Subhas Chandra Bose Raised the Indian National Army Twice, Marched It into Manipur on 18 March 1944, and Left Three Official Inquiries Split on Whether He Died in the 1945 Air Crash

The Indian National Army was raised twice. The first army began on 17 February 1942 at Farrer Park in Singapore, when a Japanese officer handed Indian prisoners of war to a Sikh captain named Mohan Singh, and it was dissolved within the year. The second was commanded by Subhas Chandra Bose from July 1943 until his death in August 1945, and a British army count put it at about 40,000 men.

This piece follows the army from Farrer Park to the Red Fort and then to Parliament in 2006, where the Home Minister defended the Government’s position on how Bose died. The sources are Peter Fay’s study, which draws on British records and INA officers’ memories, Bose’s Collected Works, and answers given in Parliament. Where figures differ, each source is named.

Farrer Park, 17 February 1942

Singapore surrendered on Sunday 15 February 1942. Some 55,000 Indian soldiers passed into Japanese hands in the Malayan campaign, most of them when Singapore fell, by Fay’s count, while Bipan Chandra and his co-authors put the Indian prisoners taken at Singapore at 45,000.

On Tuesday 17 February the Indian units were ordered to Farrer Park, a sports ground. Perhaps 40,000 men were there by the afternoon, Fay estimates, with fewer than 250 officers among them. A British officer announced that they were prisoners and handed them over to a Japanese intelligence officer, Major Fujiwara Iwaichi, who told the men to think of themselves as friends and turned them over to Mohan Singh. Mohan Singh’s 1/14th Punjab Battalion had been shattered by Japanese tanks at Jitra before the Japanese picked him up. Mohan Singh’s words, as Fay renders them, were “We are forming an Indian National Army that will fight to free India.”

Chandra and his co-authors write that by the end of 1942 forty thousand men had said they would join, and that a first division of 16,300 was formed on 1 September. That army did not last the year. Mohan Singh wanted formal Japanese recognition and a direct line to their command, and in the account of Chandra and his co-authors the Japanese wanted a token force of 2,000 where he wanted 20,000. On 29 December Mohan Singh was dismissed and taken into custody, and he spent the rest of the war on Sumatra. Rash Behari Bose, an Indian revolutionary who had lived in Japan since 1915, revived a smaller army.

Two submarines and a long way round

Bose had already left India. In the early hours of 17 January 1941 he slipped out of the family house on Elgin Road in Calcutta by car, with his nephew Sisir driving, took the Kalka Mail to Delhi that night and reached Kabul ten days later. Two months after that he was in Berlin. Germany gave him a house, a radio platform and access to Indian soldiers captured in North Africa, several thousand of whom joined an Indian Legion, but not the public statement he repeatedly asked for, that India should be free.

Bose left Kiel on 8 February 1943 aboard the German submarine U-180 with one companion, Abid Hasan. According to the uboat.net record of the patrol, the transfer to the Japanese I-29 happened in the Indian Ocean on 27 April 1943, while Sugata Bose gives 28 April, off Madagascar. I-29 landed Bose at Sabang, off the northern tip of Sumatra, on 6 May. He spent the rest of May and June in Tokyo, where he met Prime Minister Tojo, and reached Singapore on 2 July 1943.

On 4 July, at the Cathay theatre, he took over the Indian Independence League from Rash Behari Bose. He told those willing to follow him that he could offer “nothing but hunger, thirst, privation, forced marches and death.” On 5 July he announced that India’s Army of Liberation had come into being and gave it the slogan Chalo Delhi, “On to Delhi.”

A government with no territory

On 21 October 1943, again at the Cathay, Bose proclaimed the Provisional Government of Azad Hind, or Free India. Bose wrote the text himself overnight, according to S. A. Ayer, who typed it. Japan recognised the government two days later, and at a midnight meeting on 23 and 24 October its ministers declared war on Britain and the United States.

Bose told audiences that nine powers, Japan and Germany among them, recognised the government. Fay counts Japan and eight others, naming Germany and Fascist Italy, and adds that most were puppets or clients of Berlin or Tokyo and that Bose could exchange diplomatic representatives with none of them, Japan included. No source used here prints a full list of the nine. Free India held no land until late December 1943, when Japan handed it formal control of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Bose visited the Cellular Jail there (see Kala Pani and the Cellular Jail) and renamed the Andaman Islands Shaheed, meaning Martyrs, and the Nicobar Islands Swaraj, meaning Freedom.

Dr Lakshmi Swaminathan, a Singapore obstetrician, commanded the women’s unit, the Rani of Jhansi Regiment. She married Prem Sahgal in March 1947 and is known afterwards as Lakshmi Sahgal.

Sources vary most on the size of the army. Colonel Anderson’s British army monograph, as Fay summarises it, puts the force in early 1945 at about 40,000 men raised in Malaya. A Whitehall memorandum of 20 October 1945 gave 43,000, of whom 20,000 were former Indian Army men. Sumit Sarkar says the army rallied about 20,000 of 60,000 prisoners of war, while Sugata Bose writes that some 40,000 soldiers of Britain’s Indian Army forsook their allegiance.

Manipur, March to July 1944

In January 1944 the government’s headquarters moved from Singapore to Rangoon. On 18 March the INA crossed into northeastern India toward Imphal and Kohima alongside Japanese forces, and Bose’s order of the day told the men that “The road to Delhi is the road to Freedom.” British intelligence concluded, Fay reports, that the Japanese had not meant to use the INA as a fighting force before Imphal fell, and quotes its autumn 1944 summary: “It may be argued, therefore, that it is the Japanese Army which failed the I.N.A.”

According to the Government of Manipur, the INA hoisted the Indian tricolour at Moirang, and the house it used as an office still stands. Manipur’s Governor says the INA captured Moirang on 14 April 1944. Fay describes one attack on a British position. On 2 May about 300 men of the Gandhi Regiment went for the airfield at Palel, ran into dug-in Gurkhas and withdrew after two days with more than 200 casualties. British officers judged it “a dismal failure.”

Across the wider battle, from 8 March to 18 July 1944, the National Army Museum records that the Japanese Fifteenth Army, 85,000 strong, lost 53,000 dead and missing, and that the British sustained 12,500 casualties at Imphal and 4,000 at Kohima. No INA casualty total appears in the sources used here, but Fay quotes British intelligence figures for single units: of about 1,900 men in the Gandhi Brigade, 650 were present for duty in late July, only 116 had surrendered or been captured by 30 June, and the rest were sick. In August Bose publicly acknowledged that the offensive had failed.

Rangoon to the Red Fort

Bose left Rangoon on 24 April 1945. Prem Sahgal surrendered with his battalions near Allanmyo to a Gurkha battalion on 28 April. Shah Nawaz Khan and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, still in the hills near Pegu, surrendered at six in the evening on 17 May to a patrol of the 2/1st Punjab.

On Monday 5 November 1945 the first Red Fort court martial opened, with Captains Prem Kumar Sahgal, Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon and Shah Nawaz Khan accused of waging war against the King-Emperor. They were tried first, Fay says, because they were at hand and triable, and not because they were a Hindu, a Sikh and a Muslim, as many have supposed. Thirteen lawyers were on the defence side at the opening, among them Bhulabhai Desai and Jawaharlal Nehru. Desai’s closing speech lasted ten hours over two days, and argued that the accused served a provisional government with a real army.

All three were found guilty of waging war and acquitted of murder, though Shah Nawaz was found guilty of abetment of murder. Sentence was cashiering, loss of pay and transportation for life, and the Commander-in-Chief, General Claude Auchinleck, remitted the transportation. They were told on Thursday 3 January 1946 that they were free to go. A Government of India communique of 15 February 1946 said that sentences were being reviewed for acts of gross brutality and for acts that offended “the canons of civilised behaviour.” The Muslim League’s wider position in 1946 is in Jinnah and the independence movement.

Auchinleck’s private letter to senior British officers said that practically all Indian officers were sure that enforcing the sentences would have led to “chaos in the country at large.” What the trials did to the army’s loyalty, as British papers record it, is set out in Did non-violence alone end British rule?, and the naval revolt of February 1946 is told in the Royal Indian Navy mutiny. About ten trials were held, by Fay’s count, before an official communique in early May 1946 announced that there would be no more. Independence came on 15 August 1947 with Partition (the border story).

How the army is weighed

On the military record the accounts are close. Sarkar writes that the INA “never amounted to very much in sheer military terms” and came too late, with the Axis in retreat everywhere by 1944. What gave the INA “moral leverage,” in Fay’s words, was the hopeless fighting along the Irrawaddy in 1945.

On the political effect they differ. Sugata Bose writes that Bose’s strategy succeeded in “supplanting the loyalty of the Indian soldiers to their enslavers with a new loyalty to their country’s freedom.” In Fay’s judgment the army and the trials gave Britain’s willingness to leave “a powerful, perhaps decisive, boost,” and he adds that the Indian Army was never put to the test. Sarkar calls a link between the INA experience and the unrest in the forces “quite possibly the single most decisive reason behind the British decision to make a quick withdrawal.”

Chandra and his co-authors, who call the INA agitation a landmark for its intensity and its reach into villages, are more cautious. They quote Wavell’s remark that the army had been “most commendably steady,” and they call the claim that the naval revolt prompted the Cabinet Mission “obviously untenable,” because the Cabinet took that decision on 22 January 1946. In their view the decision to transfer power came from a recognition that British legitimacy had eroded over years. Joyce Lebra, who used Japanese archives, traces the army’s origins in the imagination of Fujiwara, in her publisher’s words. Leonard Gordon’s Brothers Against the Raj is the definitive biography, in Fay’s view, though it does almost nothing with the army.

Taihoku, 18 August 1945, and three inquiries

Fay, whose account largely follows Gordon’s, tells it this way. Bose left Saigon on the afternoon of 17 August 1945 in a Japanese bomber with Habib-ur-Rahman and flew on to Taipei on the morning of the 18th. After the passengers boarded again at about half past two in the afternoon, the overloaded plane lost its port propeller, fell and broke in two. Pilot, co-pilot and Lieutenant General Shidei died at once. Bose was burned over most of his body and died between nine and ten that night. Sugata Bose writes in the Collected Works that he died as a result of an air crash in Taipei on 18 August 1945.

India has held three official inquiries. On 5 April 1956 the Government appointed the Shah Nawaz Committee, whose members were Shah Nawaz Khan, Bose’s elder brother Suresh Chandra Bose and a senior administrator. Its majority held that Bose died in the crash and that his ashes lie in the Renkoji temple in Tokyo, and Suresh Chandra Bose dissented. Justice Khosla’s commission, set up in 1970 and reporting in 1974, reached the majority’s conclusion, which the Home Minister read to the Lok Sabha on 7 August 2006: Bose died of his burns the night after the crash and his ashes were taken to Tokyo.

Justice M. K. Mukherjee, a Supreme Court judge, headed the Mukherjee Commission, notified in 1999, which reported on 8 November 2005. According to the Home Minister’s summary, it found that Bose is dead, that he did not die in the crash, that the Renkoji ashes are not his, and that without clinching evidence it could not give a positive answer on how he did die. Parliament received the report and the Government’s Action Taken Memorandum on 17 May 2006. The memorandum, as quoted in the Rajya Sabha, says the Government did not agree with the first two findings.

Home Minister Shivraj Patil told the Lok Sabha that the Government preferred the two earlier inquiries because they were closer to the event and the third was inconclusive, and he noted that a commission expected to report in six months took more than six years. In the Rajya Sabha on 24 August 2006, Barun Mukherjee said the memorandum gave no reasons, that the Commission had been denied files, and that the Taiwan authorities had told it they held no document of a plane accident at the time. In a written reply on 7 May 2013, Minister of State Mullappally Ramachandran told the Lok Sabha that the finding that Bose did not die in the crash rested on the lack of “clinching evidence,” that the Government therefore did not agree with it, and that on the Shah Nawaz and Khosla reports it had concluded that Netaji died in the plane crash on 18 August 1945.