Indian National Army

Origins: The First INA

The Indian National Army had its origins in the surrender of Singapore to Japan on 15 February 1942, which placed tens of thousands of Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army into Japanese hands as prisoners of war. Japanese intelligence officer Fujiwara Iwaichi worked with the Indian Independence League, an expatriate nationalist organization, and with Captain Mohan Singh, a captured Indian officer, to recruit these POWs into a force intended to fight for Indian independence alongside Japan. This first INA grew rapidly but collapsed by December 1942, when Mohan Singh, distrustful of Japanese intentions and unwilling to subordinate the force entirely to Japanese command, was removed and interned, and the organization was disbanded.

Bose and the Second INA

The Indian Independence League's leadership passed to Rash Behari Bose, a veteran revolutionary who had lived in exile in Japan since fleeing India after the 1912 attempt on the life of Viceroy Lord Hardinge. In 1943 he handed political and military leadership to Subhas Chandra Bose, who had escaped house arrest in India in early 1941, traveled to Germany, and then made his way by submarine to Southeast Asia. Arriving in Singapore in July 1943, Bose reorganized and expanded the INA, and on 21 October 1943 proclaimed the Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind, the Provisional Government of Free India, complete with its own currency, postage stamps, and legal code, and declared war on Britain and the United States. Japan transferred nominal control of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to this government in late 1943, though real administrative authority remained with the Japanese military. The INA was organized into divisions with regiments named for Gandhi, Azad, and Nehru, and included the all-women Rani of Jhansi Regiment under Captain Lakshmi Sahgal, born Lakshmi Swaminathan, one of the first women's combat regiments raised anywhere in Asia. Bose's rallying cry, "Give me blood, and I will give you freedom," and his call for a march on Delhi, "Chalo Delhi," became defining slogans of the movement.

The INA and the Azad Hind government drew support beyond the former POWs who formed its military core. Southeast Asia's large expatriate Indian communities, including plantation workers in Malaya and traders and professionals in Singapore and Burma, contributed funds, recruits, and civilian volunteers, giving the movement a broader social base than a purely military organization. Bose's cabinet was notable for its time in including a woman minister, Lakshmi Sahgal, who headed the women's affairs portfolio alongside commanding the Rani of Jhansi Regiment.

Military Campaigns

The INA's principal military engagement came as part of the Japanese Fourteenth Army's U-Go offensive into Manipur in early 1944, aimed at capturing the British supply bases at Imphal and Kohima and opening a route into India. INA units advanced with Japanese forces and, in April 1944, raised the Indian tricolour at Moirang in Manipur, presented by the movement as the first time an Indian flag had been planted on Indian soil by an Indian military force. The offensive stalled against determined British and Indian Army defense, and the onset of the monsoon, combined with catastrophic failures in Japanese supply lines, turned the campaign into a disaster: Japanese and INA forces suffered mass starvation and disease during the retreat through Burma, with total Japanese casualties in the campaign estimated at over 50,000. INA units also saw action in the subsequent Arakan campaign and the defense of Rangoon before the collapse of Japanese resistance in Burma in 1945. Subhas Chandra Bose died, according to the official account, in a plane crash at Taipei on 18 August 1945 while attempting to reach Soviet-held territory; the circumstances were never conclusively established to the satisfaction of all inquiries, and successive Indian government commissions, the Shah Nawaz Committee (1956), the Khosla Commission (1970), and the Mukherjee Commission (2005), reached differing conclusions, leaving the matter a subject of continuing debate.

The Red Fort Trials

Following Japan's surrender, the British held courts-martial at Delhi's Red Fort in November and December 1945, prosecuting INA officers for treason and, in some cases, murder. The first and most prominent trial jointly charged Colonel Prem Kumar Sahgal, Colonel Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, and Major Shah Nawaz Khan, a Hindu, a Sikh, and a Muslim respectively, a symbolism widely remarked upon at the time. The defense, organized through a Congress-backed INA Defence Committee, included Bhulabhai Desai, Tej Bahadur Sapru, Asaf Ali, and Jawaharlal Nehru, who returned to legal practice for the case. The trials provoked large-scale protests across India that cut across religious and regional lines, and were followed closely by the press. The tribunal convicted the defendants and sentenced them to transportation for life, but Commander-in-Chief Claude Auchinleck, citing the scale of public feeling, remitted the sentences, and all three were released. The Royal Indian Navy mutiny of February 1946, in which Indian sailors in Bombay and other ports revolted, was widely seen by contemporaries as connected to the same erosion of confidence in the loyalty of Indian forces to British rule.

Legacy

The INA's own military campaign failed to achieve its objectives, and most of its soldiers were never absorbed into the postwar Indian Army. Its political effect, however, was significant: the trials and the accompanying protests are commonly cited by historians, alongside the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, as factors that convinced British military and political leadership that continued rule in India could not be sustained on the loyalty of Indian forces. For decades after independence, official commemoration of the freedom struggle centered on the Gandhian and Congress-led nonviolent movement, and the INA's contribution received comparatively little institutional recognition; this has shifted over subsequent decades, with memorials including the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Museum in Kolkata and INA memorials in Singapore and Moirang, alongside renewed government commemoration of Bose and the INA's role in the independence movement.