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Netaji pioneered the concept of overseas citizenship: Historian
Long before India embraced the concept of overseas citizenship, it was
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose who thought of it by providing the Indian
diaspora in Southeast Asia an idea of "future citizenship", an expert
said Friday.
Delivering a lecture on "Bay of Bengal and its
Cultural Connections" here at an event to mark the 118th birth
anniversary of Netaji, Harvard University professor Sunil Amrith dubbed
Netaji's effort to recognise the Indian diaspora as "a bold experiment
in citizenship".
"The migrants had all moved in an imperial
system in the 1920s and 1930s and they did not have any sense of
citizenship or rights as such. One of the things which Netaji did, which
I think was unprecedented, was to treat these Indians overseas as
citizens of a nation of the future," Amrith said.
It was the
efforts of Netaji as the head of the 'Provisional Government of Free
India' that around two lakh Indian migrants had taken the oath of
allegiance for the government that was set up in Singapore in 1943, said
Amrith, the author of "Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature
and the Fortunes of Migrants".
The book tells the story of
centuries of trade and migration that have linked the various countries
situated along the Bay of Bengal.
Commenting on the issue,
historian and Netaji's grand nephew Sugata Bose pointed out to the
pioneering concept of "extra-territorial citizenship" which the world
embraced a lot later.
"India embraced the concept of overseas
citizenship only in the 21st century, so it is a testimony to Netaji's
farsightedness. While the territory of the Provisional Government was
confined, the fact that two lakh people had taken the oath of allegiance
meant they were kind of given extraterritorial citizenship," said
Sugata Bose, also a Trinamool Congress parliamentarian.