How a court martial hastened Independence
I had made a passing reference in a previous book about the trial of officers of Subhas Bose’s Indian National Army (INA), at the Red Fort in Delhi in November-December 1945, hastening Indian Independence. A history professor and rector of Exeter College, Oxford, Rick Trainor, encouraged me to expand on it. I embarked on the project at St Antony’s College, under the guidance of Faisal Devji, professor of Indian history at Oxford.
I delved into the papers of Commander-in-Chief of armed forces in India Gen Claude Auchinleck, Viceroy Archibald Wavell, records of the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) mutiny and the British parliament, not to mention the archives of British and Indian newspapers. The question I asked myself was — how did the Indian freedom movement revive after World War-II, and what gave it an impetus so quickly?
In 1939, the Indian National Congress had elected governments in eight out of the 11 provinces. It, however, sacrificed this predominance by resigning in protest against Britain hauling India into its war against Germany without consulting it. In 1942, the Congress was banned as an organisation, and most of its leaders and many of its workers were imprisoned after its ‘Quit India’ uprising. In effect, for the greater part of six years, the Congress’ freedom movement was dormant, voluntarily or perforce.
At a loss on how to revive the struggle when it was un-proscribed in August 1945, the issue of the INA fortuitously fell on its lap. The INA was vanquished in battle. Knowledge about its attempt to liberate India militarily, though, had been suppressed from the Indian people by British war-time censorship. When information about the endeavour began pouring out, the Congress adroitly seized on the resultant public anger. Mahatma Gandhi proclaimed, “The hypnotism of the Indian National Army has cast a spell on us.”
The party was extended an even bigger windfall when the British embarked on the court martial of defectors from the British Indian army to the INA on charges of treachery. Indian newspapers rendered saturation coverage to a rousing performance by Congress activist and advocate Bhulabhai Desai as he defended three INA officers — Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Sahgal and Gurbaksh Dhillon — in the first centrepiece trial.
The choice of accused by the British was unwittingly a Himalayan blunder. A Muslim, Hindu and Sikh on the dock: India exploded with unified fury. Civic demonstrations, cutting across communal lines, turned violent, particularly in Kolkata. The RIN ranks mutinied.
The charismatic Jawaharlal Nehru toured the length and breadth of India, relating riveting tales of INA’s heroism.
Wavell and Auchinleck beat a hasty retreat. Under the British Indian Army Act, only death penalty or transportation for life could be administered for treason. They did not dare to impose either.
The Intelligence Bureau director, Norman Smith, reported “the appearance of threatening posters” vowing 20 English deaths for every INA man hanged — in Delhi and Kolkata — and warned that it “does not make the position in respect of Europeans as satisfactory as could be wished”.
After the trial, the Governor of Punjab, Bertrand Clancy, informed Wavell, “The conclusion of the first INA trial and the arrival of the three ‘heroes’ in Lahore gave rise to a continual orgy of extravagant welcomes, speeches and entertainments… One disturbing feature is the attendance of [British] Indian army personnel in uniform at meetings held in honour of the INA accused.”
In a note to General Officer Commanding-in-Chiefs under him, Auchinleck laid threadbare that any attempt to enforce a sentence “would have led to chaos in the country at large and probably mutiny and dissension in the army, culminating in dissolution”.
Nehru told the media that Khan, Sahgal and Dhillon “were not released owing to demonstrations in India, but because the Indian army had demanded their release”.
Shaken by the Indian reaction to the trial, the United Kingdom’s new Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, asserted in the House of Commons, “It is no good applying the formulas of the past to the present. The temperature of 1946 is not the temperature of 1920 (Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement) or of 1930 (Salt March), or even of 1942.” He explained that “the tide of nationalism” in India “has spread right through, and not least perhaps among some of those soldiers who have done such wonderful service in the war [referring to Indians in British Indian armed forces]”.
The Lahore session of the All India Congress Committee in 1929 passed a motion demanding ‘Purna Swaraj’ or complete Independence. The British authorities paid no attention. Only in March 1942, with Japan having swept through South-East Asia and arrived at India’s doorstep in Myanmar, did Stafford Cripps, a minister in Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s war cabinet, rush to India with an offer of conditional dominion status. The Congress rejected this.
The British position remained unchanged when the first INA trial began on November 5, 1945. In a matter of 18 weeks, though, this dramatically altered to complete Independence, with Attlee conceding this in the House of Commons on March 15, 1946.
The INA trials have generally been a footnote in the cataloguing of the Indian Independence saga. My paper, now a book, examines to what extent they impacted the final phase of India’s quest for freedom
“No trial in India either by court martial or in the civil courts,” wrote Nehru, “has attracted so much public attention or dealt with issues of such fundamental national importance… those three officers and the Indian National Army became symbols of India fighting for her Independence… a trial of strength between the will of the Indian people and the will of those who hold power in India… The trial put a final end to a chapter of India’s history… those who watched it from day to day, or those who will read about it in the printed page will sense how that end draws near and the page is being turned for us to begin the new chapter.”
— ‘The Trial that Shook Britain’ by Ashis Ray has been published by Routledge
