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Hello and thanks for downloading Witness History with me Claire Bowes from the BBC World Service. This January India is celebrating the 125th anniversary of the birth of the independence leader Shubash Chandra Bowes.

Like Gandhi, Bowes campaigned against British rule in India, but during World War II he sided with Nazi

Germany against Britain.

I've been speaking to his great niece about why many think he could have changed the course of India's history.

If the Bose brothers, Sharath and Shubash, had lived long enough, there would have been no partition.

Madhuri Bose, whose grandfather, Sharat, was also an independence fighter. But it's her great uncle Shubash, who is still idolized.

He is the one person, one leader, who is revered today across communities. There's no other leader, not even Gandhi.

And he has become a demi-gard.

In 1938, Shubash Chandra Bose was the leader of India's Congress party,

the country's first political party.

Friends, we are now living in a period which is pregnant with immense possibilities.

So if Bose was so important, why, unlike Gandhi, is he so little known outside India?

Because I believe that the British historians have airbrushed the real story of the Indian freedom struggle.

A Hindu Shubash Chandra Bose was born in 1897.

Meheer-Bose, no relation, has written about him in Raj, Secrets, Revolution,

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