Subhas Chandra Bose and the freedom struggle

The Argument for Bose's Decisiveness

One long-standing strand of Indian historiography holds that Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army, though militarily unsuccessful, mattered more to Britain's decision to leave India than its battlefield record suggests. The argument rests less on the INA's 1944 campaign in Burma than on what followed: the exposure of cracks in the loyalty of British Indian forces, and the transformation of captured INA officers into a mass political cause independent of anything the Congress itself organized.

The Red Fort Trials

When the British put captured INA officers on trial for treason, they held the proceedings publicly at Delhi's Red Fort — the same site where the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, had been tried after the 1857 uprising, a resonance not lost on contemporaries. The first three defendants, Colonels Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Kumar Sahgal and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, were deliberately chosen as one Hindu, one Muslim and one Sikh, intended by the prosecution to demonstrate that INA collaboration cut across communal lines; the effect instead was to unite Congress, Muslim League and Akali opinion, unusually, in a common defense. Jawaharlal Nehru, who had not practiced law in years, appeared in court in his barrister's gown to argue for the accused, alongside senior lawyers Bhulabhai Desai and Tej Bahadur Sapru. All three defendants were convicted, but amid mass public protest their sentences were remitted by the Commander-in-Chief, Claude Auchinleck, and they were released in early 1946.

The Royal Indian Navy Mutiny

In February 1946, ratings aboard HMIS Talwar in Bombay mutinied over pay and service conditions; the revolt spread within days to roughly 78 ships and shore establishments in Bombay, Karachi, Calcutta and Visakhapatnam. Contemporaries widely read the mutiny against the backdrop of the INA agitation of the preceding months. It was suppressed within a week, with both Congress and Muslim League leadership — including Vallabhbhai Patel and Muhammad Ali Jinnah — urging the mutineers to stand down rather than escalate, a response some historians read as evidence that mainstream nationalist leadership was as unsettled by a movement it did not control as the British were.

The Attlee Testimony

A frequently cited but disputed piece of evidence for the INA's decisiveness is an account attributed to Justice P. B. Chakrabarty, a former acting governor of West Bengal, who reported that during a 1956 visit by former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee to Calcutta, he asked Attlee directly what had driven Britain's decision to leave India, and that Attlee cited the loyalty of the Indian armed forces breaking down after the INA episode and the naval mutiny as a major factor, describing Gandhi's contemporaneous campaigns as being of comparatively minor effect. This account survives only in a letter Chakrabarty wrote years later, published by the historian R. C. Majumdar in 1976; it is uncorroborated by any independent record of the conversation, and professional historians generally treat it with caution even as it circulates widely in popular accounts.

Assessing the Claim

Serious historians of the period, including Bose's biographers Sugata Bose and Leonard Gordon, generally treat the INA's collapse and the subsequent trials and mutiny as a genuine and material factor in Britain's changed calculation about the reliability of Indian forces and the sustainability of continued rule — without treating it as the sole or even primary cause. British withdrawal in 1947 also reflected Britain's postwar financial exhaustion, American pressure toward decolonization, the cumulative effect of decades of Congress-led mass mobilization, and the scale of communal violence that made continued administration appear unworkable. No mainstream historian treats any single factor, including the INA, as sufficient on its own; Bose's contribution is generally read as one significant strand among several rather than the decisive one.