Respect is shown to the graves of those who died fighting for the British at Kohima. But Mountbatten destroyed a memorial for INA soldiers in Singapore
The news that the Battle of Kohima-Imphal 1944 was voted as the greatest that Britain has fought, at a function organised at london's National Army Museum, has brought back memories of those tempestuous years of World War II when General William Slim's forces turned back the advance of General Renya Mutaguchi's Japanese 15th Army from Burma (now Myanmar) at the North-Eastern borders of India. The campaign was described as a decisive one in the war in the Eastern theatre.
But there are other ways of looking at the fighting than just picking up the immediate winners and losers on the battle field. On the losing side was the Japanese Army supported by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's inadequately armed units of the 1st Division of the Indian National Army. But the impact Netaji's warriors left on the India psyche was so tremendous that it shook the foundations of the Raj.
The war ended a year later with the Japanese surrender after the US dropped atomic bombs to devastate the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The officers of the Azad Hind Fauj, captured by the British in Burma and Singapore and put on trial at Red Fort, united the Indian nation as never before — both the Congress and the Muslim league demanded the release of the captured officers. So intense was the fervour of the demand and so dangerous the instances of mutiny that the British sensed their rule was coming to an end. Indeed, it was the start of the end of the era of colonialism, not only in India, but also in the rest of Asia.
With respect and gratitude, the British keep remembering the thousands of their dead buried in the graveyards in Kohima (“When you go home, tell them of us and say for your tomorrow we gave our today”). For them, the winners of the Victoria Crosses and the Military Crosses, among them soldiers of the British Indian Army, are heroes. But for the Indian masses, Shahnawaz, Sehgal and Dhillon — charged with waging war against the King-Emperor, and with murder and torture — became household names. In spite of the stirring defence presented by a team of lawyers, led by legal luminaries like Bhulabhai Desai, they were held guilty and sentenced to deportation for life — a sentence which was not carried out for fear of a possible revolt by the Army.
The soldiers of the British Indian Army divisions who fought men of the Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind, as the Netaji's provisional Government was called, must have a troubled conscience. For whose cause were they fightingIJ While due respect is shown to the graves of the dead at Kohima, lord Mountbatten of Burma ordered the destruction of the memorial built in Singapore in the honour of INA soldiers. Years later a cenotaph was rebuilt at the site through public donation, and it is now a heritage monument of that multi-racial island nation where the first parade of the INA was held in 1943.
Spare a thought also for the thousands of brave men of Mutaguchi's Japanese Army, imbued by the Bushido spirit, who fell in the fierce battles in Kohima and Imphal in the name of their Emperor Hirohito, to the enemy's fire as well as to deadly mosquito bites in the rainy months.
Seated on a hopping flight in the North-East one morning in the 1970s, this writer can't forget the way Nagashima San, leading a team of Japanese table tennis players, began shedding tears when the crew announced that we were flying over the forests of Nagaland. It was in these dense jungles, he explained, controlling his emotions, that his brother shed his blood for his country. Every soldier has his own reason to go into battle.
The battles at Kohima and Imphal may have been won in 1944 by the Allies. But from the standpoint of the men of the Azad Hind Fauj, however ill-equipped for set-piece battles they might have been, the defeat was a victory in the long term. Their very participation had the desired repercussions.