Subhas Chandra Bose Jayanti | INA trials: Final phase of the Indian freedom struggle

As we celebrate the birth anniversary of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose on 23 January, it is time to recall the INA trials, another lesser known and much lesser talked about chapter of India’s struggle for freedom. The Indian National Army (INA) trials held from November 1945 to May 1946 were a series of court-martials of captured soldiers of the Indian National Army. In the first trial, three INA officers P K Sehgal, Shah Nawaz, and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon were charged with treason for defecting from the British Indian Army and joining the Indian National Army, and waging war against the King of India. The trial was held at the Red Fort in Delhi, which served as the military headquarters of the British Indian Army. Founded on 1 September 1942, in Singapore, INA  became a competent fighting force under the leadership of Netaji. It was the Army of the Indian government-in-exile headed by Subhash Chandra Bose. This new Indian Government-in-exile had the support and recognition of Germany, Italy, Burma, Thailand, Croatia, Manchukuo (an independent state in China and Mongolia), the Philippines, and free China. Soldiers of INA were the British Indian forces that surrendered to the Japanese on 15 February, 1942, in Singapore. These Indian prisoners of war were set free two days later by the Japanese. Besides POWs (of the British Indian Army) INA had plantation workers, which included men and women, from Singapore, British Malaya, and other parts of Southeast Asia. In March 1944 Subhash Chandra Bose declared war against the British to free India. In his well-researched book Netaji,Azad Hind Sarkar &Fauj eminent historian Prof Kapil Kumar writes, “It was on 4 February, 1944, that the Azad Hind Fauj (INA) fired its first shot and “went on the offences against the British and hoisted the Indian national tricolour over the hills of Arakan.” INA won many battles after that, collected intelligence behind the army lines and by 18 March 1944, having fought fierce battles against the British Army divisions, entered India at Mowdok.” INA progressed as far as Imphal but was forced to retreat in July 1944 due to less ammunition, food, and no aerial support. The immediate outcome of this retreat was the capture of INA soldiers and the decision to put them on trial. Britain’s objective behind the trial was to restore discipline in the force and to deter similar “acts of treason” by Indian soldiers within the Army. They didn’t want this defection and rebellion to escalate to the level that an all-India uprising like that of 1857 happened. The trial was also an opportunity for the colonial government to reaffirm its legal sovereignty over India. The colonial government believed that the INA’s effort to use force to achieve independence lacked popular support in India and would be condemned by the Indian National Congress and public opinion. Treason was the charge that as a civil offence under Section 121 of the Indian Penal Code, was punishable by death or transportation for life. These trials triggered a series of events that took the British Empire by surprise and hastened its departure from India. People first learned about the INA’s war against the British for independence of Bharat when the British government announced its intention to try the three officers in August 1945. The nation was shocked by the news that a sovereign Indian state had been formed in Singapore in 1943 and had initiated a war against the British Empire in India. Soon after the first trial began on 5 November, 1945, a nationwide mass movement rose in support of the three officers. Pictures of court martialed soldiers along with pictures of Subhash Chandra Bose began to appear everywhere covered in garlands of flowers. Surprisingly given the significance of the INA trials, very little scholarly work had been done by the post-independence political historians of India. But in August 1945, when the British administration declared its intent to put on trial the soldiers of INA, Indian newspapers such as the Amrita Bazar Patrika and the Hindustan Times immediately began publishing reports and editorials condemning the trial and declaring the INA soldiers national heroes. When these and reports of the INA’s battles reached far and wide, support for the INA soldiers grew drastically. It was quite opposite to the Congress policy of peaceful and non-violent civil disobedience protests under Mahatma Gandhi. It suited the British also as it was controllable and could prevent the outbreak of large-scale violent protests. However, it was the magnitude of the national outrage at the British decision to try these officers that the Indian National Congress, which had opposed Bose all along and had refused to support or even recognize the Provisional Government of Free India in October 1943, decided to assume responsibility for defending the accused. Thus, Congress established an INA Defense Committee that included its best legal minds, including Bhulabhai Desai, Tej Bahadur Sapru, Asaf Ali, K J  Katju, and future Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Its effect on common people of India When the trials began on 5 November, 1945, detailed information about the INA and its fight against British rule started coming out.  It galvanised the Indian people and triggered the country’s spontaneous rioting and mass agitation.  Calcutta, Bombay, Patna, Karachi, Rawalpindi, Banaras, Allahabad, and many other cities and towns witnessed violent protests.   The trial also triggered a moral crisis for British Indian army soldiers, that their fellow citizens had been fighting a patriotic war of national independence, while they had been defending an empire that had colonised their country and continued to oppress its people. The INA officers proudly declared their roles in the war and refused to plead guilty even at the risk of hanging for treason. The INA trial concluded with the British Military Court sentencing the defendant officers to exile for life. General Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief of British Indian forces knowing that the judgement could not be enforced amidst such intense public fury, issued an order for commuting the sentences and setting them free and recommended to the Viceroy that the charge of waging war against the King be dropped in future trials. Jawaharlal Nehru, in a letter to Auchinleck five months after the trial, gave him what he called “a glimpse into his [my] mind” at the time of the trial. “It is sometimes said,” he wrote, “that we have exploited the INA situation for political purposes …. I can say with some confidence that there was no desire or even thought of exploiting the INA issue …when it first came before the public…. I had not appreciated the political and international approach of some of the leaders of the Indian independence movement in South-East Asia…. Then a strange and surprising thing happened…. Within a few weeks, the story of the INA had percolated to the remotest villages in India, and everywhere there was admiration for them and apprehension as to their possible fate. No political organisation, however strong and efficient, could have produced this enormous reaction in India…. The widespread popular enthusiasm was surprising enough, but even more surprising was a similar reaction from a very large number of regular Indian Army officers and men. Something had touched them deeply. This kind of thing …cannot be done by politicians and agitators.” (The “Right to Wage War” against Empire: Anticolonialism and the Challenge to International Law in the Indian National Army Trial of 1945, Cambridge University Press, May 2019) It was for the first time the discourse of international (Eurocentric) law was invoked to claim the rights of a nation’s self-determination and freedom. As Michael Edwards who has written extensively on the end of Britain’s Indian empire dramatically put it, “The ghost of Subhas Bose, like Hamlet’s father, walked the battlements of the Red Fort, and his suddenly amplified figure over-awed the conferences that were to lead to independence”. The war that Subhash Chandra Bose launched against the British colonial state in India was the final phase of a long journey of India’s struggle for independence. INA trials led to incidents of protests all over India. And within two years of the INA trials, British rule in India came to a permanent end. The writer is a Ph.D. in sociology and is an independent commentator. Views are personal.   Read all the Latest News , Trending News ,  Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.