Red Fort Trials of INA (1945)

The Red Fort Trials were a series of public courts-martial held between November 1945 and May 1946 at the Red Fort (Lal Qila) in Delhi, in which the British Indian government prosecuted officers and men of the Indian National Army (INA) — the force raised under Subhas Chandra Bose to fight alongside Imperial Japan against the British during the Second World War. The legal basis lay in the Indian Army Act, 1911, and the prerogative of the Crown over members of His Majesty's Indian forces who had, in the government's view, deserted their oath of allegiance and taken up arms against the King-Emperor. After Japan's surrender in August 1945, some 20,000 captured INA personnel were classified by Allied interrogators into "white," "grey," and "black" categories according to their perceived culpability, with the most prominent figures selected for prosecution. Commander-in-Chief Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck authorised the proceedings, and the choice of the Mughal-era Red Fort as venue — long a symbol of sovereign authority — invested the trials with an emblematic charge the government had not anticipated.

The proceedings followed standard court-martial mechanics under the 1911 Act. A general court-martial, composed of serving British and Indian officers and presided over by a judge-advocate, heard each case. The defendants were charged with "waging war against the King-Emperor," a treasonable offence, and in several instances with murder and abetment of murder arising from the execution of INA personnel who had refused to fight. The prosecution led evidence of the accused's voluntary enlistment in the INA after capture at Singapore in February 1942, their commissioning of acts of war on the Burma front, and their role in disciplinary executions. Conviction on the principal charge of waging war carried a potential sentence of death or transportation for life. The accused were entitled to a defence, to cross-examine prosecution witnesses, and to lead evidence in mitigation, and the proceedings were conducted in open court — a decision that allowed extensive press coverage and turned the dock into a national platform.

The first and most celebrated trial, beginning 5 November 1945, was the joint prosecution of three officers chosen, deliberately, to represent India's principal communities: Colonel Prem Sahgal (Hindu), Major General Shah Nawaz Khan (Muslim), and Lieutenant Colonel Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon (Sikh). The defence was mounted by the INA Defence Committee, an extraordinary panel assembled by the Indian National Congress that included Bhulabhai Desai, Tej Bahadur Sapru, Asaf Ali, Kailash Nath Katju, and — making his courtroom return after decades — Jawaharlal Nehru, who donned barrister's robes for the occasion. Desai's central argument invoked international law: that the INA constituted the army of a recognised provisional government, the Azad Hind, and that its members were therefore lawful belligerents entitled to the protections of the laws of war rather than traitors subject to municipal treason law. Subsequent trials of other officers, including those charged with the brutal execution of subordinates, proceeded through the winter of 1945-46.

The political reaction in the principal cities was immediate and overwhelming. In Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, and Lahore, the slogan "Lal Qile se aayi awaz — Sahgal, Dhillon, Shah Nawaz" became a rallying cry, and the Muslim League, the Congress, and the Communist Party briefly converged in support of the accused. Demonstrations in Calcutta in November 1945 left scores dead in clashes with police. The naval mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay in February 1946, and disturbances within the Royal Indian Air Force, were understood by the colonial administration as evidence that the loyalty of the Indian armed forces — the ultimate guarantor of British rule — could no longer be relied upon. The court convicted Sahgal, Shah Nawaz, and Dhillon and sentenced them to transportation for life, but Auchinleck, weighing the threat to military discipline and the inflamed public mood, remitted the sentences in January 1946.

The Red Fort Trials must be distinguished from the broader phenomenon of the INA movement and from the contemporaneous constitutional negotiations of the Cabinet Mission (1946). The trials were a specific judicial episode, whereas the INA movement encompasses Bose's wartime organisation of the Azad Hind Fauj and the Azad Hind provisional government proclaimed in Singapore in October 1943. They are also distinct from a treason trial in a civilian court: these were military courts-martial governed by the Army Act, and the legal contest turned on the status of belligerency rather than on ordinary criminal procedure. The "waging war" charge derived from concepts also embedded in Section 121 of the Indian Penal Code, but the forum and the personnel were exclusively military.

Controversy persists over the trials' precise causal weight in hastening British withdrawal. Auchinleck's own confidential assessment, that pressing the prosecutions risked a general disaffection in the Indian Army, is frequently cited as the decisive private calculation behind the remission of sentences. Some historians regard the trials and the associated mutinies as the proximate shock that convinced the Attlee government to expedite the transfer of power, while others emphasise the prior strategic decision to quit India taken for economic and geopolitical reasons. The categorisation of prisoners into colour-coded culpability classes, and the selective prosecution of only a few hundred of the tens of thousands of INA personnel, also attracted later criticism as politically calibrated rather than evenly applied justice.

For the working practitioner — particularly the civil services aspirant and the historian of decolonisation — the Red Fort Trials illustrate how a judicial proceeding can become an instrument of mass political mobilisation and how questions of belligerent status, military allegiance, and the limits of treason law intersect with the politics of empire. The episode demonstrates that the loyalty of indigenous armed forces is the load-bearing column of colonial authority, and that prosecuting national heroes in the seat of former sovereignty can corrode that loyalty faster than any insurgency. It remains a standard reference point in examinations of how moral legitimacy, rather than legal verdicts, determines political outcomes.