• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4508 0

INA men they called the ‘blacks’, men who had tortured and flogged Indian Army soldiers who had refused to join them, most Indians made no distinctions between members of the INA. They agitated for the release of all of them. One comparison developed by members of Bose’s old party, the Forward Bloc, was between the INA and the Free French under General de Gaulle. The INA, too, had rebelled against a government of occupation and had been sentenced to death in their absence. Not surprisingly, this view was not popular with the British and the Americans, but went down wonderfully among ordinary Indians. A national defence fund was instituted and some of the best lawyers in the country, including Jawaharlal Nehru, came forward to act as defending counsel for INA men put on trial. In England, the Cambridge University Indian student association, the Majlis, set up an INA Defence Fund. V. D. Savarkar, Hindu ideologue and historian of the Indian freedom struggle of 1857, sent a telegram to Attlee.61 It demanded a general amnesty for all INA prisoners. It was signed, not with Savarkar’s name, but with a date, ‘1857’, the year of the Great Mutiny.

At first the British resisted the campaign to free the INA men. Wavell was quite clear that the INA ‘blacks’, estimated at about 7,000 men, would have to face trial. Their ‘rebellion against the king-emperor’ and violation of their oath put these men in quite a different category from, say, those Tamil estate workers in Malaya who had joined the Japanese. Nor was there a comparison with the BNA, for the Burmese had ‘redeemed’ themselves by ultimately rebelling against the Japanese. Even the cautious General Sir Claude Auchinleck, commander-in-chief India Command, was insistent that INA men who had personally beaten and tortured their former comrades must be held to account. Otherwise the army would be guilty of disloyalty to its own men. The British made a lot out of those enlisted men who were hostile to the INA. Not everyone was cowed by the public adulation of Bose. One R. A. Hassan of Lahore wrote to the Statesman in October denouncing him as ‘selfish, vain, ruthless’. He had eaten four-course meals every day while slowly killing the POWs who would not join him.62 A British officer, W. L. Alston, was moved to compose a little ballad on how he thought a penitent INA man might feel:

It makes me shudder when I think

That once I lent a hand,

To help that squat barbarian,

To take my native land.63

Alston sent his doggerel to Auchinleck, but did not receive a reply, perhaps because his verses went on to indict the Labour ‘cranks’ for betraying the Empire.

The INA was a prickly issue for the Congress too. Despite their public denunciations of the British for even considering trials, the Congress leaders were privately in two minds, concerned that a new national army should be loyal and not divided by factions that had originated in the war. Nehru had always referred to the INA as ‘misguided men’, but had then gone on to say that ‘whatever errors and mistakes they had committed’, they had been real patriots. The issue of the oath meant little to civilian Indians, but the atrocities against other Indian troops were more difficult to dismiss. The British picked up some of the Congress’s disquiet through a returned POW, Captain Hari Badhwar. Badhwar, who was well acquainted with the accounts of atrocities, met Asaf Ali of the Congress Working Committee and found that he had been deputed by Congress to test opinion in different parts of the country.64 Badhwar reported that Ali had found a widespread feeling amongst ordinary Indians that the British must not try even the INA ‘blacks’. Congress was well aware of the INA atrocities and deplored them. It was also worried about the future of the army. But Congress dare not take a line against the INA ‘as they would lose much ground in the country’. There was an implicit suggestion in Badhwar’s report that if the government of India were to abandon the plan, Congress might be prepared to put them on trial when it came to power.

The British themselves