Journey
INA — Southeast Asia to Imphal
An army raised from Indian prisoners of war in Japanese hands, which fought its way to within sight of Imphal in 1944 and failed there. Its military record is slight and its political effect was enormous: the trial of three of its officers in the Red Fort in 1945 produced the biggest agitation of the decade and a naval mutiny.
Stops (9)
- Subhas Chandra Bose · Subhas Chandra Bose
Twice Congress president and its most uncompromising militant, who escaped house arrest in Calcutta in 1941, reached Berlin overland, transferred to Japan by submarine in 1943, and took command of the INA at Singapore — arguing that Britain's difficulty was the only opportunity India was going to get.
- Singapore · Singapore, July 1943 — Azad Hind
Bose took command of the INA here from Rash Behari Bose, raised the provisional government of Azad Hind in October, and recruited from both the captured Indian garrison and the Tamil and Malayali plantation communities of Malaya. Its treasury came largely from Indian merchants in Southeast Asia.
- Lakshmi Sahgal · Lakshmi Sahgal and the Rani of Jhansi Regiment
A Madras-trained doctor practising in Singapore who raised and commanded an all-woman combat unit of about a thousand — the first of its kind in Asia — and took it into Burma in 1944. She practised medicine in Kanpur for sixty years afterwards and stood for the presidency of India in 2002.
- Rangoon / Yangon · Rangoon — the forward base
The INA's headquarters for the campaign and the city from which Bose broadcast. Burma had been governed as a province of India until 1937 and Rangoon had an Indian-majority population, so the army was operating among people who were, in a real sense, its own constituency.
- Moirang · Moirang, April 1944 — the flag
The INA raised the tricolour at Moirang in Manipur, the first Indian soil it held, and the site is now a museum. The Meitei village had its own long history well before this — it is a centre of Lai Haraoba — and the INA episode sits on top of that rather than replacing it.
- Kangla Fort, Imphal · Imphal — Kangla and the failure
The objective was Imphal, and the Japanese Fifteenth Army with the INA reached its outskirts in April 1944 and could not take it. The offensive had been launched with three weeks' rations on the assumption that British supply dumps would be captured; they were not, and air supply held the defenders.
- Kohima · Kohima — the tennis court
The other half of the same battle, fought in the Naga hills at one point across the deputy commissioner's tennis court. Holding Kohima cut the Japanese supply road and decided Imphal. The retreat that followed, through the monsoon, killed more men than the fighting had.
- Red Fort, Delhi · The Red Fort trials, 1945 — the afterlife
Three officers — Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Sahgal and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, a Muslim, a Hindu and a Sikh — were tried together for waging war against the King. Nehru put on a barrister's gown after twenty-five years to defend them. The sentences were commuted under public pressure, and the naval mutiny followed in February 1946.
- Tokyo · Tokyo — the ashes
Bose died in a plane crash at Taipei in August 1945 and his ashes were taken to the Renkoji temple in Tokyo, where they remain. Three Indian commissions of inquiry have reached different conclusions; the family has never agreed to their return, and the question is still live eighty years on.