Between 5 November and 31 December 1945, three officers of the Indian National Army (INA) were tried by a British military court on charges of murder and waging war against the British king. Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Sahgal and Gurbaksh Dhillon were found guilty of committing treason against the Crown, Khan was found guilty of murder, and Sahgal and Dhillon were acquitted of murder charges. But instead of imposing the required sentences of life or death, all three defendants were cashiered from the British Army and had their pay and allowances forfeited. As longtime journalist Ashis Ray explains in The Trial That Shook Britain, British authorities made a decision to effectively grant clemency to the officers due to the political and civil turmoil that surrounded the trial. Although the officers were physically in the dock, it was Indian independence that was on trial.
Ray, who acknowledges that he approached this story as a journalist, not a historian or academic, begins the book by providing a brief background of the origins of the Indian independence movement, including the 1857 Mutiny, the Revolutionary Movement of the early 20th century, the Ghadar Movement, and the formation of the Indian National Congress led by Mohandas Gandhi and Subhas Bose. During World War II, the British India Army fought against Japanese forces in the China Burma India theater, and tens of thousands of Indian troops became prisoners of war of the Imperial Japanese Army. Japanese officials held out the promise of Indian independence to these troops if they would join Japan in fighting the British. Meanwhile, Subhas Bose, who had been imprisoned by British authorities but was released though kept under watch after a hunger strike, escaped from British surveillance to meet with German and Japanese officials to gain their support for Indian independence. When Singapore fell to Japanese forces, Ray notes, Bose broadcast to his countrymen that it meant the “collapse of the British empire”.
Bose … set about assiduously reviving the INA that had been created from soldiers of the British India Army held as POWs by the Japanese in Southeast Asia, but had since been disbanded.

Bose wanted to form an army of more than 300,000 men “to liberate India by force.” After reviving the INA, Bose in October 1943 in Japanese-controlled Singapore announced the Provisional Government of Free India and declared war on Britain and the United States. The INA was now an “anti-colonial, nationalist army” committed to India’s independence.
After Japan’s defeat, Ray notes, British authorities rounded-up many former British India Army soldiers who joined the INA, and courts martial were set in motion. The trial of Khan, Sahgal and Dhillon, which was held at the old Red Fort in Delhi and was highly publicized, set off what Ray describes as a “civil outcry” by Indians of all faiths and classes. Demonstrations broke out—many of them violent—all over India. The officers’ defense, spearheaded by lawyer Bhulabhai Desai, was that the officers had acted as Indian patriots intent on helping to establish Indian independence. The officers claimed they belonged to an army of a new government—the Provisional Government of Free India. Ray notes that the officers’ counsel even read the US Declaration of Independence into the record.
The lenient sentences imposed after the officers’ convictions were a result of policy decisions made at the highest level of the British government. In addition to the civil upheaval in India over the trial, there was a brief mutiny among sailors in the Royal Indian Navy at Bombay that further convinced British officials that the best response was to cut their losses.
Ray credits British General Sir Claude Auchinleck (commander-in-chief of all armed forces in India) with recognizing that harsh penalties would only further inflame Indian sentiment. Official pledges of self-government for India were made, but by then Indian independence appeared inevitable. A war-exhausted Britain was not going to do what was necessary to maintain control of India, if that was even possible. The trial of the three Indian officers, writes Ray, “turned out to be a major milestone on the road to Indian emancipation.”
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