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By Root 4480 0

politics in British-founded institutions and the activities of unscrupulous or purblind leaders had fractured relations between members of the two religious traditions. There had been a spate of serious Hindu–Muslim riots in the 1930s when peasant protests against landlords and moneylenders had become infused with the inflammatory language of religious revivalists. Those divisions might have narrowed during the war, but with the fighting in Burma unnervingly close, the British authorities had been happy to let attempts at religious coalition fall by the wayside. Incensed by Congress’s opposition to the war effort, they preferred to keep in power a conservative Muslim ministry which had a loose alliance with Mahomed Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League in all-India politics. Muslims on the whole were more favourable to the British war effort and it was important to keep recruits flowing into the army. For their part, the Hindu leaders of Bengal, whether formally members of Congress or not, were more inclined to think in communal terms than in many other parts of India. The old gentry class, the bhadralog or ‘respectable people’, dominated Hindu politics. Though fiercely anti-British, they were fearful of domination by the Muslim majority in the province. These fears were only heightened as the probability of a British withdrawal increased in the aftermath of the Labour election victory of the summer.

Meanwhile, the Bengali autumn festival of Durga Puja, celebrated in honour of the province’s great mother goddess, proceeded with much gusto as a kind of peace returned to India. A series of incidents in which Muslim bands attacked Hindu images and scuffles and retaliatory shooting by police erupted outside mosques presaged a dark future. The great crescent, so recently violently unified by the successes of the British and Indian armies, was soon to be fragmented again. Hindu would fight Muslim in Bengal. Self-selected leaderships of the Nagas and other people of Assam and the eastern hills would agitate and later fight for the autonomy which they believed they deserved because of their services during the war. To the south, in Arakan, Buddhist would fight Muslim. Christian Karen would fight Burmese Buddhist. Chinese and Malay Muslim gangs continued to skirmish in rural Malaya. The malevolent spirit of the war hovered above the crescent even as millions of soldiers returned to their homes.

THE RECKONING

Across the world these last months of 1945 were months of retribution. In Europe the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders were being prepared. In Rangoon and Singapore Japanese officers were arraigned as war criminals. Dozens passed through the Gothic central prisons of these cities, interrogated persistently, aggressively, week after week, but without the benefit of whips, bamboo splinters beneath the fingernails, or bastinadoes, as had been commonplace with the Japanese secret police, the Kempeitai. In Tokyo Allied judge advocates prepared the trials of bigger figures in the war. Emperor Hirohito escaped, but the chain of events had been set in motion that led inevitably to the hanging of Hideki Tojo and his associates, sacrifices for the imperial house. In this atmosphere the British were determined to bring the INA to some kind of reckoning.

The first arrests were in Malaya and Singapore, where the INA was not merely a scattering of renegade military units but a citizen army. The arrival of Subhas Chandra Bose in Singapore in July 1943 had created an unprecedented wave of mobilization among the Indians of Southeast Asia. Many INA personnel were Malayan residents who had never seen India but identified with it as their great national community. The sons of middle-class families joined up; so too did the daughters, by enlisting in the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, named after the heroine queen of 1857. The civilian organization – the Indian Independence League – supplied propagandists and administrators of Bose’s Azad Hind government; virtually the whole Indian business community was co-opted in one way or another, as were Ceylonese professionals,