WHY THE INA GENERALS WERE RELEASED

And the defence of Bhulabhai Desai, so far as I gather, was that the accused (the three charged Generals of the INA, namely, Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Kumar Sehgal and Gurbux Singh Dhillon) had waged war on the Anglo-American Allied forces not by way of seditious activity as subjects of the British Crown but on behalf of a sovereign State with its own independent functioning government, the Provisional Government of Free India headed by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, which had duly received diplomatic recognition from eleven States across the world including Germany, Japan and Russia, key players in World War II, and, as such, the captured soldiers of such a warring nation could not as per international law be tried for treason as subjects of the British Empire. Hence, the entire case fell through and the three generals were released unconditionally.

The response of the country to this release was uproarious as the INA soldiers emerged from the shadows of the closely guarded intelligence cover-up of their activity in the just concluded World War to the blaze of the midday sun and the entire country erupted in protest against further British occupation. The British Indian Armed Forces revolted, the Army at Jabalpore, the Air Force at Karachi from where it spread to sixty RAF stations across India, Ceylon and Singapore, and the Navy at Bombay. This shook the foundations of the British Indian Empire and they called it quits, not impelled by the Mahatma's Quit India Movement at all which had been squashed by the British within weeks of its initiation but by the impact of the INA on the now shifting loyalty of its erstwhile reliable soldiers who no longer could be depended on to fire on their own countrymen to hold British sovereignty over subjected India.

The above view of the unfolding drama of freedom is not based on the idle imagination or facile speculation of this writer --- elsewhere denounced by a critic as the incautious, simplistic, fallacious approach of the ardent admirer of Netaji to a complex historical episode demanding unbiased factual analysis and critical understanding thereof --- but is founded on the expressly articulated statement of Lord Clement Attlee to Chief Justice Phani Bhushan Chakraborty of the Calcutta High Court in 1956, then in the capacity of Acting Governor of West Bengal, when the former stayed as his guest at Raj Bhavan (Governor's House). Lord Attlee, who as Labour Party Prime Minister of Britain was instrumental in the Transfer of Power in 1947, had in response to Justice Chakraborty's query as to why the British, for no apparent reason in the wake of their victory in the Second World War and Gandhi's failed Quit India Movement, left India in a hurry in 1947, said that it was Bose's military activity that had significantly eroded the loyalty of the British Indian troops to the Crown which made the furtherance of the Raj in India a hazardous proposition. When inquired about Gandhi's role in bringing about their departure, I quote Justice Chakrabarty, "Attlee's lips became twisted in a sarcastic smile as he slowly chewed out the word, m-i-n-i-m-a-l."

So, there you are, my detractors, you have your ample answer. Now have the stomach to digest such new-found wisdom and grow into ardent admirers of Netaji like me and others whose number is legion. In it lies your well-being and in it lies the good of the nation as well for the bud of true patriotism will bloom once you have well-absorbed the legacy of the patriot premier, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Vande Mataram! Jai Hind!