Indian National Army: Subhas Chandra Bose, Azad Hind and the INA Trials

Indian National Army Timeline, 1938 to 1946

Timeline of Bose and the INA, 1938 to 1946

• February 1938: Bose presides over the Haripura session of the Congress.
• March 1939: Bose is re-elected Congress President at Tripuri, resigns within weeks and forms the Forward Bloc.
• January 1941: Bose escapes from Calcutta and reaches Berlin in early April.
• 1942: Mohan Singh and the Japanese officer Fujiwara raise the first INA; the Bangkok conference of June 1942 builds the Indian Independence League.
• December 1942: The first INA is dissolved.
• 4 July 1943: Bose takes charge of the League and the INA at Singapore.
• 21 October 1943: The Provisional Government of Azad Hind is proclaimed.
• 1944: The INA fights in the Imphal and Kohima campaign and falls back with the Japanese.
• 18 August 1945: Bose dies after an air crash at Taihoku.
• November 1945: The first INA trial opens at the Red Fort.
• February 1946: Naval ratings of the Royal Indian Navy rise in Bombay.

Subhas Chandra Bose Before the INA: The Congress Years

Early Life, the Civil Service and Entry into Politics

Subhas Chandra Bose was born on 23 January 1897 in Cuttack. In the open competition of August 1920 he was placed fourth for the Indian Civil Service. By April 1921 he had decided not to join the service, and on 22 April 1921 he asked the Secretary of State for India to remove his name from the list of probationers. He reached Bombay on 16 July 1921 and met Gandhi the same afternoon. The two differed from the first meeting on means, since Gandhi held non-violence non-negotiable while Bose accepted any means in the service of anti-colonial ends.

Gandhi sent him to C. R. Das, the leader of the Congress in Bengal, and Das launched him into politics. When Das became Mayor of Calcutta in 1924, Bose served as chief executive officer of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation. He was imprisoned in Mandalay in Burma after the round-up of nationalists in 1925, became general secretary of the Congress in 1927 and worked with Jawaharlal Nehru for independence. At the Calcutta session of December 1928 he commanded the Congress Volunteer Corps in uniform. He became Mayor of Calcutta in 1930. In the mid-1930s he travelled in Europe and wrote the first part of The Indian Struggle, covering the years 1920 to 1934, which the British government banned in India.

Haripura 1938 and Tripuri 1939: Bose as Congress President

By 1938 Bose was a leader of national stature and agreed to stand for the Congress presidency. He presided over the Haripura session of February 1938. In that year he stated that the Congress should be organised on the broadest anti-imperialist front, with the two-fold aim of winning political freedom and establishing a socialist regime. He stood for unqualified swaraj, including the use of force against the British, and that set him against Gandhi, who opposed his re-election in 1939.

In 1939 Bose was elected president again at Tripuri, defeating Pattabhi Sitaramayya, the candidate closest to Gandhi, and he attended the meeting on a stretcher. Manoeuvres in the Congress Working Committee then left him unable to function, and he resigned in April 1939. The contest was about more than two men. It was a test of whether a president could set policy against the wishes of the leader who had built the mass movement, and the answer in 1939 was that he could not.

Forward Bloc and the Left's Reading of the War

After resigning, Bose formed the Forward Bloc, a faction within the Congress aimed at consolidating the political left, with its main strength in Bengal. Dates for its founding differ: The faction was formed in May 1939, and the party itself marks 22 June, the day of its first All India Conference at Nagpur in 1940, as its founding day.

When war broke out in 1939 the Congress split over what to do. A coalition of leftist groups (Bose and his Forward Bloc, the Congress Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the Royists) called it an imperialist war that gave an opportunity to win freedom through an all-out struggle, and urged an immediate mass struggle. Bose even proposed a parallel Congress, but the Congress Socialists and the Communists differed with him on that. Nehru's outlook leaned towards an early struggle, yet he held that it would undermine the fight against fascism, and he went along with Gandhi and the Congress majority.

Gandhi and his supporters advised patience for four reasons: The Allied cause was just, communal tension could turn a struggle into riots, the Congress organisation was in shambles, and the masses were not ready. They wanted the organisation toned up and negotiation continued until every chance of a settlement was exhausted. The Ramgarh session of March 1940 resolved that the Congress would resort to civil disobedience only when its organisation was fit or circumstances precipitated a crisis. Bose, meanwhile, organised protests in Calcutta for the removal of the Holwell Monument. He was arrested in July 1940, released after a seven-day hunger strike, and kept under watch by the CID.

From Calcutta to Berlin: Bose in Germany, 1941 to 1943

Escape from India in January 1941

Bose went abroad because raising an army inside India was unrealistic and Britain's enemies were the only possible allies. He escaped from his Elgin Road house in Calcutta on the night of 16 to 17 January 1941, dressed as a Pathan and accompanied by his nephew Sisir Kumar Bose.

He travelled to Peshawar and crossed into Afghanistan with help from the Abwehr, the German military intelligence. He passed through Kabul to the Soviet border and went on to Moscow on an Italian passport in the name of Count Orlando Mazzotta. In Moscow he found the Soviet response disappointing, and the German ambassador, Count von der Schulenburg, had him flown on to Berlin, where he arrived in early April 1941.

Free India Centre, Azad Hind Radio and the Indian Legion

In Berlin Bose founded the Free India Centre, which was given the status of a diplomatic mission by Nazi Germany. He also set up Azad Hind Radio within Germany's radio service. The shortwave station first broadcast on 7 January 1942 and carried news bulletins in English, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Pashto, Gujarati and Urdu.

His military project was the Free India Legion, also called the Indian Legion, raised from Indian prisoners of war who had been captured in North Africa while fighting for the British. At its largest the Legion numbered 4,500. Its members swore an oath to Hitler as commander of the German armed forces and to Bose as leader of India, which showed how far control of the unit rested with Germany. It was in Berlin that members of the Legion first called Bose Netaji, the leader.

Hitler, the Submarine Voyage and Arrival in Asia

By the spring of 1942 the German army was bogged down in the Soviet Union, and Bose, disappointed at Germany's response, wanted to move to South-East Asia where Japan had won quick victories. Hitler, at their only meeting in late May 1942, refused Bose's requests and arranged a submarine voyage to East Asia instead.

Bose left Germany in February 1943 aboard the German submarine U‑180, which sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. South-east of Madagascar he was transferred to the Japanese submarine I‑29, the only civilian transfer between submarines of two different navies in the war. In Tokyo he met the Japanese Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo, and the Japanese High Command, and he reached Singapore on 2 July 1943. The Japanese had by then agreed that the leadership of the Indian Independence League and the INA should pass to him.

The First INA and the Indian Independence League, 1941 to 1942

Who Founded the Indian National Army? Mohan Singh and the First INA

The Indian National Army was founded by Mohan Singh, a captain of the British Indian Army, with Japanese support, in Malaya in 1942. Subhas Chandra Bose did not found it. He revived it in Singapore in July 1943 and led it until 1945.

When Japan overran Malaya, about 70,000 Indian troops were stationed there, and nearly 45,000 were taken prisoner after the fall of Singapore alone. The Japanese intelligence officer Major Iwaichi Fujiwara, who headed the F Kikan, made contact with Indian nationalists in Thailand and Malaya, among them Giani Pritam Singh. Through that network he recruited Mohan Singh, who had chosen not to retreat with the British. The first INA took shape in discussions between Fujiwara and Mohan Singh in the second half of December 1941, and they chose its name in the first week of January 1942. In September 1942 the first division was formed with 16,300 men.

The first INA set its own limit: It would go into action only on the invitation of the Indian National Congress and the people of India. Many Indians also saw it as a check on Japanese misconduct towards Indians in South-East Asia.

Tokyo and Bangkok Conferences: The Indian Independence League

Rash Behari Bose had lived in Japan since the First World War. He had planned the Delhi-Lahore conspiracy of 1912 against the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, and had been a leading figure in the Ghadar conspiracy of 1915. In March 1942 he invited local leaders of the Indian Independence Leagues of South-East Asia to a conference in Tokyo, which reached no definite decisions because many delegates distrusted Japan's aims. The delegation returned to Singapore, where the All-Malayan Indian Independence League was proclaimed.

The conference at Bangkok in June 1942 constituted the Indian Independence League. It had a Council of Action chaired by Rash Behari Bose, a committee of representatives from the twelve territories with Indian populations, and local branches. The conference placed the INA under the League and adopted a thirty-four-point resolution asking Japan to recognise India as independent, treat the INA as an allied army, release Indian prisoners of war to it and use it only to liberate India. Membership of the local Leagues brought rations and security under the occupation, and the All-Malayan League alone had close to a hundred thousand members by the end of August.

Collapse of the First INA, December 1942

The first INA broke down over who controlled it. The Japanese wanted a token force of 2,000 men, while Mohan Singh wanted to raise an army of 2,00,000. In November and December 1942, concern about Japan's intentions led the INA leadership and the League's leaders, except Rash Behari Bose, to resign. Mohan Singh dissolved the unit in December 1942 and ordered the troops back to the prisoner-of-war camps. He was taken into custody.

Between December 1942 and February 1943 Rash Behari Bose struggled to hold the INA together. On 15 February 1943 the army was placed under Lieutenant Colonel M. Z. Kiani, and a policy body under the League was set up. The break showed the central problem of the whole project: An army meant to be a national force could not accept the role of a Japanese auxiliary.

Bose Takes Command: The Azad Hind Fauj and the Provisional Government, 1943

Bose in Singapore and the Revival of the INA

Bose reached Singapore on 2 July 1943 and on 4 July assumed the leadership of the Indian Independence League and the second INA at a ceremony in the Cathay Building (the Cathay Cinema Hall). Rash Behari Bose handed the League and the army to him. Bose refused to take a military rank, and soldiers and civilians alike called him Netaji. His slogans were "Jai Hind", which became the national greeting of India, and "Dilli Chalo" (On to Delhi), the call he gave the soldiers. At a rally in Burma on 4 July 1944 he said, "Give me blood, and I shall give you freedom!"

Civilians joined in large numbers, including barristers, traders and plantation workers, many with no military experience. The INA under Bose drew its soldiers from every region and religion, and women served in it too; it followed its own military law and kept its own police. A training school for officers was led by Habib ur Rahman, and a youth wing of 45 young Indians, known as the Tokyo Boys, was sent to Japan's Imperial Military Academy and trained as fighter pilots.

The fighting core of the second INA was four guerrilla regiments, each named after a leader of the national movement.

Rani of Jhansi Regiment and Women in the INA

Bose announced the Rani of Jhansi Regiment on 12 July 1943. It was led by Captain Lakshmi Swaminathan, better known as Lakshmi Sahgal, who gave up a gynaecological practice in Singapore to lead it. The unit was named after Rani Lakshmi Bai, who led the revolt of 1857, and it was intended to have combat commitments.

Most of the women were teenage volunteers of Indian descent from Malayan rubber estates, and very few had ever been to India. The first camp in Singapore began with approximately 170 cadets. The regiment is seen as the first of its kind in Asia. Lakshmi Sahgal also served as the minister in charge of women's organisation in the Azad Hind government, and after independence she remained in public life in India.

Provisional Government of Azad Hind, 21 October 1943

On 21 October 1943 Bose proclaimed the Provisional Government of Azad Hind (Free India) at the Cathay Building in Singapore. It began functioning with eleven ministers and eight representatives of the INA. Bose was Head of State, Prime Minister and Minister for War and Foreign Affairs. On the same night the government declared war on Britain and the United States, although the cabinet had not been unanimous on including the United States.

The government was recognised by nine states, all of them Axis powers or their allies; Germany and Japan were among them. It produced its own currency, postage stamps, a court and a civil code. In November 1943 it took part as an observer in the Greater East Asia Conference in Tokyo. Its limits were plain: It depended on Japanese support, and critics called it a puppet government of Japan. Its value to Bose was symbolic, since a government at war with Britain allowed the INA to claim the standing of a national army.

Andaman and Nicobar Islands: Shaheed and Swaraj

By the end of the Greater East Asia Conference, Azad Hind had been given limited jurisdiction over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which the Japanese Navy had captured early in the war. The islands were renamed Shaheed (Martyr) and Swaraj (Independence) and placed under Lieutenant Colonel A. D. Loganathan as Governor General.

Real control stayed with the Japanese Navy. Loganathan later admitted that he had held full control of little beyond the islands' education department, and he resigned in protest and returned to Rangoon. During Bose's visit his Japanese hosts isolated him from the local population, and the leader of the island's Indian Independence League, Diwan Singh, was tortured by the Japanese administration and later died of his injuries in the Cellular Jail. Bose hoisted the tricolour at Port Blair on 30 December 1943, an event whose 75th anniversary the Government marked at Port Blair in 2018.

Imphal-Kohima Campaign and the End of the INA, 1944 to 1945

Operation U-Go and the INA at Imphal and Kohima

The INA's first major commitment was the Japanese offensive towards Manipur, code-named Operation U-Go. Japanese planners had at first wanted the INA to do no more than espionage and propaganda, and Bose rejected that. He secured agreement from the Japanese Army Chief of Staff that the INA would rank as an allied army in the offensive. The INA's plan was to avoid set-piece battles, to induce British Indian soldiers to defect, and, once the Japanese had broken through at Imphal, to cross the hills into the Gangetic plain as a guerrilla army.

In early April 1944 a unit of the Bahadur Group under Colonel Shaukat Malik took the border enclave of Moirang, where the tricolour was hoisted on 14 April 1944, the first time it flew on Indian soil on the mainland. The main body of the 1st Division, led by Shah Nawaz Khan, protected the Japanese flanks, advanced through Tamu towards Imphal and was redirected to Kohima. By the time it reached Ukhrul, near Kohima, the Japanese had begun to withdraw.

Retreat, Rangoon and the Surrender of the INA

The Japanese offensive failed. Commonwealth forces held Imphal and Kohima for months, then counter-attacked and drove the Japanese and the INA back into Burma. With little supply and with the monsoon and Allied air superiority against them, the INA divisions withdrew with the Japanese, and wounded and sick men died of starvation on the way. The weakened Gandhi Brigade (2nd Guerrilla Regiment) held its position against the Maratha Light Infantry on the Burma road while the general withdrawal was prepared. The Japanese treated the INA units as inferiors: They were denied rations and arms and made to do menial work, which demoralised them.

During the campaign, on 6 July 1944, Bose spoke on Azad Hind Radio from Singapore, called Gandhi the Father of the Nation and asked for his blessings and good wishes for the war. It was the first time Gandhi was given that title. In 1945 the INA still fought in Burma, at Meiktila, Mandalay and Mount Popa, but with the fall of Rangoon in May 1945 the Azad Hind government ceased to be an effective political entity. A total of 16,000 of the INA's 43,000 recruits were captured, and the remaining troops surrendered with Japan.

Death of Subhas Chandra Bose (18 August 1945) and the Inquiry Commissions

Subhas Chandra Bose died on 18 August 1945, aged 48, of third-degree burns after a Japanese bomber crashed on take-off from Taihoku airfield in Japanese-ruled Formosa, now Taiwan, and he died the same day in a military hospital. Many of his supporters, especially in Bengal, refused to believe that he had died, and later inquiries examined the question.

INA Trials at the Red Fort, 1945 to 1946

Why the British Held Public Trials

The INA trials, also called the Red Fort trials, were courts-martial of INA officers held between November 1945 and May 1946. The British first planned public trials of several hundred of the INA prisoners, dismissal from service for others and detention without trial for around 7,000. Difficulty in proving individual crimes cut the number further, and in the end about ten courts-martial were held.

The British then held the first trial in the Red Fort at Delhi in November 1945, at a moment when the war was won and the Indian public had just been told stories of the INA's march and of its sufferings in Burma. The trials covered military law, constitutional law and international law, and they turned the question into one of Britain's right to judge Indians who had fought for India's freedom.

First Red Fort Trial: Sahgal, Dhillon and Shah Nawaz Khan

The first trial put three officers in the dock together: Prem Kumar Sahgal, a Hindu; Shah Nawaz Khan, a Muslim; and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, a Sikh. All three were charged with waging war against the King-Emperor, contrary to Section 121 of the Indian Penal Code, and charges of murder and abetment of murder were added. The Advocate General, Sir Naushirwan Engineer, led the prosecution.

At its first post-war session in Bombay in September 1945, the Congress adopted a strong resolution declaring support for the INA cause. The defence was organised by Bhulabhai Desai, Tej Bahadur Sapru, Kailash Nath Katju, Jawaharlal Nehru and Asaf Ali. All three accused were sentenced to deportation for life. The sentence was never carried out, because public pressure led the Commander-in-Chief, Claude Auchinleck, to remit it on 3 January 1946 and release them. A slogan of the time ran "Laal quile se aayi aawaz, Sahgal, Dhillon, Shahnawaaz".

Later trials took a different line. Charges of treason were dropped in the trials that followed, and the officers were cashiered. The Government then announced that only INA members accused of murder or brutality towards fellow prisoners would be tried.

INA Agitation Across the Country

The campaign for the release of the INA prisoners was conducted with an intensity never seen before. The nerve centres were Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, the towns of Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, and the campaign spread to places as distant as Coorg, Baluchistan and Assam. INA Day was observed on 12 November 1945 and INA Week ran from 5 to 11 November. Support took many forms: Funds from film stars, municipal committees, gurudwaras and tonga drivers; public meetings; shop closures; student boycotts of classes; and conferences of peasants and of women.

Those who backed the INA cause, apart from the Congress, included the Muslim League, the Communist Party, the Unionists, the Akalis, the Justice Party, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Sikh League. Even the traditional supports of the Raj showed sympathy: Government employees collected funds, and men of the armed forces attended meetings, some in uniform. The central theme was Britain's right to decide a matter concerning Indians, and the issue took on an Indian versus British colour. Officials spoke of the situation as the edge of a volcano.

Upsurges of 1945 to 1946 and the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny

Three Upsurges of the Winter of 1945 to 1946

The nationalist feeling of the INA campaign turned into violent confrontation with authority in the winter of 1945 to 1946, in three major upsurges.

Each upsurge followed the same three stages. A group defied authority and was repressed. The people of the city then joined in, producing a near paralysis of Calcutta and Bombay. People in other parts of the country finally expressed sympathy and solidarity.

Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of February 1946

The Royal Indian Navy mutiny began at HMIS Talwar, a signals school at Colaba in Bombay, on 18 February 1946. Around 1,000 communications operators lived there, many with matriculation or college education, and a small group among them had formed a secret society called Azad Hind. The ratings protested against racial discrimination, unpalatable food, abuse by superior officers, the arrest of a rating for scrawling "Quit India" on HMIS Talwar, the INA trials, and the use of Indian troops in Indonesia.

By dusk on 19 February a Naval Central Strike Committee had been elected. The revolt spread from Bombay to Karachi, Calcutta and Visakhapatnam and came to involve over 10,000 sailors. The rebel ships flew the Congress, Muslim League and red flags tied together. Sympathetic strikes followed in military establishments in many cities, and men of the Royal Indian Air Force, who had already struck over their own grievances in January 1946, struck in sympathy at Bombay, Poona, Calcutta, Jessore and Ambala. The Communist Party was the only nation-wide party to support the rebellion and called a general strike on 22 February.

The Congress and the League did not. Vallabhbhai Patel and Jinnah persuaded the ratings to surrender on 23 February with an assurance that national parties would prevent victimisation. Arrests and courts-martial followed, and 476 sailors were dismissed from the Royal Indian Navy.

Impact on the Transfer of Power

The upsurges prompted the British to make some concessions. The Government decided in January 1946 to send a Cabinet Mission, announced that only those INA members accused of murder or brutality would be tried, remitted the sentences of the first batch in January 1946, and withdrew Indian soldiers from Indo-China and Indonesia by February 1947. Britain was by then exhausted by the war, and officials feared another Congress revolt that disaffected soldiers, government officials, the police and trained INA men might join.

The strikes in the Royal Indian Air Force in January and February 1946 and the mutiny in the Royal Indian Navy in February 1946 told the British that they could no longer rely on the Indian military to hold the empire. The Cabinet Mission of 1946 then sought a peaceful transfer of power. Historians now treat Britain's exit as the result of many factors, among them popular uprisings, the efforts of revolutionaries, the mutinies, Britain's diminished status after the war and the world trend towards decolonisation, and not of Gandhi's methods alone.

The upsurges also had limits. They were short-lived and confined to a few urban centres, while the INA agitation reached remote villages. The British machinery of repression was intact, and a Maratha battalion in Bombay rounded up the ratings and restored them to their barracks.

Evaluation: Bose, Gandhi and the Legacy of the INA

Bose and Gandhi: Differences in Their Approach to Freedom

Gandhi and Bose shared the goal of complete independence and respected each other. In the late 1920s Bose was among the first Congress leaders to call for Purna Swaraj, the full independence that the Congress later adopted. They differed on means, timing, allies and the shape of free India.

Significance and Legacy of the Indian National Army

The INA was the clearest manifestation of the linkages between India and overseas Indians during the freedom struggle, and it was a model of diversity in region, religion and gender. Yet its battlefield record was poor, and the INA did not oppose Japanese fascism or protest Japanese war crimes. Many in India admired Bose's courageous defiance, and others criticised his alliance with Nazi Germany and Japan, which remains the hardest part of his legacy.

The larger effect came after the war. The trials turned the INA's cause into a national one, the agitation drew in the Congress, the League and the Communists, and the British Raj, never seriously threatened by the INA, backed down in the face of opposition from the Congress. "Jai Hind", the INA's battle cry, was declared the national greeting of India by Nehru and remains in use.

Remembering Netaji: Parakram Diwas, Islands and Memorials

The Government announced in January 2021 that 23 January, Bose's birthday, would be observed every year as Parakram Diwas, beginning with the 125th birth anniversary year. At Port Blair on 30 December 2018, on the 75th anniversary of the tricolour being hoisted on Indian soil by Netaji, Ross Island was renamed Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Dweep, Neil Island Shaheed Dweep and Havelock Island Swaraj Dweep. The names Shaheed and Swaraj return the vocabulary of the Azad Hind government to the map of independent India.

On 21 October 2018 the Prime Minister hoisted the National Flag at the Red Fort to mark the 75th anniversary of the Azad Hind government. In September 2022 a 28-foot (about 8.5 m) granite statue of Bose was installed under the canopy near India Gate. The government of 1943 held no real power, but its symbols outlived it.

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