An essential spotlight

As is widely accepted, the Indian National Congress, more so after Mahatma Gandhi assumed its leadership, spearheaded India’s struggle for independence from British rule. Indeed, in 1939, it enjoyed elected governments in eight out of India’s then eleven provinces. But it sacrificed this predominance by resigning from governance in protest against Britain hauling India into World War II 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.

At a loss on how to revive the struggle when it was unprescribed 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 by force, though, had been suppressed from the Indian people by British war-time censorship. When information about the saga began pouring out after the post-war ungagging of the Indian press, the Congress adroitly seized on the resultant public anger.

The party was extended an even bigger windfall when British authorities embarked on courts 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 advocate Bhulabhai Desai as he defended three INA officers in the first of the trials.

Civic demonstrations against the trial cutting across communal lines turned violent, particularly in Calcutta; the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) mutinied. The British viceroy in India, Lord Archibald Wavell, and General Sir Claude Auchinleck, commander-in-chief of armed forces in the country, beat a hasty retreat. Contemporaneously, the process of granting complete independence to India – previously only dominion status being on offer – unobtrusively gathered pace in London.

The unified public fervour on the INA phenomenon, fuelled by the Congress, was almost unprecedented in Indian history. The charismatic Jawaharlal Nehru toured the length and breadth of India to relate riveting tales of heroism of the INA and eulogise it to vast audiences. The INA trials have generally been a footnote in the cataloguing of the Indian independence movement. This book examines to what extent they actually impacted the final phase of India’s quest for freedom. In so doing, it unveils that, although the Congress’s extended odyssey was essentially about a passive push-back, at a critical juncture of its campaign to extinguish British hegemony in India, it endorsed and embraced (Subhas) Bose and the INA’s use of force.

******

Quite evidentially, the trial of (Shah Nawaz) Khan, (Prem) Sahgal and (Gurbaksh) Dhillon turned out to be a major milestone on the road to Indian emancipation, not a mere footnote on the path. The consequent tsunami was similar to the impact of Gandhian non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements undertaken by the Congress. All three reflected reactions to what the party and the Indian people perceived as injustice, thereby carving a political opportunity. Each event triggered mass upheavals. In the third instance, unlike the first two, it became for India’s British rulers not just a law-and-order problem but a danger to their physical well-being. If Mahatma Gandhi had stewarded the earlier mass dissents, Nehru spearheaded the last, with Subhas Bose having in absentia provided the Congress a whirlwind to capitalise on.

The groundswell of public fury precipitated by the first court martial manifested in the November 1945 riots in Calcutta. It shook the serenity of British rule in India ... Security safeguards, such as additional armed forces, were sought from London and the tough line on the trials was watered down ... As far as London was concerned, the loyalty of Indian servicemen in the British armed forces could no longer be trusted.

******

From 1929 to 1942, Britain gave short shrift to the Congress’s call for purna swaraj. Then, under the compulsion of war-time stress, it offered conditional dominion status. Up to 5 November 1945, when the first INA trial began, there was no material shift in this position.

******

The Congress’s 1929 resolution, unacceptable for 16 years, had in a mere 18 weeks become acceptable. Circumstantial evidence, evidence of actions taken and evidence of the timings of such actions establish an integral link between the atmosphere created by the INA trials and the British government acquiescing to hasten the announcement of and conceding complete Indian independence.

Nehru in the foreword to Moti Ram’s transcript of the INA trial had elucidated, ‘Eighty-eight years ago another trial was held in this Red Fort of Delhi, the trial of the last of a great line [of Indian emperors]. That trial put a final end to a chapter of India’s history. Was this second trial held in the final weeks of 1945, to mark the end of another chapter? Surely, it is a presage of that end, and 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 last word, indeed the last laugh, radiated from another consummate wordsmith: Sarat Bose (Subhas’s elder brother) … he chose to quote Lord George Byron: Freedom’s battle once begun, Bequeathed by bleeding sire to son, Though baffled oft, is ever won.

(Excerpted with permission from Ashis Ray’s The Trial That Shook the Nation; published by Routledge)