The INA and Independence

I returned to India in August 1946 after serving in Burma and Indonesia during the Second World War. While I was abroad, I learnt about the Indian National Army (INA) trials that had taken the country by storm. The Naval Mutiny in Bombay followed thereafter.

When the war ended I was with my battalion in Burma. We were given the task of looking after a prisoner of war (PoW) camp. I was appointed the adjutant of the camp. Some 8,000 Japanese prisoners were in the camp. A couple of hundred INA prisoners also came. We had to dispatch the latter to Insein jail in Rangoon. They said they had fought for India’s Independence while we were mercenaries serving the British. I became friendly with the British captain who was the adjutant of the Insein camp. He allowed me to meet Colonel Mahboob Ahmed, the military secretary to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who was in that camp. Col. Mehboob was from my home town and five years older than me. We had been close family friends from our childhood. He became PoW in Malaya and joined the INA. He was inspired by Netaji and worshipped him. He told me that the Japanese treated Netaji with great respect, like a head of state. They, however, did not treat the INA so well and gave them subsidiary roles in battle. Despite being short of supplies, the INA had managed to do well and it was a proud moment for them when it planted the tricolour on Indian soil at Moirang in Manipur on April 14, 1944. After the INA trials at Red Fort, Col. Mehboob was released and arrived in Patna to a hero’s welcome.

I proceeded on a posting to Batavia (now Jakarta) as general staff officer (operations) in Allied Forces Headquarters in Indonesia. During the war, Indonesia had been under Japanese occupation, like Burma and Malaya. I saw Asian nationalism rising out of the ashes of European colonialism in these countries.

The Indian Army was in Indonesia to take the surrender of 1,00,000 Japanese soldiers and dispatch them to Japan. In the process, we got involved in fighting the Dutch who came with us to take back their empire. The Indonesian Army had been raised and equipped by the Japanese during their occupation of Indonesia on the lines of the INA in Malaya and Burma. We had qualms about getting involved in a fight with the Indonesians. The Indonesians were struggling for their freedom and we were not free ourselves.

My return to India in August 1946 coincided with the Great Calcutta killings. I was among the three Indian officers posted to Military Operations Directorate for the first time. My British predecessor had been conscripted for service during the war and was in a hurry to get back home to civil life after demobilisation. He handed over the key of “top secret” almirah to me saying that I could check them in my own time. I was amused to see two files with a strange security classification: “Top secret not for Indian eyes”. I studied these files carefully. The first had a paper written by Maj. Gen. O’Brien, the director of military intelligence, on the loyalty of the Indian Army. Broadly, the main points made in the paper were that the Indian Army had expanded from 450 Indian officers to 12,000 between 1939-1945. Similarly, the personnel below officer rank had increased from 1.5 lakh to 2.2 million. Those recruited during the war were from all over the country and had been exposed to the ongoing Independence movement in our country. With such large scale expansion, the old concept of martial race or loyal families had to be discarded. The bulk of the Indian Army abroad had served in the East where the white man’s prestige had suffered gravely. Britain was both militarily and economically exhausted to maintain a strong military presence to tackle a 1857-type situation.

The second file, marked “Operation Gondola”, was a logical consequence of the first file. It was a plan for the safe evacuation of British civilians from remote areas all over the country under escort to camps. There is no doubt that at the last stage it was the reliability of the Indian Army that was the main factor behind the decision of the British to quit so hastily as stated by Clement Attlee (the British Prime Minister who signed off on India’s independence) in 1956 to Justice P.B. Chakraborty, acting governor of West Bengal. He said that the influence of Mahatma Gandhi at that time was marginal. Based on this some people have been writing that it was Netaji who at the final stage won Indie freedom and that the Mahatma had become irrelevant after 1942. No doubt that Netaji and the INA made a tremendous contribution towards getting our Independence in 1947, but this does not mean the Mahatma’s role can be ignored.

The British misread the mood of Indians in 1945. They picked on a Hindu, Muslim and Sikh, tried them on criminal charges of atrocity and killing Indian PoWs with the Japanese. The place chosen for the trial, Red Fort, in full public view aroused strong nationalist sentiments. It was reminiscent of the unfair trial of the 80-year-old last Mughal emperor and his exile to Rangoon. The trial unified all Indian political groups in support of the INA. Had the British held the trials in Burma without publicity, the story could have been very different.

After the declassification of several files pertaining to Netaji recently there has been a wide discussion on TV channels and in newspapers about the role of Netaji and the INA in bringing about Independence. The INA was a more potent force in defeat than during the war. The main prop upholding British military power in India, the Indian Army, was no longer willing to support British imperial rule.

The writer, a retired lieutenant-general, was Vice-Chief of Army Staff and has served as governor of Assam and Jammu and Kashmir