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Indian National Army

This article is about the second Indian National Army under Subhash Chandra Bose. For the organisation under Mohan Singh, see First Indian National Army. For the modern Indian military, see Indian Armed Forces. For the army of the British Raj, see British Indian Army. For the regiment raised in Germany, see Free India Legion.

Indian National Army
Azad Hind Fauj
Insignia of the INA
ActiveJuly 1943 – September 1945
AllegianceEmpire of Japan
RoleGuerrilla, infantry, special operations
Size~43,000 Soldiers: Gandhi Brigade, Nehru Brigade, Azad Brigade, Subhas Brigade, Rani of Jhansi regiment
Motto(s)Ittefaq, Itmad aur Qurbani
(Hindustani: Concord, Faith and Sacrifice)
MarchQadam Qadam Badhaye Ja
EngagementsWorld War II
Commanders
Commander-in-ChiefSubhas Chandra Bose (1943–1945)
First Indian National Army: Mohan Singh (1942)
Chief of StaffJaganath Rao Bhonsle
Notable
commanders		Prem Sahgal
Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon
Shah Nawaz Khan
The INA Martyrs' Memorial Complex in Moirang, Manipur, where in April 1944 the Indian National Army opened its first headquarters on Indian soil.[1]

The Indian National Army (INA, sometimes Second INA;[2] Azad Hind Fauj /ˈɑːzɑːð ˈhinð ˈfɔːdʒ/; lit. 'Free Indian Army') was a Japanese-allied and -supported armed force constituted in Southeast Asia during World War II and led by Indian anti-colonial nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose.[3][4] It comprised British Indian Army POWs taken by the Japan and enlisting civilians.[5] The INA aimed to liberate India from British rule.[6] After exacting Japanese assent,[7] it furnished support to the Japanese Army during its unsuccessful attack on British India.[8] The INA followed Japanese military strategy but had its own military law and police.[9]

Subhas Chandra Bose's impassioned speeches may have been a factor in both POWs and civilians joining the INA.[10] Bitterness at their discriminatory treatment by the British,[11] and a sense of abandonment by the British after the Fall of Singapore may have been factors.[12] The examples of POWs who did not join being shipped to distant Japanese labour camps may have been another factor.[13][14] Although the INA has been described as a collaborationist force,[15] its battlefield performance was poor, and its formation did not constitute a legitimate mutiny.[16] The INA did not oppose Japanese Fascism, nor protest Japanese war crimes that occurred amongst its midst.[17]

A First Indian National Army had been founded in 1942 by Iwaichi Fujiwara and Mohan Singh, and comprised a portion of the Indian prisoners of war (PoWs) of the British Indian Army captured by Japan in the Malayan campaign and at Singapore.[18] However, Mohan Singh refused to align with the Japanese, leading to his arrest and the First INA's disbandment.[19] After Subhas Chandra Bose arrived in Southeast Asia from Nazi Germany in May 1943, he refounded the INA with significant recruitment from Indian civilian communities in Malaya and Singapore.[20]

The INA fought under the command of the Japanese military in the British campaign in the Southeast Asian theatre of WWII, with its aim to secure Indian independence from British rule.[21] The army was first formed in 1942 under Mohan Singh by Indian prisoners of war (PoWs) of the British Indian Army captured by Japan in the Malayan campaign and at Singapore.[22][23][24] This first INA, which had been handed over to Rash Behari Bose and Mohan Singh, collapsed and was disbanded in December that year after differences between its leadership and the Japanese military over its role in Japan's war in Asia. The INA was handed over to Subhas Chandra Bose.[25] It was revived under the leadership of Subhas Chandra Bose after his arrival in Southeast Asia in 1943. The army was declared to be the army of Bose's Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind (the Provisional Government of Free India). The INA came to be known as the puppet army of the Japanese empire.[26][27]

Subhas Chandra Bose named the brigades/regiments of INA after Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad, and himself.[28] There was also an all-women regiment named after Rani of Jhansi, Lakshmibai. Under Bose's leadership, the INA drew ex-prisoners and thousands of civilian volunteers from the Indian expatriate population in Malaya (present-day Malaysia) and Burma.[29][30][31][32][33][34][35] This second INA fought under the Imperial Japanese Army against the British and Commonwealth forces in the campaigns in Burma: at Imphal and Kohima, and later against the Allied retaking of Burma.[36][37]

After the INA's initial formation in 1942, there was concern in the British Indian Army that further Indian troops would defect. This led to a reporting ban and a propaganda campaign called "Jiffs" to preserve the loyalty of the Sepoy.[38] Historians consider the INA not to have had significant influence on the war.[39]

The British Raj, never seriously threatened by the INA, charged 300 INA officers with treason in the INA trials, but eventually backtracked in the face of opposition by the Congress.[40][41] These trials became a galvanising point in the Indian Independence movement for the Indian National Congress.[42][43] A number of people associated with the INA during the war later went on to hold important roles in public life in India as well as in other countries in Southeast Asia, most notably Lakshmi Sehgal in India, and John Thivy and Janaki Athinahappan in Malaya.[44]

The military unit was associated with Imperial Japan and the other Axis powers, and accusations were levelled against INA troops of being involved and complicit in Japanese war crimes.[45] The INA's members were viewed as Axis collaborators and traitors by British soldiers and Indian PoWs who did not join the army,[46] but after the war they were seen as patriots by many Indians.[46] Although they were widely commemorated by the Indian National Congress in the immediate aftermath of Indian independence, some of the members of the INA were denied freedom fighter status by the Government of India.[47][29][46][48]

  1. ^ McGregor, Rafe (2016). "Enemy of my Enemy: In the quest for India's independence, one fervent nationalist made a pact with the Axis to overthrow the British Raj". Military History. 33 (1): 69. ISSN 0889-7328. On Feb. 4, 1944, a Bahadur Group under Captain L.S. Misra infiltrated the British lines and overran the 7th Indian Infantry Division headquarters. The Japanese Twenty-Eighth Army—which included the 1st Battalion of the Subhas—fought its way to the Indian border. In April INA troops took Moirang, and the town became the army's first headquarters on Indian soil.
  2. ^ McGregor, Rafe (2016), "Enemy of my Enemy: In the quest for India's independence, one fervent nationalist made a pact with the Axis to overthrow the British Raj", Military History, 33 (1), ISSN 0889-7328, (the terms First INA and Second INA are sometimes used to distinguish Singh's administrative unit from Bose's combat unit).
  3. ^ McGregor, Rafe (2016). "Enemy of my Enemy: In the quest for India's independence, one fervent nationalist made a pact with the Axis to overthrow the British Raj". Military History. 33 (1). ISSN 0889-7328. His name was Subhas Chandra Bose, and he was head of the Japanese-allied and -supported Indian National Army
  4. ^ Mitter, Rana (2012). "War and memory since 1945". In Chickering, Roger; Showalter, Dennis; van de Ven, Hans (eds.). The Cambridge History of War: Volume 4, War and the Modern World. Cambridge University Press. pp. 542–565. ISBN 978-0-521-87577-6. (p. 564) The case of India showed how memories of nationalistic struggle and war could combine in unusual ways. Many Indian troops served on the Allied side during the war, although sentiment in favor of independence also fueled the Quit India Movement in 1942. A smaller but significant movement backed the Japanese outright. Subhas Chandra Bose, the former president of the Indian National Congress, formed the Indian National Army, which allied with Tokya in the hope of driving the British out of India by force.
  5. ^
    • "Subhas Chandra Bose". Britannica Online. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica. 2025. ISSN 1085-9721. Retrieved 11 January 2025. he led an armed force composed of former Indian prisoners of war and volunteers from the Indian expatriate community. ... aligned with the Axis powers and opposed the Allied powers during World War II.
    1. Metcalf, Barbara D.; Metcalf, Thomas R. (2012). A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge Concise Histories (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 244–245. ISBN 978-1-107-02649-0. The force that he (Bose) put together included not only prisoners of war, but other Indian residents of the area, including a novel women's detachment
    2. Barkawi, Tarak (2017). Soldiers of the Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II. Cambridge University Press. p. 114. ISBN 978-1-107-16958-6. Later, after Bose's arrival, the INA would eventually number around 45,000, but about 18,000 of these were recruited from Indian civilian communities in Southeast Asia.
    3. Gordon, Leonard A. (2013). "Subhas Chandra Bose". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/47756. Bose's army was constituted mainly from Indian soldiers taken prisoner at Singapore, and was supported by the Free India League ... backed by the Indian community of southeast Asia. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
    4. Bose, Sugata (2011). His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against Empire. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Pess. p. 246. ISBN 978-0-674-04754-9. A large majority of Indian expatriates in Southeast Asia responded with great fervour ... At least eighteen thousand civilians, mostly Tamils from southern India, enlisted in the Indian National Army.
    5. Bayly, Christopher; Harper, Tim (2005). Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945. Harvard University Press. p. 323. ISBN 0-674-01748-X. The second INA involved Indian society in Southeast Asia in a way the earlier incarnation had failed to do so. ... Men were recruited locally, and ... special emphasis was placed on the Tamils of Malaya.
  6. ^
    1. Mann, Michael. South Asia's Modern History: Thematic Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge. p. 125. ISBN 978-1-315-75455-0. As a result, Punjabis, Bengalis, and Tamils soon found themselves serving in a national liberation army consisting of 40,000 men who Bose, together with the Japanese units, led against British India in 1943.
    2. Misra, Maria (2008). Vishu's Crowded Temple: India Since the Great Rebellion. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-13721-7. Bose, ..., determined to resurrect the INA and, with Japanese aid, liberate India by force of arms. To the main force of prisoners of war he added Indian plantation workers from Malaya, and traders and shopkeepers from Thailand ... the INA was an admirable multi-ethnic force.
    3. Banerjee-Dube, Ishita (2014). A History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press. p. 404–405. ISBN 9781107065475. (404) After Subhas Bose became INA's supreme commander, it managed to recruit about 40,000 men. ... Civilians, ... swelled its ranks. (It) also had a women's regiment. (405) The dream of liberating India by means of an armed campaign ended rudely.
  7. ^ McGregor, Rafe (2016). "Enemy of my Enemy: In the quest for India's independence, one fervent nationalist made a pact with the Axis to overthrow the British Raj". Military History. 33 (1). ISSN 0889-7328. Soon after his arrival in the Japanese capital Bose met with Prime Minister Flideki Tojo, and they quickly reached an agreement: Japan would recognize Indian independence but maintain a military presence in liberated India until the conclusion of the war. On July 4 Bose took command of the INA, and on October 21 he was sworn in as prime minister of the Provisional Government of Free India.
  8. ^
    1. Copland, Ian (2012) [2001]. India 1885–1947: The Unmaking of an Empire. Seminar Studies in History series. Longman/Pearson Education. p. 65. ISBN 978-0-582-38173-5. Although the INA did little actual damage in the field, the fact that thousands of Indian soldiers had seen fit to renounce their oath of allegiance to the King-Emperor raised serious doubts about whether the military could continue to be relied on to enforce imperial authority.
    2. Ludden, David. India and South Asia: A Short History. London: One World Publications. Kindle Edition. p. 247. ISBN 978-1-78074-108-6. Meanwhile, a leading Congress figure, Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945), formed the Indian National Army (INA) in Japanese-occupied Burma to invade India and fight for liberation.
    3. Stockwell, A. J. "Imperialism and Nationalism in Southeast Asia". In Brown, Judith M.; Louis, Wm. Roger (eds.). The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume IV, The Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press. pp. 466–489. ISBN 0-19-820564-3. (p. 479) The Japanese also assisted the exiled Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose in the recruitment of overseas Indians to the Indian National Army. Although it played a role in military operations in Burma, the principal contribution of the INA was to the propaganda aimed at subverting British India.
  9. ^ Fay, Peter Ward (1995) [1993]. The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence, 1942–1945. Ann Arbor: University if Michigan Press. ISBN 0-472-08342-2. (p. 260) Kawabe was not so easily shifted in the matter of military law. All the local armies allied with Nippon, he pointed out, the Nanking Army, the Thai army, the Burma National Army, accepted Japanese military law. But Bose found the prospect intolerable. It meant surrendering uniformed Indians to the tender mercies of the Kempeitai. The INA had its own Army Act and its own military police. These must suffice. And in the end Kawabe gave way. He even agreed that when Japanese and Indian officers of equal rank met, neither would wait, they would salute together.
  10. ^ Kovner, Sarah. Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. p. 61. ISBN 978-0-674-73761-7. (p. 63) In July 1943, S. C. Bose's arrival in Singapore energized the remaining Indian POWs. A "fiery orator," Bose was known for his speaking skill. As one observer recalled, "When Subhas Chandra Bose spoke, women would throw their jewelry at his feet." It is difficult to know what exactly motivated the men who followed him. M. Singh believed they were inspired by the idea of freeing India from British rule. Most Indians were not believers in or loyal to the ideas of Pan-Asianism or its policy incarnation, the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. According to Pitt Kuan Wah, "those who did it did it for self-gain." But "The average Indian, yes, has a negative attitude toward the Japanese."
  11. ^ Marston, Daniel (2014). The Indian Army and End of the Raj. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 34. ISBN 978-0-521-89975-8. There were officers who had become bitter through mistreatment at the hand of some British officers and civilians and relegation to second-class status as soldiers. This mistreatment was a major reason for some Indian officers' decision to break their oaths of allegiance and join the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army (INA) after the defeats in Malay and Burma in 1942.
  12. ^
    1. Jeffery, Keith. "The Second World War". In Brown, Judith M.; Louis, Wm. Roger (eds.). The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume IV, The Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press. pp. 306–328. ISBN 0-19-820564-3. (p. 324) Canvassing for recruits among demoralized Indian prisoners-of-war captured in Malaya and Singapore, the nationalists secured quite a good response. Many men felt, in the words of one later INA brigade commander, that they had been 'handed over like cattle by the British to the Japs'.
    2. Fisher, Michael (2018). An Environmental History of India: From the Earliest Times to the Twenty-First Century. New Approaches to Asian History series. Cambridge University Press. p. 161. ISBN 9781107111622. In this war, some 2.5 million Indians served in British imperial armies. Many of those abandoned by their British officers when Singapore fell or in other British defeats joined the Indian National Army led by S.C. Bose that allied with the Germans and Japanese
  13. ^ Markovits, Claude (2021), India and the World: A History of Connections, c.1750–2000, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, pp. 79, 113, 114, doi:10.1017/9781316899847, ISBN 978-1-107-18675-0, LCCN 2021000609, S2CID 233601747,   (p. 79) This was owing to Japan's own ambivalent attitude towards Indians: on the one hand, the Japanese saw them as potential allies in the fight against Britain, and they made an alliance with the dissident nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose; on the other hand, they despised them as a 'subject race' enslaved by the British. Thanks to this alliance, however, the Indians escaped some of the harshest measures that the Japanese took against the Chinese population in the region. That said, 100,000 Indian coolies, mostly Tamilian plantation workers, were conscripted as forced labour and put to work on various infrastructure projects for the Japanese Imperial Army. Some were sent from Malaya to Thailand to work on the infamous Thailand–Burma railway project, resulting in 30,000 deaths of fever and exhaustion (Nakahara 2005). Thousands of war prisoners who had refused to join the Indian National Army (INA) of Subhas Bose were sent to faraway New Guinea, where Australian troops discovered them hiding in 1945.
  14. ^ Kovner, Sarah. Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. p. 61. ISBN 978-0-674-73761-7. The Japanese continue to try to win over Indian POWs. They found it better to separate Indian and British troops to achieve this end. They did so with the helf of Indian civilians. The biggest movements of all were of the Indian prisoners. Between December 1942 and September 1943 about 12,000 Indian POWs were shipped from Singapore to various islands in the Southwest Pacific, the Andaman Islands, and French Indochina. The largest convoy left Malaya in May, including not just men who had held out against collaboration but also men who had at one time been volunteers in Singapore and in building the Thai-Burma Railway. The POWs were proving useful as a labor pool not just in Singapore but at many points of Japan's far-flung empire.
  15. ^ Marston, Daniel (2014). The Indian Army and End of the Raj. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-521-89975-8. The Indian Army's experience in the Second World War also involved grappling with the military and cultural implications of a Japanese-sponsored collaborationist force, the Indian National Army
  16. ^ Marston, Daniel (2014). The Indian Army and End of the Raj. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 117–118. ISBN 978-0-521-89975-8. (p. 117) Reports of its creation in 1942/3 caused consternation among the political and military leadership (p. 118) of the GOI, but in the end its formation did not constitute a legitimate mutiny, and its presence had a negligible impact on the Indian Army.
  17. ^ Weinberg, Gerhard L. (2011). A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2nd Edition. p. xx. ISBN 978-0-521-61826-7. None of the works that deal with ... Subhas Chandra Bose, or his Indian National Army has engaged ... the reaction of the soldiers in his army to the sex slaves kidnapped in Japanese-occupied lands and held in enclosures attached to the camps in which they were being trained to follow their Japanese comrades in the occupation of India
  18. ^ Lebra, Joyce Chapman (2008) [1971]. The Indian National Army and Japan. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. p. 216. Mohan Singh, co-founder with Fujiwara of the INA, was a revolutionary of a different order. Before Fujiwara's eyes Mohan Singh became transformed into a revolutionary, unwilling to comprimise with the Japanese when other Indians advised caution and moderation.
  19. ^ Grint, Keith (2021). Mutiny and Leadership. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. p. 298. ISBN 978-0-19-289334-5. In 1941 Subhas Chandra Bose had escaped house arrest and began building an army aligned to the Axis powers, specifically Japan, in order to overthrow British rule in India. Indian POWs held by the Japanese were then released into the INA and they fought against the British in Burma (Singh, 2006) In fact, this was the second incarnation of the INA: the first had been led by Mohan Singh who refused to align with the Japanese and was eventually arrested by them.
  20. ^
    • "Subhas Chandra Bose". Britannica Online. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica. 2025. ISSN 1085-9721. Retrieved 11 January 2025. he led an armed force composed of former Indian prisoners of war and volunteers from the Indian expatriate community. ... aligned with the Axis powers and opposed the Allied powers during World War II.
    1. Metcalf, Barbara D.; Metcalf, Thomas R. (2012). A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge Concise Histories (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 244–245. ISBN 978-1-107-02649-0. The force that he (Bose) put together included not only prisoners of war, but other Indian residents of the area, including a novel women's detachment
    2. Barkawi, Tarak (2017). Soldiers of the Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II. Cambridge University Press. p. 114. ISBN 978-1-107-16958-6. Later, after Bose's arrival, the INA would eventually number around 45,000, but about 18,000 of these were recruited from Indian civilian communities in Southeast Asia.
  21. ^ Fay 1993, p. viii.
  22. ^ Ray, N.R. (1984). Challenge, a Saga of India's Struggle for Freedom. People's Publishing House. p. 586.
  23. ^ Ghosh, R. (2006). Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Indian Freedom Struggle (Set in 2 Vols.). Deep & Deep Publications. p. 32. ISBN 978-81-7629-842-1.
  24. ^ Lebra 2008, Foreword, pp. viii–x harvnb error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFLebra2008 (help)
  25. ^ Cite error: The named reference Lebra2008p99 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  26. ^ Seaman, Harry (1989). The Battle At Sangshak: Prelude to Kohima. L. Cooper. p. 23. ISBN 978-0-85052-720-9.
  27. ^ Yuki Tanaka (2017). Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II. Asian Voices. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 215. ISBN 978-1-5381-0270-1.
  28. ^ "Subhas Chandra Bose, Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru: Admirers or adversaries? A myth buster". 23 January 2020.
  29. ^ a b Lebra 2008, p. xv harvnb error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFLebra2008 (help)
  30. ^ Metcalf, Barbara D.; Metcalf, Thomas R. (2012). A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge Concise Histories (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 244–245. ISBN 978-1-107-02649-0.
  31. ^ "Subhas Chandra Bose". Britannica Online. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica. 2025. ISSN 1085-9721. Retrieved 11 January 2025.
  32. ^ Barkawi, Tarak (2017). Soldiers of the Empire; Indian and British Armies in World War II. Cambridge University Press. p. 114. ISBN 978-1-107-16958-6.
  33. ^ Gordon, Leonard A. (2013). "Subhas Chandra Bose". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/47756. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  34. ^ Bose, Sugata (2011). His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against Empire. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Pess. p. 246. ISBN 978-0-674-04754-9.
  35. ^ Bayly & Harper 2005, p. 323. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFBaylyHarper2005 (help)
  36. ^ Cite error: The named reference Fayp283and284 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  37. ^ Fay 1993, p. 330
  38. ^ Fay 1993, p. 423
  39. ^ Cite error: The named reference Fay138 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  40. ^ Moreman, Tim (2013). The Jungle, Japanese and the British Commonwealth Armies at War, 1941–45: Fighting Methods, Doctrine and Training for Jungle Warfare. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-135-76456-2.
  41. ^ Marston2014, pp. 130–132 harvnb error: multiple targets (4×): CITEREFMarston2014 (help): "Many Indian Army POWs were perplexed by Congress's sudden support for the INA"
  42. ^ Singh 2003, p. 98.
  43. ^ Sarkar 1983, p. 420
  44. ^ Cite error: The named reference Lebra2008p219 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  45. ^ Fay 1993, pp. 423–424, 453
  46. ^ a b c Toye 1959, Mason, in Foreword, p. xiv
  47. ^ Cohen 1971, p. 132
  48. ^ Fay 1993, p. 228

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الجيش الوطني الهندي Arabic Индийска национална армия Bulgarian আজাদ হিন্দ ফৌজ Bengali/Bangla Indian National Army German Ινδικός Εθνικός Στρατός Greek Ejército Nacional Indio Spanish آزاد هند فوج FA Armée nationale indienne French Azad Hind Sena GOM આઝાદ હિંદ ફોજ GU

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