Indian National Army (Azad Hind Fauj)

The Indian National Army (INA), known in Hindustani as the Azad Hind Fauj, was a military force raised from Indian prisoners of war and civilian expatriates in Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia between 1942 and 1945 to overthrow British colonial rule in India by force of arms. Its origins lay in the rapid Japanese conquest of Malaya and Singapore in early 1942, when roughly 45,000 Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army surrendered at the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942. Captain Mohan Singh, an officer of the 1/14th Punjab Regiment, conceived the first iteration of the force, and its political direction was channelled through the Indian Independence League led by Rash Behari Bose, a long-exiled revolutionary based in Japan. The first INA was formally proclaimed in 1942 but collapsed by December of that year amid disputes between Mohan Singh and the Japanese command over whether the army was a genuine national liberation force or an auxiliary instrument of Japanese strategy.

The army was revived and transformed under Subhas Chandra Bose, who arrived in Singapore by submarine in 1943 after escaping British surveillance in Calcutta in January 1941, travelling to Berlin, and then crossing to Asia. On 4 July 1943 Bose assumed leadership of the Indian Independence League, and on 21 October 1943 he proclaimed the Provisional Government of Free India (Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind) in Singapore, with himself as Head of State, Prime Minister, and Minister of War. This provisional government declared war on Britain and the United States, issued its own currency and stamps, and was recognised by the Axis powers and several states aligned with them. The INA was constituted as its standing army, its recruits drawn both from captured Indian troops and from the large Tamil, Telugu, and Punjabi labouring populations of Malaya and Burma, who supplied funds, volunteers, and supplies.

Organisationally, the revived INA grew to a strength of some 40,000 to 60,000 and was distinguished by features unusual for the period. It raised the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, an all-women combat unit commanded by Captain Lakshmi Sahgal, one of the first such formations in modern military history. Its battle cry was "Chalo Dilli" (March to Delhi), its salutation "Jai Hind," and "Subh Sukh Chain," an adaptation of Tagore's anthem, served as its national song. The army was divided into divisions named for Indian leaders, including the Gandhi, Azad, and Nehru Brigades. Funding came substantially from voluntary contributions by Indian merchants in Southeast Asia, and Bose's appeal "Give me blood and I shall give you freedom" framed its ethos of total sacrifice.

In military terms the INA committed forces to the Japanese U-Go offensive of 1944, the abortive invasion of British India through the Manipur frontier. INA units participated in the battles of Imphal and Kohima between March and July 1944, and an advance element planted the tricolour on Indian soil at Moirang in Manipur in April 1944. The offensive failed catastrophically owing to collapsed supply lines, monsoon conditions, and Allied air superiority. As Japan retreated through Burma in 1945, the INA disintegrated, and Bose died on 18 August 1945 in a plane crash at Taihoku (Taipei), Taiwan—a death disputed by some commentators but accepted by official inquiries including the Khosla Commission.

The INA must be distinguished from the mainstream Indian National Congress movement and its strategy of non-violent satyagraha. Where Gandhi rejected armed struggle and alliance with the Axis, Bose embraced both, reasoning that Britain's wartime adversaries were India's tactical allies. The INA is also distinct from the Ghadar movement of the First World War and from the Free India Legion (Legion Freies Indien) that Bose had earlier helped raise in Germany; the Azad Hind Fauj was a far larger Asian-theatre formation with its own provisional government and territorial claims. It should not be conflated with the British Indian Army from which most of its soldiers defected.

The most consequential aftermath was political rather than military. In 1945–46 the British conducted the Red Fort trials, court-martialling INA officers Prem Kumar Sahgal, Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, and Shah Nawaz Khan—a Hindu, a Sikh, and a Muslim—on charges of treason. The Congress organised a defence committee including Jawaharlal Nehru, who donned legal robes for the occasion, and the trials provoked mass demonstrations across India and unrest in the armed services, contributing to the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of February 1946. The public sympathy convinced British authorities of the unreliability of Indian troops, a factor cited as accelerating the decision to transfer power. Controversy persists over Bose's collaboration with imperial Japan and over the circumstances of his death, the subject of the Shah Nawaz Committee, the Khosla Commission, and the Mukherjee Commission.

For the contemporary practitioner and the civil-services aspirant, the Azad Hind Fauj illustrates the plurality of strategies within the Indian freedom struggle and the limits of armed external intervention against entrenched colonial power. It remains a fixture of the UPSC General Studies Paper I modern-history syllabus, frequently examined for its provisional government, the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, and the political impact of the Red Fort trials. The INA's legacy endures in Indian public memory through the slogan "Jai Hind," the lionisation of Bose, and recurring debates over recognition, mythology, and the historical record.