Mohan Singh

Mohan Singh founded the first Indian National Army out of prisoners of war in Malaya in 1942, and was arrested by the Japanese within the year for insisting it be treated as an allied army rather than an auxiliary. He was a captain in the British Indian Army who was cut off during the retreat down the peninsula and surrendered near Alor Star. Some forty-five thousand Indian soldiers were taken at Singapore in February 1942, and the Japanese handed them to a Japanese intelligence officer, Fujiwara, who proposed raising them as an army of Indian liberation. Singh agreed and recruited perhaps forty thousand. The quarrel that followed was about status: he wanted a written commitment that the INA would be a national army of a provisional government, with its own command, and the Japanese wanted a unit under their direction. He dissolved the first INA in December 1942 and was interned on Pulau Ubin. Subhas Chandra Bose arrived the following year and rebuilt it. Singh returned to India after the war, was released with the other INA officers after the Red Fort trials produced enormous public sympathy, joined the Congress, and served in the Rajya Sabha. He always maintained that the INA's purpose was Indian independence and not Japanese victory, and that the two were not the same thing. The Red Fort trials of 1945 produced demonstrations across India and a mutiny in the Royal Indian Navy the following year, and are widely argued to have convinced the British that the loyalty of the Indian forces could no longer be relied on - which mattered more to the timing of independence than the INA's battlefield record did.

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