The Indian National Army (INA; Azad Hind Fauj; Hindi: आज़ाद हिन्द फ़ौज; Urdu: آزاد ہند فوج) was an armed force formed by Indian nationalists in 1942 in Southeast Asia during World War II. The aim of the army was to secure Indian independence with Japanese assistance. Initially composed of Indian prisoners of war captured by Japan in the Malayan campaign and at Singapore, it later drew volunteers from Indian expatriate population in Malaya and Burma. The INA also was at the forefront of women's equality and the formation of a women's regiment, the Rani of Jhansi regiment was formed as an all volunteer women's unit to fight the British occupiers as well as provide medical services to the INA.
Initially formed in 1942 immediately after the fall of Singapore under Mohan Singh, the first INA collapsed in December that year before it was revived under the leadership of Subhas Chandra Bose in 1943 and proclaimed the army of Bose's Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind (The Provisional Government of Free India). This second INA fought along with the Imperial Japanese Army against the British and Commonwealth forces in the campaigns in Burma, Imphal and Kohima, and later, against the successful Burma Campaign of the Allies. The end of the war saw a large number of the troops repatriated to India where some faced trial for treason and became a galvanising point of the Indian Independence movement.
The legacy of the INA is controversial given its associations with Imperial Japan, the course of Japanese occupations in Burma, Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia, its alliance with the Axis in Europe, as well as Japanese war crimes and the alleged complicity of the troops of the INA in these. However, after the war, the Red Fort trials of captured INA officers in India provoked massive public outcries in support of their efforts to fight for Indian independence against the Raj, eventually triggering the Bombay mutiny in the British Indian forces. These events in the twilight of the Raj are accepted by historians to have played a crucial role in its relatively rapid end.
Read more about Indian National Army: First INA, Second INA, INA in Operation, End of The INA, Impact, Relations, Controversies, Post 1947, Works On The INA
Famous quotes containing the words indian, national and/or army:
“The next forenoon we went to Oldtown.... The Indian is said to cultivate the vices rather than the virtues of the white man. Yet this village was cleaner than I expected, far cleaner than such Irish villages as I have seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people’s safety and greatness.”
—Grover Cleveland (1837–1908)
“I was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. His life is in some respects more adventurous than that of his brother in the West; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. Here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)