Freedom and
the soldier
By Kuldip Singh Bajwa

IN this golden year of our Independence, let us pause and consider the contribution made by our soldiers to the freedom struggle. On the surface it may appear that the sepoy was a mercenary who helped the British to first subjugate India and then to rule us for over 150 years. The underlying reality is considerably different.

We were a fragmented people when the East India Company embarked on its conquest of the subcontinent. The Mughal empire had broken up into a host of large and small principalities, with their own armies and riven by internecine rivalries and local conflicts. The British and the other Europeans made their entry into the country as traders, an 18th century version of the modern day multi-nationals. They gradually took over the production and trading in the primary commodities of indigo, opium, cotton and jute and the sea trade. They exploited this economic domination to curry favour with the local chieftains. By becoming advisers to the armies of local rulers and thus insinuating themselves into the power structure, they won the confidence and loyalty of the Indian soldiers.

The power structure itself was systematically weakened by inciting the rulers to settle scores with each other. In this deepening power vacuum, the sepoys flocked to their banners. By 1857, the combined strength of the Bengal, Madras and Bombay Armies was well over 3 lakh Indian sepoys as against only 40,000 British soldiers. The British defeated us in detail, kept us divided and Britania came to rule. Undoubtedly, the sepoy provided the main force to achieve their design but he was not a mercenary in the strict sense. We had been a nation, though often lacking in the trappings of a state in the modern sense but by the 18th century, our awareness of being a nation had been largely blurred. The sepoy fought because this was his calling and he deeply revered our traditions of a work ethic and honour, his own and that of his family and his clan.

In 1857, only two-thirds of the high caste sepoys of the Bengal Army had risen in revolt. The initial motivation was a caste conflict. Popular support was confined to parts of what is now Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal, generally the area where ruthless Firangi planters of the primary commodities had treated the locals very harshly. By 1858, the British had triumphed and the subcontinent passed into a passive submission. But the first spark for the freedom struggle had been lit.

Our peasant manhood was welcomed and wooed into uniform. Their social and moral conditioning and their traditional loyalty to the class, clan and the local chieftain, was cleverly juxtaposed into a fierce Paltan Ki Gairat, a concern for pride and honour of the unit. The British officers were encouraged to completely identify themselves with the men they commanded; in fact most of them spent a part of their leave in the areas from where their men came. This theme of a tight knit group of the unit and the leader, substantially made up for the lack of a unifying pull from the alien and the rather remote British Crown.

The soldiers were generally insulated from the broader canvas of our political struggle for freedom and treated with special care. But the march of ideas could not be stopped by physical barriers. The British themselves created the grounds for receptivity. The ever insidious onslaughts of Indian assimilation, drove them to a zealous social insulation. The outward arrogance of this basically defensive mechanism, launched bruising thrusts onto the already injured Indian pride. Soldiers, though very thoughtfully handled, were not immune to the adverse impact of the "No dogs and Indians allowed" syndrome. Further more, the assiduously cultivated aura of "white superiority" received a jolt, when during the World War I Indian soldiers fought side by side with white men in the Middle East and in France and proved themselves as good, if not better. The dastardly massacre of innocent and unarmed civilians in Jallianwala Bagh at Amritsar on April 13, 1919, with the help of Indian and Gorkha troops left a profound adverse impact. In its wake came the civil disobedience movement started by Gandhi in 1920, the atrocities committed during the Akali morchas, hanging of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev and death of Lala Lajpat Rai as a result of injuries suffered in a police lathi charge. The Indian soldiers were not immune to the shadows cast by these events. In 1930, the Garhwali soldiers refused to open fire on the Khudai Khidmatgars at Peshawar.

In the thirties, the British tried to contain the non-violent Indian freedom struggle mainly with the help of the police. The soldier was largely kept out. Nevertheless, dormant concepts of liberty became previous to the call for freedom given by the Indian National Congress. The harsh discipline and the obvious hopelessness of an open defiance, kept the armed forces out of the gathering momentum of the freedom struggle. Nevertheless, the British hold over the Indian soldier was on the decline.

During the World War II, the Indian Army underwent a tremendous expansion; from less than 150,000 in 1939 to over 2,00,000 by 1945. Inevitably the recruitment base had to be widened and the intake thrown open to a very large spectrum of classes other than those in which the British had especially cultivated a tradition of loyalty to the crown. Most of the nearly 10,000 youth inducted into the officer corps had received liberal education. They had imbibed the burgeoning worldwide awareness of liberty and equality. A fair percentage of the soldiers were also educated. Both had been exposed to the influence of the freedom movement. During the war, bulk of them served in South-East Asia, where the myth of white supremacy had been blown by the Japanese. At the start of the war, the white colonial powers, the British in Burma and Malaya, the French in Indo-China, the Dutch in Indonesia and the USA in the Philippines, had been humbled by the Japanese. In Africa and Europe too, the Indian soldier had participated in the defeat of Germany, another white military power. Thus, the Indian soldier had become aware of the concept of freedom as a human birth-right, and in 1945 was vastly different in his outlook from what he was before 1939.

The overthrow of the colonial yoke was no longer considered an unattainable dream. This emotional development generated the primary motivation for the formation of the Indian National Army out of the Indian prisoners of war captured by the Japanese. While militarily, this force made only a token contribution to the fighting in the Eastern Theatre, its emotional and psychological impact was significant. The INA trials in, of all the places, the Red Fort at Delhi, drew an upsurge of national feelings. Soon after, the naval mutiny at Bombay and Karachi followed. Though not connected with the freedom struggle, this mutiny, spread indiscipline in the Air Force, unrest in the Army at Jabalpur, all of which amounted to a fundamental change in the outlook of the Indian soldier, left little doubt in the minds of the British that they could no longer rely on the Indian forces. In the wake of these developments, Lord Wavell, the Viceroy, in a despatch to King George VI on March 22, 1946, states:"... It is a sorry state of misfortune and folly. Perhaps the best way to look at it is that India is in the birth pangs of a new order, the most disturbing feature of which is the unrest beginning to appear in some units of the Indian Army...." Britain, exhausted by the war, could not support a military presence in India, credible enough to ensure their rule. This was virtually confirmed by Earl Atlee, the British Prime Minister in 1947. In 1956, during a visit to India, he told the Governor of West Bengal:" The decision to withdraw from India was on account of a number of reasons, the most important among them being the fact that the loyalty of the men of the Indian Army and the Navy to their British commanders had been undermined." Any calculation to hold on to the "jewel in the crown" of the empire was no longer cost-effective. The withdrawal from their Indian Empire had become inevitable. Our non-violent freedom struggle had nurtured the spark lit by the sepoys in 1857 into a blaze and the substantive change in the outlook of the soldier, manifested by the eruptions and the rumblings in the Indian armed forces, had rendered the burning desire for Independence, uncontrollable. The soldier had helped the British to conquer and rule India. Now he had convinced them to quit India.