He was an ideal Shia and a noble Sufi saint.

Safrani memorial school in Golconda, run by his wife, Suraya, seeks to instill in the minds of young pupils the lofty ideals, values and principles dear to her husband.

Dasu Kesava Rao is a senior journalist who worked for The Hindu, among other newspapers

source: http://www.siasat.com / The Siasat Daily / Home> Featured News / by Safoora / January 26th, 2020

How Netaji’s aide coined the slogan Jai Hind in a German POW camp

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Abid Hasan’s grandnephew recounts the story behind creation of a salutation to replace religion-based greetings for Indian soldiers.

Image credit: Photo courtesy: Anvar Alikhan | Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose with his aide Abid Hasan during their journey to Japan from Germany in 1943.
Image credit: Photo courtesy: Anvar Alikhan | Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose with his aide Abid Hasan during their journey to Japan from Germany in 1943.

Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose had a problem. It was 1941. He was in Germany, and was spending a lot of his time in the Konigsbruck prisoner-of-war camp, trying to recruit Indian soldiers captured by Rommel’s army in North Africa into his new Azad Hind Fauj.

But what troubled him was that the soldiers of the Indian Army had historically been organised into regiments based on ethnic and religious lines – the Rajputs, the Baluchis, the Sikhs, and so on. And even here, in the prisoner-of-war camps, they tended to cluster into their own little ethnic and religious groups.

Netaji, however, was very clear that his new Azad Hind Fauj would be a completely integrated army with men of every community and caste fighting shoulder-to-shoulder for an integrated India. After all, how could it be any other way?

But to integrate the soldiers was a complex issue that had to be tackled at many levels. For starters, each community greeted each other with their own salutation: the Hindu soldiers said, “Namaste” or “Ram, Ram ji”; the Muslims said, “Salaam alaikum”, and the Sikhs said, “Sat Sri Akal”. Netaji believed the first thing he had to do was to replace these religion-based greetings with a common salutation that would help bond everybody together.

And this task he entrusted to his aide, Abid Hasan.

The great rallying cry

Hasan was a Hyderabadi who’d been a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi as a teenager, and had spent time at his Sabarmati Ashram. Later, when his contemporaries all went to university in England, Hasan chose to go, instead, to Germany. And it was there that, in 1941, he met Netaji, and dropped out of engineering college to became his aide.

Now, pondering over the task Netaji had set him, Hasan was wandering around the Konigsbruck POW camp, when he overheard two Rajput soldiers greet each other with “Jai Ramji ki”. And that triggered off in his mind the idea of “Jai Hindustan ki”.

This, in turn, led to the shorter, more rousing “Jai Hind”.

Netaji was delighted with Hasan’s idea, which worked so well that “Jai Hind” soon went beyond its original brief to become a rallying cry of the Indian National Army. Later, of course, it would be adopted as the national slogan when, at the time of Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru raised it, stirringly, at the Red Fort.

It is ironic now, in the time of the Bharat Mata ki Jai controversy, to think that Jai Hind was a slogan created specifically to help unite the people of India, rather than divide them.

Later, in 1943, when Netaji was searching for an anthem for his Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind, or the Provisional Government of Free India, he decided on Rabindranath Tagore’s poem, Jana Gana Mana. But to make it more accessible to the common man, Netaji wanted it translated from Tagore’s classical Bengali into simple Hindi. And for that, once again, he turned to Hasan, along with two other INA officers, Mumtaz Hussain and JR Bhonsle, while the tune itself was composed by Capt Ram Singh. Netaji’s vivid brief to them was, apparently, that when the anthem played, it should be so rousing that auditorium itself should shatter in half to reveal the sky above.

It is a mark of the kind of man Netaji was, to combine such a wide sweep of vision, with such minute attention to its details.

Chalo Dilli!

So what became of Abid Hasan?

When Netaji made his historic escape from Germany to Japan by submarine in 1943, he took Hasan along with him. It was the longest submarine voyage in history till then, beginning in the Baltic Sea in a German submarine, transferring off the coast of Madagascar into a Japanese submarine, and then sailing across the Indian Ocean to land in Sumatra, nearly four months later (a voyage that is interestingly portrayed in Shyam Benegal’s The Forgotten Hero, with Rajit Kapur playing the part of Hasan). From Sumatra the two of them were then flown in a Japanese Air Force plane to Tokyo.

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose with his aide Abid Husain on their famous voyage from Germany to Japan in 1943. Photo courtesy: Anvar Alikhan
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose with his aide Abid Husain on their famous voyage from Germany to Japan in 1943. Photo courtesy: Anvar Alikhan

Hasan (by then Major Hasan) fought in the historic Battle of Imphal in 1944 – which Netaji believed would be the INA’s great breakthrough into the plains of India at the head of General Mutaguchi’s 15th Japanese Division, culminating in his dream of “Chalo Dilli!” But, unfortunately, everything went wrong.

A spy code-named Silver tipped off the Allies about the attack. The Allied defenders fought back with unexpected desperation; the monsoon broke early, and torrential rains cut off the INA’s and Japanese supply lines, while the Allies managed to supply their troops by air. The expected defection of Indian soldiers from the Allied side to the INA didn’t happen; instead, demoralised INA soldiers and officers began to surrender to the Allies. Also, significantly, the Japanese, invincible until now, were, for the first time, under real pressure on various fronts, both geographical and metaphorical. The tide of the war had imperceptibly, but decisively, turned.

The four-month-long Battle of Imphal (along with the Battle of Kohima nearby) has been voted the greatest battle fought in the history of the British Army. But what that meant for the Indian National Army was that instead of leading to an advance upon Delhi, the battle ended with the long, dejected retreat back to Rangoon, which Hasan orchestrated.

That last, fateful flight

In August 1945, Hasan was one of the key aides whom Netaji picked to accompany him on his final flight, along with SA Ayer, a minister in his Cabinet; Colonel Habeeb-ur-Rahman, his secretary; Colonel Pritam Singh; Colonel Gulzara Singh and Debnath Das. The plan was that they would fly together from Singapore to Tokyo, via Bangkok, Saigon, Taipei, and Manchuria.

But at Saigon Netaji suddenly asked Hasan to remain behind to finish some work, and meet up with him in Tokyo. Ultimately Netaji took off in a Japanese Mitsubishi Ki21 bomber, accompanied only by Rahman.

And the rest we know.

Or don’t know.

It all depends, essentially, on your point of view. (Although it is interesting to note that the top INA officials who were closest to Netaji say that he died in the crash.)

At the end of the war, Hasan was imprisoned by the British and, along with other close Netaji associates, was grilled by British Intelligence about Netaji and his plans. But like the others – including Habeeb-ur Rahman, Pritam Singh and John Thivy, founder of the Malayan Indian Congress – he refused to talk. Some of them were taken away and never seen again; nobody knew whose turn would be next.

After Independence, Hasan joined the newly-formed Indian Foreign Service, and took on the surname Safrani (after the saffron colour in the Indian flag). He would ultimately retire as Ambassador to Denmark – the coast of which he had quietly slipped past at the start of his secret submarine journey to Japan in 1943.

After Independence, Abid Hasan joined the newly-formed Indian Foreign Service, and took on the surname Safrani. Photo courtesy: Anvar Alikhan
After Independence, Abid Hasan joined the newly-formed Indian Foreign Service, and took on the surname Safrani. Photo courtesy: Anvar Alikhan

He also happened to be (and it’s now time for a disclosure) a favourite grand-uncle of mine.

I asked him once, in an unguarded moment, what really happened to Netaji, and he said, “Arre beta, yeh sab bilkul bakwas hai.” This is all complete nonsense.

But was he telling me the truth?

Or was it just a cover-up for some secret he didn’t want to reveal?

I suppose I shall never know.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> Remembering History / by Anvar AliKhan / Sunday – April 24th, 2016