INA Lost the War. So Why Did the British Leave India?

The Indian National Army never captured Delhi. It never broke the British Indian Army in open battle. By the summer of 1945 it had been driven back through Burma, its supplies gone, its Japanese allies collapsing, and its founder, Subhas Chandra Bose, dead in a plane crash in Taiwan. On paper, the Azad Hind Fauj lost the war. Two years later the British were gone. The question that still hangs over 1947 is why a victorious empire left so quickly after winning the largest conflict in its history.

The answer lies less in what the INA achieved on the battlefield and more in what happened after its soldiers came home in chains.

From Prisoners of War to a Second Front

The INA began as a product of defeat. After the fall of Singapore in 1942, tens of thousands of Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army became Japanese prisoners. Captain Mohan Singh first organised many of them into a force that would fight the British. The experiment faltered amid disputes with the Japanese. Bose revived and transformed it after arriving in Southeast Asia in 1943. He proclaimed the Provisional Government of Free India, declared war on Britain, and presented the INA as the army of a sovereign Indian state rather than a Japanese auxiliary.

Bose’s strategy was explicit. He did not expect the INA alone to defeat the British Empire. He wanted it to open a “second front” that would ignite revolt inside India, especially among Indian soldiers still serving the Raj. The army marched with Japanese forces toward Imphal and Kohima in 1944. It reached Indian soil, then stalled. Logistics failed, the monsoon arrived, Allied air power dominated, and the British and Indian troops holding the frontier did not crack. By 1945 the INA was in retreat. When Japan surrendered, its remaining units surrendered too.

Wartime censorship had kept most of India from knowing the full story. That silence would not last.

The Trials That Backfired

The British decision to put captured INA officers on public trial at the Red Fort in November 1945 was meant to demonstrate that those who had taken up arms against the King-Emperor were traitors. The first high-profile defendants were chosen with little political imagination: Prem Kumar Sahgal, a Hindu; Shah Nawaz Khan, a Muslim; and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, a Sikh. The symbolism was immediate and powerful. Three officers from three communities stood together as accused patriots.

Once the proceedings began, details of Bose’s government-in-exile, the INA’s campaigns, and its slogan of “Jai Hind” poured into a country that had been starved of the news. Crowds treated the accused as heroes. Congress, which had kept its distance from Bose during the war, now formed a defence committee. Jawaharlal Nehru put on barrister’s robes again. Demonstrations spread from Calcutta to Bombay, Karachi to Banaras. The trials produced something the wartime INA itself had never managed on Indian soil: a visible, emotional, cross-community surge of nationalist feeling.

The British had intended a lesson in loyalty. They delivered a lesson in its opposite.

The Army the Raj Could No Longer Trust

The more dangerous effect was inside the services that actually held India. Indian soldiers, sailors and airmen watched fellow Indians being tried for fighting for independence while they themselves were still wearing the King’s uniform. Loyalty, always more conditional than official histories admitted, began to fray.

In February 1946 the Royal Indian Navy mutinied. It started in Bombay and spread to more than seventy ships and shore establishments. Ratings hauled down the White Ensign and raised Congress, Muslim League and Communist flags. Sympathy strikes and unrest appeared in parts of the Army and the Royal Indian Air Force. The British put the mutiny down, but the political meaning was unmistakable. The instrument that had conquered and kept India—the Indian soldier—could no longer be assumed to fire on Indian crowds or to remain reliable in a general crisis.

Senior British officers understood the implication. Field Marshal Auchinleck and Viceroy Wavell both recognised that another 1857, on a larger and better-organised scale, was no longer unthinkable. Britain did not have enough British battalions in India, and those it had were tired and wanted to go home. Holding the country by force required Indian troops. Once their allegiance looked uncertain, the military foundation of the Raj was compromised.

A later conversation is often cited in this context. In 1956 Clement Attlee, the prime minister who authorised independence, visited Calcutta and spoke with Justice P.B. Chakravartti. Asked why Britain left so hastily after winning the war, when the Quit India Movement of 1942 had already been crushed, Attlee pointed to the INA and the doubts it created about the loyalty of the Indian armed forces. Asked about Gandhi’s role in the final decision, he is said to have replied that it was “minimal.” The account comes from Chakravartti years after the meeting and should be treated as one recollection rather than a signed confession. Even so, it matches the contemporary anxiety visible in official British assessments of 1945–46.

Not the Only Cause

It would be a distortion to claim the INA single-handedly expelled the British. Several pressures arrived at once.

The Second World War left Britain financially exhausted and heavily in debt. A Labour government under Attlee was more willing than Churchill’s Conservatives to contemplate withdrawal from an empire that had become expensive and politically toxic. Decades of Congress mobilisation, the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan, and the wartime politicisation of Indian society had already made the old style of rule unsustainable. International opinion, including American discomfort with European colonialism, added external pressure. Partition itself was the price of a hurried exit that British officials hoped would prevent a worse communal explosion.

The INA did not create these conditions. What it did was accelerate the moment when British policymakers concluded that delay was more dangerous than departure. The trials and the naval mutiny compressed the timetable. Within months of the Red Fort proceedings, London was sending the Cabinet Mission. Within two years the Union Jack came down.

What the Defeat Actually Achieved

Bose had said the INA’s purpose was to supplement the struggle inside India from the outside. In military terms the supplement failed. In political terms it succeeded after the army itself had been broken. The returning prisoners, the public trials, and the unrest in the services turned a defeated force into a symbol that the Raj could not easily dismiss or punish.

Independent India later honoured many INA veterans even while, under an understanding with Mountbatten, they were kept out of the new regular army. The slogan they carried—“Jai Hind”—became official. The Red Fort, where they had been tried, became the place from which independent India’s prime ministers addressed the nation.

The INA lost the war it set out to fight. It helped win the argument that followed: that Britain could no longer govern India with Indian hands. That is why an empire that had just emerged victorious from a world war chose, in 1947, to leave.

About The Author