Ashoka's Lions: The Warrior Spirit of India by Henry Jesuadian

Author:Henry Jesuadian [Jesuadian, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ancient, History, Military
ISBN: 9789390439881
Google: 6nUjzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Vij Books India Pvt Limited
Published: 2021-01-15T06:29:02+00:00

13

Independence and Partition

With the surrender of Japan in August 1945 and the cessation of the Second World War, Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army were gradually demobilized, and those that didn’t re-enlist went back to their civilian lives, all of them treated with as much respect as could be expected from the British administration.

The soldiers of the Indian National Army, however, posed a problem. The British authorities had already conducted a series of courts-martial of captured INA personnel in 1943 and 1944 on charges of contravening Section 41 of the Indian Army Act 1911, i.e. desertion and treason. However, the large numbers of these dissident troops that were captured at the end of the Burma Campaign made it nearly impossible to charge them all, so the British decided to try only those classified as ringleaders and those accused of war crimes. The trials were held at the Red Fort just outside Delhi, and the first three to face the courts were Maj. Gen. Shah Nawaz Khan and Cols. Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon and Prem Sehgal (INA ranks) between November and December 1945, followed by a second trial of Abdul Rashid, Shingara Singh, Fateh Khan (INA ranks unknown) and Capt. Malik Munawar Khan Awan. The Prosecution Counsel was Sir Naushirwan P. Engineer who was the Advocate General of India, while an INA Defence Committee was appointed by the Indian National Congress comprising eminent lawyers such as Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru (lead Counsel), Jawaharlal Nehru, Kailash Nath Katju, Asaf Ali and Bhulabhai Desai. Ten trials in all were to be held right upto March 1946.

In the first trial, the three accused were charged not only with treason against the British Crown but also murder and abetting murder.

This trial went ahead despite widespread opposition from all sections of the community, including the armed forces. The Indian National Congress and the Muslim League were united, for possibly the last time, because of the three on trial Nawaz Khan was a Muslim, Gurbaksh Singh was a Sikh and Prem Sehgal was a Hindu! All three were found guilty and sentenced to deportation for life, but the sentence was never carried out.

In the second trial, the charges of treason were dropped and the trial moved to an adjoining building of the Red Fort because of the notoriety surrounding the first trial.

Amidst the general public unrest, sailors of the Royal Indian Navy (the Navy and Air Force had been awarded in 1946 the ‘honorific’ Royal for their service in the Second World War) had mutinied at all Navy establishments from Bombay to Karachi. Simultaneously, Indian NCOs in the British Indian Army studiously ignored orders from their British officers, while at Poona (Pune) and Madras (Chennai) there were revolts in the garrison ranks.

British troops brutally suppressed, at bayonet point, a mutiny of Indian soldiers at Jabalpur which lasted two weeks, at the end of February 1946. Of the 45 who were tried by separate courts-martial, 41 were sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment, and the remaining four dismissed with the others on administrative grounds.

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