The Army That Lost Every Battle and Still Broke the Raj

In November 1945, the British put three Indian officers on trial inside the Red Fort in Delhi. One was Muslim, one Hindu, one Sikh. The charge was waging war against the King.

It was meant to be a demonstration. Instead it became the most effective piece of nationalist theatre in the history of the Raj, and the British had staged it themselves.

A man who kept leaving

Subhas Chandra Bose was the Congress president who wouldn’t stay in the party’s lane. He was elected to the post twice, in 1938 and 1939, and resigned after the second win when Gandhi’s wing made the job impossible. He wanted independence taken, not negotiated, and he was willing to take it from anyone who would help.

By 1941 the British had him under house arrest in Calcutta. He slipped out, made his way overland to Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, and surfaced in Germany. Berlin gave him a radio station and polite indifference. Tokyo, three years into a war it was winning in Asia, gave him an army.

On 4 July 1943, in Singapore, Bose took over the leadership of the Indian independence movement in East Asia. The force he inherited and rebuilt, roughly 40,000 strong, was the Indian National Army, the Azad Hind Fauj. Most of its soldiers were prisoners of war, men of the British Indian Army captured when Singapore fell. On 21 October 1943 Bose proclaimed a provisional government of free India, with himself as head of state, and it was recognised by Japan and its allies.

He raised a women’s regiment and named it for the Rani of Jhansi. He gave his soldiers a slogan they still repeat in India: give me blood, and I will give you freedom.

The march that stopped at Kohima

On 18 March 1944 the INA crossed onto Indian soil, moving with the Japanese Fifteenth Army into Kohima and the Imphal plain. The plan was to take the British supply bases in the northeast and let the rest of India rise.

It went catastrophically wrong, and mostly not for the Indians. The Japanese Fifteenth Army went in 85,000 strong and came out having lost 53,000 dead and missing, one of the worst defeats the Japanese Army ever suffered. The offensive broke on British and Indian defensive lines, and the momentum handed General Slim the reconquest of Burma.

The INA’s own war was smaller and grimmer. It was under-equipped, under-supplied, and not fully trusted by the Japanese command it depended on. Its men died of starvation and disease in numbers that had nothing to do with combat. By May 1945 Rangoon had fallen. What was left of the army surrendered.

Bose flew out. On 18 August 1945, days after Japan’s surrender, he died of burns in a Japanese hospital in Taiwan following a plane crash. That account has never fully settled in India, where the crash has been the subject of repeated official inquiry and is still argued over. We are not going to settle it here. What matters for the story is that he was gone, and his army was in British custody.

Why the trial was the mistake

Britain had thousands of captured INA personnel in its hands and a decision to make. It chose to prosecute, and to prosecute publicly, at the Red Fort, the Mughal seat where the last emperor had been tried after 1857. The symbolism was not subtle, and it did not point the way the British thought.

Between November 1945 and May 1946 the courts-martial ran. The first and most famous put Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Kumar Sahgal and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon in the dock together on charges of waging war against the King, with murder and abetment to murder attached. Trying a Muslim, a Hindu and a Sikh side by side, in the same case, for the same act of disloyalty, handed Indian nationalism a picture of unity that no politician could have arranged.

Congress ran the defence and made it a national campaign. Bhulabhai Desai led the team. Jawaharlal Nehru put on a barrister’s gown for the first time in decades to join it, alongside Tej Bahadur Sapru, Asaf Ali and Kailash Nath Katju. The defence argued that men serving a recognised provisional government of a country under occupation could not be traitors to a crown they had renounced.

The court convicted all three. They were sentenced to transportation for life, and then Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck, commander-in-chief in India, cancelled the sentences. On 3 January 1946 the three walked out of the Red Fort as free men and into crowds that treated them as the winners.

Auchinleck was not being generous. He was reading his own army.

The loyalty that stopped being reliable

The trials landed on an Indian Army that had just fought a world war for Britain, and whose serving men had friends, villages and cousins on the wrong side of the dock. The empire in India rested on that army. It always had.

On 18 February 1946, ratings of the Royal Indian Navy rebelled at Bombay and Karachi over pay, food, conditions and racial discrimination. Britannica reads the revolt plainly: it showed how far the INA trial had shifted loyalties in the Indian military away from the empire and towards independence. The mutiny was not a Congress project. Gandhi and Nehru declined to back it, and Aruna Asaf Ali’s support for the sailors caused a public rift with Gandhi.

That is the part worth sitting with. The pressure was no longer coming only from the political leadership. It was coming from inside the machine Britain used to hold the country.

What the INA actually won

Judged as a military campaign, the Indian National Army failed completely. It took no Indian city, held no ground, and lost more men to hunger than to the enemy. Bose’s alliances were with the Axis, and there is no way to tell this story honestly without saying so plainly; that choice remains the hardest thing to weigh about him, and Indians have been weighing it for eighty years.

Judged as a political fact, the INA did something no other force in the freedom struggle managed. It proved that the Indian soldier, the single instrument on which British rule depended, could be turned. And then the British proved it themselves, in open court, in the middle of Delhi, with the press watching.

Empires do not usually fall to armies that lose. They fall when the people holding the rifles stop being sure whose side they are on.