SOURCE: NATIONAL INTEREST
In Esplanade Park in Singapore there is a plaque that was erected in 1995 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and it stands on the site of an original memorial—one that was a bit controversial. That memorial, which was built just before the Japanese surrender, was dedicated to an unknown soldier who served in the Indian National Army (INA) and featured the motto: Unity (Etihaad), Faith (Etmad) and Sacrifice (Kurbani). When British forces returned to Singapore, Lord Mountbatten, commander of the Southeast Asia Command, ordered the memorial demolished.
The INA is often best described as “The Forgotten Army,” it was made up of former British Indian soldiers, many of whom took part in a heroic rearguard action against the Imperial Japanese Army during the invasion of the Malaya Peninsula in early 1942. As prisoners of war, those Indian soldiers were recruited by the Japanese and subsequently took part in an invasion of India as allies of Japan. The 1944 campaign, which was the Japanese military’s last hope to turn the tide, ended in failure, but it was the INA that perhaps took the loss the hardest. As a military force the INA’s combat record was undistinguished, however, it proved effective in other ways.
While its first incarnation, under the leadership of Mohan Singh, a member of the Indian Independence Movement, only lasted from February to December 1942; the revamped force under Indian Nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose proved to be a far more effective political/propaganda tool.
Civilians with little to no military experience expressed interest in joining the force, and some estimates suggest a million civilians volunteered to join the INA. While those numbers were likely exaggerated, a CIA report from June 1945 noted, “Many Indians doubtless sincerely believed that by joining the INA they would participate in achieving real independence. Furthermore, they were told that they would be welcomed by the British Indian Army, which would refuse to fight them, and that all India would rise to welcome them.”
While the morale was high, the optimism quickly disappeared, especially after the ineffectiveness of the INA was revealed during the campaign to invade India. British-Indian troops would fight the enemy the CIA report noted, “Whether he was Indian or Japanese.” By the time the Japanese were defeated in Burma in mid-1945 the INA had crumbled.
Yet, since the end of the Second World War the question has been whether these men were “freedom fighters” or British Army deserters.
The answer may be both.
Bose died in a plane crash while en route to the Soviet Union, where he hoped to possibly elicit aid—but whether such aid would have come even with a Cold War brewing is debatable at best. Yes, Bose’s death marked a turning point in another way.
The British misjudged the situation, and publicly put some of the former INA soldiers on trial, which only altered the entire population to the INA’s existence. During the war the British censors had kept its very existence a secret, but by making the trials public allowed it to become almost a mythic force. The second mistake the British mad was to select three soldiers to put on trial—and this included a Hindu, Muslim and Sikh.
The rationale was too likely to show even-handedness but this only served to unite rather than divide the populace, and essentially allowed sympathy among each of India’s major religious groups. Finally, the location of the trial was a serious misjudgment—Delhi’s Red Fort, a symbol of India’s once-mighty Mughal Empire but also of the Indian mutiny that began in 1857. Any effort to cast the INA as traitors backfired.
Prime Minister Clement Attlee and the Labor Party, who was elected in July 1945, saw that independence for India couldn’t be delayed. Rather than facing another Indian mutiny—which actually did occur with the Royal Indian Navy in February 1946—and with civil war looming between the far factions in the subcontinent, the British granted independence. Attlee considered Indian Independence his “finest achievement,” but it may not have happened had the INA not attempted to win it on the battlefield.
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