Indian National Army Trials

The Indian National Army trials were British military prosecutions of INA officers who had fought alongside Japan against British rule during the Second World War. Conducted publicly at Delhi's Red Fort, the trials transformed alleged military offenders into symbols of patriotic sacrifice and made their defence a nationwide nationalist cause.

Why the accused became national symbols

• The first joint trial in 1945 prosecuted Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Kumar Sahgal and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, principally for waging war against the King-Emperor.
• The presence of a Muslim, Hindu and Sikh officer projected inter-communal unity at a time of growing communal tension.
• Many Indians regarded INA personnel as freedom fighters rather than traitors because their declared objective was India's liberation from colonial rule.
• The symbolic setting of the Red Fort, associated with sovereignty and the uprising of 1857, intensified public interest.

How a military trial became a mass campaign

The proceedings received extensive publicity, allowing competing accounts of patriotism and loyalty to be debated across India.

• The Congress INA Defence Committee organised legal assistance, while prominent lawyers, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Bhulabhai Desai, appeared for the defence.
• Political organisations with otherwise divergent positions supported the accused, giving the campaign an unusually broad nationalist character.
• Public meetings, defence funds, student protests and hartals converted courtroom proceedings into street mobilisation.
• The defence argued that allegiance to an enslaving colonial power could not override the right to fight for national freedom.

Political significance

• Although the three officers were convicted, the Commander-in-Chief remitted their sentences amid intense public pressure.
• The agitation demonstrated that the colonial state's definition of treason had lost legitimacy among large sections of Indian society.
• Sympathy for the INA among civilians and sections of the armed forces deepened British anxiety about relying indefinitely on Indian personnel to maintain colonial authority.
• The trials contributed to the post-war atmosphere of unrest that also surrounded the Royal Indian Navy uprising of 1946, although they did not remove underlying communal divisions.