How Bose’s INA helped India win independence — but not on the battlefield

The INA was formed on February 17, 1942, two days after the British surrendered to Japanese forces in Singapore. It mostly comprised Indian prisoners of war (PoWs) captured by the Japanese during their Southeast Asia campaign. The Japanese thought that a native Indian force would be a powerful weapon in its planned conquest of India.

By December, however, the army was in disarray, lacking vision and leadership. It would take the arrival of Subhas Chandra Bose to turn things around. Bose arrived in Singapore in July 1943, after courting both the Nazis and the Japanese for help in India’s independence struggle. He took charge of the 12,000-strong INA on July 4.

“For an enslaved people, there can be no greater pride, no higher honour, than to be the first soldier in the army of liberation,” he told his troops the next morning, and immediately rejuvenated the army.

Over the next few months, he would carry out a public relations masterpiece, gathering support — in both men and material — from the Indian diaspora in Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia. The INA’s strength eventually grew to more than 40,000 personnel, and many Indians donated their life savings for the cause.

A doomed fight for freedom

From the very beginning, Bose had pinned his hopes on a large-scale uprising within the country, to complement the INA’s attack at the border. “When the British government is thus attacked from both sides — from inside India and from outside — it will collapse, and the Indian people will then regain their liberty,” he said in speech on July 9, 1943.

But to spark a countrywide revolution, the INA needed to first achieve some military successes of its own. Unfortunately, by the time Bose’s army was ready to fight, the tide of the war had turned.

Instead of a victorious romp into Assam and then to Delhi, as Bose had hoped, the Imphal offensive of 1944 was a deadly reality check. After being unable to take Imphal and Kohima, the supply starved INA, along with its Japanese allies, was forced to retreat, all while suffering heavy losses due to the enemy’s air superiority and gunpowder, as well as starvation and disease. The army would never set foot in India again.

By 1945, the British had launched their own campaign to retake Burma, and the INA once again found itself in retreat. Many perished or surrendered to the rampaging Allies, and by August, Bose and what was left of the INA were back in Singapore. After the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered on August 15.

Bose wanted to stay with his troops for the surrender, but was persuaded to leave by his subordinates. He died in a plane crash three days later.

But Bose’s fight was not in vain

Even after the military defeat, Bose genuinely believed that the INA’s fight had not been in vain. “… I regret more than you do that your sufferings and sacrifices have not borne immediate fruit. But they have not gone in vain, because they…will serve as an undying inspiration to Indians all over the world. Posterity will bless your name, and will talk with pride about your offerings at the altar of India’s Freedom…,” he said in a message to his supporters on July 15. He was right.

After the war, Claude Auchinleck, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Indian army, decided to publicly prosecute senior INA officers for high treason. The trials would be held publicly at the Red Fort from November 1945 to May 1946, and unleash a wave of nationalist sentiment among the public.

Contrary to Auchinleck’s calculations, the Indian public overwhelmingly sympathised with Bose’s INA, hailing the soldiers as heroes in India’s national struggle. Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Sahgal and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, facing the first and most high-profile of court martials, became a potent symbol of the unity of Indians.

So overwhelming was the national sentiment that the Indian National Congress — which had been highly critical of Bose and his decision to ally with the Japanese — decided to assume responsibility for defending the accused. Jawaharlal Nehru himself put on his barrister’s coat for the trial.

For the British, particularly concerning was the sympathy that INA soldiers had aroused among men of the British Indian armed forces.

Between February 18-25, 1946, mutiny broke out in the Royal Indian Navy, spreading from Bombay to Karachi and Calcutta, and eventually involving more than 20,000 Indian personnel and 78 ships. Another mutiny broke out in the Army in late February in the Jabalpur Cantonment.

“Thus, in the aftermath of the trial, the very idea of a British Indian Army — an imperial army — became untenable: the identity of the armed forces had now come to be grounded in that of the nation to such an extent that there could only be either a British Army or an Indian Army,” the historian Mithi Mukherjee wrote. (‘The “Right to Wage War” against Empire: Anticolonialism and the Challenge to International Law in the Indian National Army Trial of 1945’ in Law and Social Enquiry, 2019).

For the British, losing control over the Indian soldiers in their armed forces effectively ended their ability to govern their colonial possessions in India — and maybe beyond.

The newly elected British Premier, Clement Atlee, announced the Cabinet Mission a day after the mutiny started. While multiple INA officers were found guilty on various charges, their sentences were never carried out.