India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has rechristened three of the country’s island territories named after colonial officials, as part of a campaign by his Hindu nationalist government to disassociate itself from two centuries of British rule.

On a visit to the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago off India’s east coast in the Bay of Bengal on Sunday, Modi announced the renaming of Ross, Neil and Havelock Islands after freedom fighter Subhash Chander Bose.

Mr Bose, who was a radical Hindu nationalist, had raised a rebel army of Indian soldiers during WWII with the help of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, to fight the British.

His rag-tag Free India Army was defeated alongside the Japanese army advancing from Burma (Myanmar) into north eastern India and soon after Mr Bose died under mysterious circumstances, two years before Indian independence in 1947.

Consequently, Ross Island, named after a Colonial marine surveyor will now be known as Subhash Chander Bose Dweep or island, while nearby Neil Island that commemorated a British military officer of the East India Company, becomes Shaeed or Martyr Dweep.

Adjoining Havelock Island, that honoured a former British army general who crushed the 1857 mutiny by Indian soldiers against British rule, has been renamed Swaraj or Independent Island.