INA, warts and all: The Forgotten Prisoners offers a needed rebalancing

The Forgotten Indian Prisoners of World War

by Gautam Hazarika

Published by Penguin

346 pages  ₹2799

  World War historiography in the 21st century has seen a belated recognition of the seminal role of colonial soldiers in defeating the Axis powers. In World War II, the Indian Army alone contributed 2.5 million soldiers to the Allied cause, accounting for over a fifth of British imperial forces involved in that conflict.

 

But in contrast to heroic escape stories by British POWs, Indian soldiers’ lives as prisoners of war (POWs) were largely undocumented. A shout-out to the late Ghee Bowman for his pioneering book The Great Epinal Escape: Indian Prisoners of War in German Hands  (2024). Bowman documents how 3,000 Indian soldiers escaped from a French POW camp in 1944. In The Forgotten Indian Prisoners of World War II,  Gautam Hazarika traces the lives of Indian POWs following Japan’s shock conquest of southeast Asia in 1941/1942. Since this theatre saw the mobilisation of the Indian National Army (INA), this book encompasses that history too. 

 

Given the uncontested glorification of the INA and Subhas Chandra Bose, The Forgotten Prisoners …achieves a much-needed rebalancing. Mr Hazarika, a former banker who researches World War II in the context of Southeast Asia, presents a dispassionate account of an undoubtedly extraordinary facet of India’s independence movement. The subtitle, “Surrender, Loyalty, Betrayal and Hell” accurately sums up the competing narratives.

 

Though historians know otherwise, most Indians assume that Bose arrived in 1943 from Germany and mobilised the INA from among POWs and civilian volunteers through sheer charisma. Mr Hazarika reminds that, in fact, the INA in Southeast Asia predated Bose. The first INA leader was, improbably, a 33-year-old army captain, Mohan Singh, who was primed ahead of the Japanese invasion to collaborate on creating a volunteer army to oust the British from Asia. After British surrender of Singapore in February 15, 1942, Singh addressed the 50,000 Indian POWs in a speech witnesses described as electric. He spoke of the Japanese sincerity in fighting for Indian independence, and urged men to join the fight to free India from the British.

 

It speaks volumes for Singh’s personality that some 25,000 soldiers, including officers who outranked him, volunteered for the INA. Few Indian soldiers at the time had a sense of nation — their loyalties were localised in family, village and their units. But the abject British defeat to an “inferior” race convinced many to switch loyalties. Mr Hazarika carefully documents that another 15,000 or so signed up after witnessing the brutal Japanese treatment of POWs.

 

The first INA lasted from September to December 1942, its brevity a reflection of its sponsors’ irreconcilable aims. “For Japan,” Mr Hazarika writes, “India was peripheral. …For the Indians, the only objective was their independence, and to ensure that Japan must only use the INA to fight for it and have no ambitions on India.” Mohan Singh grew suspicious when the Japanese insufficiently armed only one Indian division. He rightly feared that the Japanese Army planned to use INA soldiers for propaganda rather than as a critical strike force, which would “leave the Indians in a poor bargaining position if India were conquered”. He, therefore, refused to send a division to Burma and disbanded the INA, by then 60,000 strong.

 

Mohan Singh was arrested, after which the Japanese roped in the Bengali revolutionary Rash Behari Bose — who had signed Mohan Singh’s arrest warrant — to rebuild the INA. Considered a Japanese stooge, many Indian soldiers refused to follow him. Nevertheless, by dint of patient dissembling, he valiantly cobbled together about 15,000 men, serving as a placeholder till Subhas Chandra Bose arrived in July 1943 to galvanise the INA.

 

Mr Hazarika notes that despite Bose’s electrifying oratory, only 2,000 men of the 27,000 POWs outside the INA joined; the rest opted for the purgatory of Japanese POW camps. It was from the civilian population that Bose filled INA ranks. But he, too, faced the problem of asymmetrical aims. The Japanese, Mr Hazarika explains, “had a low opinion of the INA. Not only had the men surrendered but they had also agreed to fight alongside their erstwhile enemies. Given the code the Japanese lived by, this was incomprehensible.”

 

The familiar history follows — crack INA troops were used to drive cattle and dig trenches on the frontlines, Netaji’s haplessness in the face of Japan’s defeat and the famous Red Fort trials. This larger story is bracketed by eye-opening accounts of INA politicking as well as page-turning accounts of betrayals and hazardous escapes by Indian soldiers and officers through Malaysia and Burma. Among them is an entertaining account of the escape of Major Mahabir Singh Dhillon, who managed to win an MBE despite double-crossing the Japanese and triple-crossing the British.

 

Also covered in distressingly graphic details is the appalling fate of Indian soldiers shipped to the “torture islands” of the South West Pacific Area. That only 198 out of 3,000 Indians survived on New Guinea speaks volumes for the savagery of Japanese incarceration.

 

Closely researched and evenly written, this capacious popular history will ensure that Indian soldiers’ experience in an overlooked but critical theatre of war remains vividly on the record.