Azad Hind Fauj (INA): The forgotten heroes who brought us Purna Swaraj
By Prasenjit K. Basu
British mythology would have us believe that India achieved its independence through a smooth “transfer of power” to Indian hands. More recent public discourse (initiated by Collins/Lapierre’s book and Attenborough’s movie) fosters the notion that non-violent resistance led by Gandhiji and the Congress alone led to independence. This story-line implicitly flatters the supposed British commitment to fair-play and the rule of law.
It also conveniently air-brushes out both the brutality of British rule, and the long history of resistance to it – including violent resistance by the Marathas, Sikhs, and Mysore between 1760 and 1846, then the first war of independence across north and east India in 1857-58, the mighty Swadeshi movement of 1905-11, the Ghadr party’s rebellion in 1913-17, the revolutionary movement inspired by Bhagat Singh and Chandrasekhar Azad in the 1920s culminating in Surya Sen and Pritilata Waddedar's raid on the Chittagong armoury in April 1930, the INA’s war from 1942-46 culminating in the mutiny of the Royal Indian navy, and large parts of the air force and army in February 1946, which finally convinced the British their time was up. Singapore was a crucial staging base for Indian resistance in both the world wars.
India accounted for about a fifth of world industrial production in 1800 (most of this emanating from India’s most prosperous province, Bengal, which naturally made it the first target of British imperial conquest). A ban on imports of Indian cloth into Britain, and the loot from extortionate land revenue collections, built the edifice of Britain’s textile industry while perpetrating a famine in Bengal in 1770 that wiped out a third of its population – and further impoverished India over the next century. Violent resistance to the spread of British rule was thus a natural reaction.
During the First World War, the Ghadr party (formed in the US, with close links to the Irish freedom-fighters of Sinn Fein) had prepared the ground for a mutiny in British Indian army units from Peshawar to Calcutta and Singapore in 1915. While British infiltrators managed to foil most of these plans, the only actual mutiny occurred among Indian troops of the 5th Light Infantry in Singapore, 700 of whom mutinied on February 15th 1915. This was put down after a week of fighting, and 37 mutineers were publicly executed on Outram Road (in front of 15,000 spectators).
In Lahore, 42 leaders of the Ghadr party were also executed, but one (Rashbehari Bose) managed to escape from prison, threw a bomb at Viceroy Hardinge in Delhi and managed to flee to Japan. There, he amalgamated various Asian branches of the India Independence League in 1942, and with another Ghadr veteran Giani Pritam Singh, prepared the ground for the creation of the Indian National Army (INA) – with Mohan Singh at its head – soon after the British-occupied territories of Malaya and Singapore fell to the Japanese in early 1943.
But the INA was truly galvanized into action only after the arrival of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in Singapore (July 1943), after a daring voyage with Abid Hasan (uncle to India’s former commerce secretary Abid Hussein) by submarine from Germany (including a submarine to submarine transfer on the high seas off Madagascar). Soon after arriving in Singapore, Netaji arranged for the shipment of up to a million tonnes of rice to Bengal and Bihar – which were then gripped by famine. But the British roundly refused Netaji’s offer, while Churchill’s war cabinet released less than a quarter of the food tonnage requested by the British colonial government in India.
Reviewing this episode, the British historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper conclude: “…it is difficult to escape the impression that the War Cabinet was simply hostile towards India. The prime minister believed that Indians were the next worst people in the world after the Germans. Their treachery had been plain in the Quit India movement. The Germans he was prepared to bomb into the ground. The Indians would starve to death as a result of their own folly and viciousness. Churchill got the implicit support of the government's scientific adviser...who seems to have thought...that over-breeding and eugenic unfitness were the basic reasons for the scarcity". The Famine of 1943 killed at least 3 million people (and possibly twice as many) in a deliberate act of war perpetrated by Churchill's cabinet: after the Jewish holocaust, the Bengal/Bihar Famine was the worst atrocity of the war, and also the least known. The true extent of the famine was kept hidden by the British, but the news snippets that arrived in Singapore gave particular urgency to Netaji’s clarion call to march to the Red Fort of Delhi in pursuit of freedom.
Far from being an army merely of prisoners of war, the INA recruited more than 20,000 local Indians – including the first women’s regiment in any Asian army (named the Rani of Jhansi regiment, led by Capt. Lakshmi Swaminathan Sehgal). On October 21st, 1943, Netaji proclaimed the Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind (Provisional Government of Free India), which was recognized by at least nine sovereign governments – including that led by Eamon de Valera of the neutral Irish Republic, as well as Croatia, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, Germany, Manchukuo, etc.
Japanese PM Tojo had declared that any area of India liberated by the Japanese or the INA would come under the INA’s civilian control. The provisional government took over administration of the Andaman and Nicobar islands immediately (renaming them Swaraj and Shahid). In March 1944, the INA and their Japanese allies made an audacious assault via the Dimapur road and raised the tricolor of free India over Kohima, with the INA’s Col. Loganathan becoming Chief Commissioner of the area. When Col. Shaukat Malik’s forces conquered Moirang (Apr 18th 1944), and Col. Gulzara Singh advanced 250 miles into Manipur, those territories came under Azad Hind rule as well.
Thousands of Tamil soldiers from Singapore and Malaya (including women-soldiers such as Janaki Devar Nahappan and Russama Bhupalan) have described the sheer joy of setting foot in India for the very first time -- with a gun in their hands. That exhilarating moment carried them to victory in Kohima, but the Imphal plateau (at an elevation of 3000’) presented more daunting problems. While the INA laid siege to Imphal for the next four months, the British were saved by the arrival of American air support, which continually replenished their supplies – while the monsoons (and the depletion of Japan’s ability to provide air support as its planes fought an island-to-island battle in the Pacific) emasculated the INA’s supply lines from Burma.
The Imphal campaign proved the turning point of the Asian war, and a bedraggled INA was forced to retreat by mid-July 1944 – defeated more by monsoon mudslides, jungle diseases, diminishing supplies and hunger than by the force of British-Indian arms. The Azad Hind Fauj fought at least one other heroic battle, in the defense of Mt. Popa in Burma (February 1945). Although they were by then diminished and severely weakened, the INA forces led by Shah Nawaz, Gurbax Dhillon and Prem Sahgal fought a magnificent rearguard action against heavy odds – made worse by the defection of the INA-trained Burma National Army (led by Aung San) to the British side.
Those three officers were subsequently court-martialled by the British in the celebrated INA trial at the Red Fort, which proved to be a big strategic error by the British. As the Indian newspapers began filling with the story of the valour and patriotism of these brave officers and their men, the majority of Indians became acquainted for the first time with their hitherto-suppressed story. The result was a national upsurge.
The British intelligence agent, Hugh Toye, particularly lamented that this upsurge helped revive the Congress Party (which had been moribund since the brutal suppression of the Quit India movement in the six months ending March 1943). The Trial of three officers representing India’s three main religions – a Hindu (Sahgal), a Muslim (Shahnawaz) and a Sikh (Dhillon) – united all of India in a single cause.
Within days of the start of the trials, there were massive demonstrations (with Congress and Muslim League participating together) across India’s cities – including Madurai, Calcutta, Bombay, Allahabad, Patna and Karachi. A huge uprising outside the Red Fort itself resulted in police firing in which more than a hundred people were killed. A revolutionary situation arose in the Punjab (the key recruiting ground of the Army). A worried Gen. Claude Auchinleck, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Indian Army, conducted an informal survey of his Indian officers, and was told that he could not be sure of either his officers’ or his Indian soldiers’ support were the three INA officers to be executed. He commuted their sentences, but attempted to continue trials of junior officers.
On February 18th (two days after the end of the INA trials) a mutiny began on the HMS Talwar. By the 20th, 78 ships (out of a total of 88) in the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) and all but two naval bases joined the revolt. Much of the Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF) joined the revolt a few days later.
The edifice of British control over India – built on the implicit and unyielding loyalty of the Indian troops – had crumbled. Auchinleck ordered Shahnawaz, Dhillon and Sahgal acquitted, and advised his superiors in Britain (especially Attlee) that Britain could hold onto India no longer. In late February 1946, Attlee sent Cripps at the head of a Cabinet mission to negotiate India’s freedom.
By the end of February 1946 – within three months of the start of the INA Trials at the Red Fort – the late Netaji had effectively redeemed his pledge, “Give me blood and I’ll give you freedom”. The INA’s valour and nation-wide support convinced the British that they could no longer hold onto India. The thousands of Indians from Malaya, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and Burma who gave their lives, savings and youth to the INA did not fight in vain. In the words of the American historian Peter Ward Fay: “In 1942, at the time of Quit India, there had been no question of (the British Indian Army’s) loyalty. Now (1946), their own commander doubted it. Three years of…battlefield victories in Europe and the Irrawaddy, do not explain the change... It was the Indian National Army that forced Britain’s hand”. It suited the British to perpetuate the myth of a “transfer” of power, and for the Congress to acquiesce in that story-line. But Purna Swaraj would not have been achieved without the bravery of the 80,000 soldiers from India and South-east Asia who fought a valiant war in Imphal, Kohima and Burma for our independence – and changed the mentality of the sword arm of the British empire for ever in late-1945 and early-1946. In their seeming defeat, the INA achieved the ultimate triumph of full Independence for India rather than the moth-eaten dominion status the British had hoped for until the very end.
British mythology would have us believe that India achieved its independence through a smooth “transfer of power” to Indian hands. More recent public discourse (initiated by Collins/Lapierre’s book and Attenborough’s movie) fosters the notion that non-violent resistance led by Gandhiji and the Congress alone led to independence. This story-line implicitly flatters the supposed British commitment to fair-play and the rule of law.
It also conveniently air-brushes out both the brutality of British rule, and the long history of resistance to it – including violent resistance by the Marathas, Sikhs, and Mysore between 1760 and 1846, then the first war of independence across north and east India in 1857-58, the mighty Swadeshi movement of 1905-11, the Ghadr party’s rebellion in 1913-17, the revolutionary movement inspired by Bhagat Singh and Chandrasekhar Azad in the 1920s culminating in Surya Sen and Pritilata Waddedar's raid on the Chittagong armoury in April 1930, the INA’s war from 1942-46 culminating in the mutiny of the Royal Indian navy, and large parts of the air force and army in February 1946, which finally convinced the British their time was up. Singapore was a crucial staging base for Indian resistance in both the world wars.
India accounted for about a fifth of world industrial production in 1800 (most of this emanating from India’s most prosperous province, Bengal, which naturally made it the first target of British imperial conquest). A ban on imports of Indian cloth into Britain, and the loot from extortionate land revenue collections, built the edifice of Britain’s textile industry while perpetrating a famine in Bengal in 1770 that wiped out a third of its population – and further impoverished India over the next century. Violent resistance to the spread of British rule was thus a natural reaction.
During the First World War, the Ghadr party (formed in the US, with close links to the Irish freedom-fighters of Sinn Fein) had prepared the ground for a mutiny in British Indian army units from Peshawar to Calcutta and Singapore in 1915. While British infiltrators managed to foil most of these plans, the only actual mutiny occurred among Indian troops of the 5th Light Infantry in Singapore, 700 of whom mutinied on February 15th 1915. This was put down after a week of fighting, and 37 mutineers were publicly executed on Outram Road (in front of 15,000 spectators).
In Lahore, 42 leaders of the Ghadr party were also executed, but one (Rashbehari Bose) managed to escape from prison, threw a bomb at Viceroy Hardinge in Delhi and managed to flee to Japan. There, he amalgamated various Asian branches of the India Independence League in 1942, and with another Ghadr veteran Giani Pritam Singh, prepared the ground for the creation of the Indian National Army (INA) – with Mohan Singh at its head – soon after the British-occupied territories of Malaya and Singapore fell to the Japanese in early 1943.
But the INA was truly galvanized into action only after the arrival of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in Singapore (July 1943), after a daring voyage with Abid Hasan (uncle to India’s former commerce secretary Abid Hussein) by submarine from Germany (including a submarine to submarine transfer on the high seas off Madagascar). Soon after arriving in Singapore, Netaji arranged for the shipment of up to a million tonnes of rice to Bengal and Bihar – which were then gripped by famine. But the British roundly refused Netaji’s offer, while Churchill’s war cabinet released less than a quarter of the food tonnage requested by the British colonial government in India.
Reviewing this episode, the British historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper conclude: “…it is difficult to escape the impression that the War Cabinet was simply hostile towards India. The prime minister believed that Indians were the next worst people in the world after the Germans. Their treachery had been plain in the Quit India movement. The Germans he was prepared to bomb into the ground. The Indians would starve to death as a result of their own folly and viciousness. Churchill got the implicit support of the government's scientific adviser...who seems to have thought...that over-breeding and eugenic unfitness were the basic reasons for the scarcity". The Famine of 1943 killed at least 3 million people (and possibly twice as many) in a deliberate act of war perpetrated by Churchill's cabinet: after the Jewish holocaust, the Bengal/Bihar Famine was the worst atrocity of the war, and also the least known. The true extent of the famine was kept hidden by the British, but the news snippets that arrived in Singapore gave particular urgency to Netaji’s clarion call to march to the Red Fort of Delhi in pursuit of freedom.
Far from being an army merely of prisoners of war, the INA recruited more than 20,000 local Indians – including the first women’s regiment in any Asian army (named the Rani of Jhansi regiment, led by Capt. Lakshmi Swaminathan Sehgal). On October 21st, 1943, Netaji proclaimed the Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind (Provisional Government of Free India), which was recognized by at least nine sovereign governments – including that led by Eamon de Valera of the neutral Irish Republic, as well as Croatia, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, Germany, Manchukuo, etc.
Japanese PM Tojo had declared that any area of India liberated by the Japanese or the INA would come under the INA’s civilian control. The provisional government took over administration of the Andaman and Nicobar islands immediately (renaming them Swaraj and Shahid). In March 1944, the INA and their Japanese allies made an audacious assault via the Dimapur road and raised the tricolor of free India over Kohima, with the INA’s Col. Loganathan becoming Chief Commissioner of the area. When Col. Shaukat Malik’s forces conquered Moirang (Apr 18th 1944), and Col. Gulzara Singh advanced 250 miles into Manipur, those territories came under Azad Hind rule as well.
Thousands of Tamil soldiers from Singapore and Malaya (including women-soldiers such as Janaki Devar Nahappan and Russama Bhupalan) have described the sheer joy of setting foot in India for the very first time -- with a gun in their hands. That exhilarating moment carried them to victory in Kohima, but the Imphal plateau (at an elevation of 3000’) presented more daunting problems. While the INA laid siege to Imphal for the next four months, the British were saved by the arrival of American air support, which continually replenished their supplies – while the monsoons (and the depletion of Japan’s ability to provide air support as its planes fought an island-to-island battle in the Pacific) emasculated the INA’s supply lines from Burma.
The Imphal campaign proved the turning point of the Asian war, and a bedraggled INA was forced to retreat by mid-July 1944 – defeated more by monsoon mudslides, jungle diseases, diminishing supplies and hunger than by the force of British-Indian arms. The Azad Hind Fauj fought at least one other heroic battle, in the defense of Mt. Popa in Burma (February 1945). Although they were by then diminished and severely weakened, the INA forces led by Shah Nawaz, Gurbax Dhillon and Prem Sahgal fought a magnificent rearguard action against heavy odds – made worse by the defection of the INA-trained Burma National Army (led by Aung San) to the British side.
Those three officers were subsequently court-martialled by the British in the celebrated INA trial at the Red Fort, which proved to be a big strategic error by the British. As the Indian newspapers began filling with the story of the valour and patriotism of these brave officers and their men, the majority of Indians became acquainted for the first time with their hitherto-suppressed story. The result was a national upsurge.
The British intelligence agent, Hugh Toye, particularly lamented that this upsurge helped revive the Congress Party (which had been moribund since the brutal suppression of the Quit India movement in the six months ending March 1943). The Trial of three officers representing India’s three main religions – a Hindu (Sahgal), a Muslim (Shahnawaz) and a Sikh (Dhillon) – united all of India in a single cause.
Within days of the start of the trials, there were massive demonstrations (with Congress and Muslim League participating together) across India’s cities – including Madurai, Calcutta, Bombay, Allahabad, Patna and Karachi. A huge uprising outside the Red Fort itself resulted in police firing in which more than a hundred people were killed. A revolutionary situation arose in the Punjab (the key recruiting ground of the Army). A worried Gen. Claude Auchinleck, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Indian Army, conducted an informal survey of his Indian officers, and was told that he could not be sure of either his officers’ or his Indian soldiers’ support were the three INA officers to be executed. He commuted their sentences, but attempted to continue trials of junior officers.
On February 18th (two days after the end of the INA trials) a mutiny began on the HMS Talwar. By the 20th, 78 ships (out of a total of 88) in the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) and all but two naval bases joined the revolt. Much of the Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF) joined the revolt a few days later.
The edifice of British control over India – built on the implicit and unyielding loyalty of the Indian troops – had crumbled. Auchinleck ordered Shahnawaz, Dhillon and Sahgal acquitted, and advised his superiors in Britain (especially Attlee) that Britain could hold onto India no longer. In late February 1946, Attlee sent Cripps at the head of a Cabinet mission to negotiate India’s freedom.
By the end of February 1946 – within three months of the start of the INA Trials at the Red Fort – the late Netaji had effectively redeemed his pledge, “Give me blood and I’ll give you freedom”. The INA’s valour and nation-wide support convinced the British that they could no longer hold onto India. The thousands of Indians from Malaya, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and Burma who gave their lives, savings and youth to the INA did not fight in vain. In the words of the American historian Peter Ward Fay: “In 1942, at the time of Quit India, there had been no question of (the British Indian Army’s) loyalty. Now (1946), their own commander doubted it. Three years of…battlefield victories in Europe and the Irrawaddy, do not explain the change... It was the Indian National Army that forced Britain’s hand”. It suited the British to perpetuate the myth of a “transfer” of power, and for the Congress to acquiesce in that story-line. But Purna Swaraj would not have been achieved without the bravery of the 80,000 soldiers from India and South-east Asia who fought a valiant war in Imphal, Kohima and Burma for our independence – and changed the mentality of the sword arm of the British empire for ever in late-1945 and early-1946. In their seeming defeat, the INA achieved the ultimate triumph of full Independence for India rather than the moth-eaten dominion status the British had hoped for until the very end.
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