Interview/ Gautam Hazarika, author
Readers in India may be misled by the title of Gautam Hazarika’s new book, The Forgotten Indian Prisoners of World War II: Surrender, Loyalty, Betrayal and Hell. It is not about the INA prisoners who were put on trial in the Red Fort by the British. This book is about those Indian soldiers who fought the Japanese in Singapore, Malaya and Burma alongside the British, and who had to surrender, were taken prisoner, put to torture and hard labour by the Japanese, refused to join the INA, and faced death or managed to escape. While recounting their stories, Hazarika also gives an insight into the INA movement. Edited excerpts from an interview with the author:
Q/ What prompted you to look at this particular chapter of Indian history, when new narratives are coming in about the INA and its collaboration with the Japanese?
A/ This book is not about the INA, but about the 67,000 Indian troops who were defending Singapore and Malaya when the Japanese invaded. One part of the book is about what happens to them in Singapore. Another part is about what happens to them in Papua New Guinea, yet another about what happens to the INA in Burma.
Q/ Papua New Guinea?
A/ When the Japanese invaded, they captured all of Southeast Asia. They were wanting to fortify Papua New Guinea, to use it as a springboard to invade Australia. They needed labourers; they started using Allied PoWs (The Bridge on the River Kwai movie). They also took the locals. Of those 2,20,000 men and women, 1,20,000 died. They shipped about 17,000 Indian PoWs from Singapore to Papua New Guinea; 3,000 of them died on the way. Of the 14,000 survivors, most were on this small island called New Britain, north of New Guinea; 3,000 on the island of New Guinea. They were made to do hard labour, build fortifications, dig trenches, tunnels. They had very little food. They had very little medicines. They were forced to work to death by the Japanese.
Q/ How many escaped to tell the story?
A/ Of the 3,000 Indian soldiers in Papua New Guinea, 185 escaped in 1944. They reached India. Of the remaining 2,815, only one reached home. Just one. So horrific was the death toll. Half of the 11,000 soldiers died in two years. After the war, when the Australians found survivors, they saw them as almost skeletons. They told stories of how the Japanese had slapped, kicked.... The Australians held 100 war crimes trials. For this, we owe a great debt to Australia; 36 Japanese were sentenced to be hanged.
Q/ What was happening in the INA in the meantime?
A/ It consisted of both surrendered Indian prisoners and recruited civilians. It had three phases—under Captain Mohan Singh, under Rash Behari Bose and finally under Netaji Bose.
Mohan Singh was the first. He had been a captain in the Indian Army. The most senior was Lt Col N.S. Gill. He didn’t get along with Mohan Singh because it was not pleasant for him to take orders from a junior. This was an experience many other officers had.
Q/ So what happened to Gill?
A/ Gill was upset. So the Japanese said, why don’t you run our spy network out of Burma? He went to Burma, but instead of running the spy network, he tried to escape. Unfortunately, he was not able to escape.
Basically, Mohan Singh had formed the INA, the army. He recruited them; he trained them. He put them into divisions, with regiments named Gandhi, Nehru and Azad, etc. He formed the army with whatever few weapons the Japanese had given. But he didn’t trust the Japanese at the end. He refused to cooperate and was arrested.
A/ Even though he was not a soldier, he was able to keep the army together. By now, the INA had become more of a political entity than an army. They had only a few rifles and machine guns, but not enough bullets. It was, if I may use a term, a paper army. Rash Behari Bose was able to bring it back. Then Netaji arrived, and Rash Behari handed over the army to Netaji. Netaji focused more on the civilians, getting them organised into a movement. He had the brilliant idea of the Rani Jhansi Regiment, a fantastic idea. The INA had become more of a political army now.
Q/ How serious or sincere were the Japanese towards the Indians’ cause?
A/ The Japanese had no intention of arming them. They did not want 40,000 well-armed Indians behind their backs. They wanted 2,000 or 3,000 men. Eventually, they arrived at a compromise of 17,000, which was the strength of the INA under Mohan Singh: 16,700 to be exact.
Q/ Would it be correct to say that recruitment of civilians was at the behest of the Japanese, because the Japanese wouldn't have trusted the surrendered soldiers from the British Indian Army who had sworn allegiance to the King and the Crown?
A/ I don't think so. The civilians joined as a result of the enthusiasm that the Indian diaspora in Southeast Asia felt for Indian independence. But yes, the Japanese were not trusting the soldiers. Netaji found that the Japanese didn’t want to use the INA to fight. He said, "Look, you must." They gave exactly the same reason that you mentioned: that they had surrendered and also joined their enemy. Even if your enemy happens to be us, you are doubly beyond the pale.
The other reason they gave was that the Indian officers had not commanded more than 100 men. Even though Gill was a lieutenant colonel, he had not commanded a battalion, because the British had not allowed Indians in field command. So, the Japanese told Netaji that just because one has promoted oneself to command a regiment of 3,000, it doesn't mean one knows how to command a regiment of 3,000. So, there were three reasons: one, you surrendered; two, you joined your enemy; three, you don't have command experience. So, we don't want to use you to fight.
Q/ But finally, they did...
A/ Netaji insisted. He said, "Indians must be seen to be fighting for freedom." They [The Japanese] finally agreed in Singapore to use a regiment of 3,000. That regiment, called the Subhas Bose Regiment, was formed by mothballing the rest of the INA. It was the one that was sent under Shahnawaz Khan to Burma. When Netaji arrived with Shahnawaz Khan in Burma in January 1944, the Japanese commander said, "Yes, we will use your 3,000 men, but we are going to split them into small units of 50-60 across our army." Netaji said, "No, no, no, that will not work; only if you're a joint unit of 3,000 can you achieve something." Finally, they said, "Okay, we'll use you in battalions of 1,000." So, one battalion of 1,000 was sent to the subsidiary Arakan sector that was very far away from Imphal, Kohima.
Q/ The other two battalions under Shahnawaz Khan?
A/ They were in the rear of the Imphal sector. Shahnawaz Khan writes in his diary that his men were being used as laborers. Only at the end when they were retreating, when they were failing, facing a problem in Kohima, did they ask Shahnawaz Khan to help. Yet, many INA soldiers got out of hospital because they got a chance to fight for, or retake, India. Unfortunately, it was too late; the retreat from Kohima had already begun. Indeed, there were some INA soldiers who unfurled the Congress tricolour above the hills of Nagaland and Kohima, but those men were really not used for fighting.
Q/ Perhaps, India was secondary to the Japanese war goals; their main theatre was the Pacific, against the Americans. On the other hand, for the British, India was the main theatre to be defended with all their might?
A/ Yes, for Japan, the Indian sector was a subsidiary sector. Their main fight was against the Americans who were coming closer. They not only supplied the INA very poorly, they even supplied their own men in the India theatre very poorly. When the Japanese invaded Manipur, they had supplies for 21 days because they expected to succeed and capture the supplies from the Indian army in Manipur. When they failed to do that, they also died of starvation, as did the INA soldiers. I don't know what would have happened to my family if the Japanese had come to my father's hometown, about 100 kilometres from the Burma border. I am very grateful that they stopped. As far as the British were concerned, you're right. India was the jewel in the crown, very critical for Britain’s global war effort.
Q/ Coming back to the heroes of your book—the soldiers who were taken prisoners by the Japanese and refused to join the INA—was any of them taken back into the army when they returned?
A/ There are two sets of people. One, those who had refused to join the INA after surrender. They were all taken back into the Indian Army. Then those who joined the INA. They were interrogated by the British and categorised into what was called black, grey and white. ‘White’ was considered loyal; they were allowed back into the army. ‘Black’ was considered fiercely disloyal; they were dishonourably discharged and not allowed to rejoin. The ‘grey’ were sent to rehabilitation camps. If rehabilitation worked, they would be allowed back.
Q/ There has been much controversy about the ‘blacks’ not being taken back into the army.
A/ I’d like to mention two things here. The INA had one General Mohan Singh, four major generals, several colonels. All these men had been lieutenants and captains in 1942. Now, if they were to rejoin the Indian Army, what would have happened? Would they be taken in their earlier ranks or INA ranks? It was a very, very complex issue. There have been lots of blame about Nehru being cajoled by Mountbatten to not take them back. I’m sure Mountbatten did give him that advice. I’m sure it was one of the factors that Nehru considered, but there were many, many factors. From what I’ve read, even the senior men in the Indian Army were not comfortable having these men back.
You see, the Indian Army men fighting [on the British side] against the Japanese in Burma were also patriots. They wanted to make sure that Japan did not enter India. And after that, I was told by one senior army officer, we would tackle the British in India. It’s not that Brigadier Thimmaya was not patriotic. They were all patriotic Indians, but they had a different way of fighting for India.
Q/ One last question: what was Japan’s larger imperial scheme for Southeast Asia, Burma and India?
A/ Japan started this greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere, Asia for the Asiatics, etc. But if you see what they really did in Malaysia, in Singapore, or most importantly in Burma—they could have made those countries independent, but it never happened. They committed atrocities. Indian civilians from Burma, Malaya were press-ganged into labour. Secondly, there were some unofficial groups in Japan, who had plans to split India up. They didn’t look at India as one country; they were going to combine Sri Lanka with the southern part of India and things like that.
As to the official Japanese policy, the best example is what happened in Burma. Or what they did after capturing the borders of India. There was euphoria in the beginning, because the Japanese were advancing towards Kohima and Imphal. Soon Japanese scientists, businessmen, bankers all were brought to document and take over all the natural resources of the northeast. There was, and it has been documented, a big tussle between Netaji and the Japanese about who would control these resources. Eventually they failed in the campaign. You look at what the Japanese did; they were an imperialist power, they were going to replace Britain. They were not freeing Asia for the Asiatics. They were freeing Asia for the Japanese.
THE FORGOTTEN INDIAN PRISONERS OF WORLD WAR II: SURRENDER, LOYALTY, BETRAYAL AND HELL
By Gautam Hazarika
Published by Penguin Vintage
Price: Rs799; pages: 346