The Andamans for Azad Hind

On 29 December 1943 Subhas Chandra Bose, head of the Provisional Government of Free India proclaimed in Singapore two months earlier and known as Azad Hind, arrived at Port Blair, the chief town of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Japan had announced that it was handing the Andaman and Nicobar archipelagos over to this government – the first and, as it turned out, the only piece of British Indian territory over which Bose’s government held formal authority. The next day Bose hoisted the flag of the national movement in Port Blair and announced that the islands would be given new names: Shaheed (“Martyr”) and Swaraj (“Self-rule”). The chronicle entry stating that the Japanese “handed over control of the Andamans” to the Azad Hind government needs a qualification, however: the transfer was largely symbolic, and real power on the islands remained with the Japanese navy until the end of the war.

Prison islands

The Andamans, some 1,250 kilometres from Calcutta, had been a British penal colony since the mid-19th century. Port Blair was the site of the Cellular Jail, built at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, which held among others Indian revolutionaries and independence activists; in the language of the Indian national movement, transportation to the Andamans was called “Kala Pani” – “black water”. For Indian nationalists the islands therefore had a symbolic weight out of all proportion to their economic importance or population.

After the fall of Rangoon in March 1942 the British judged the Andamans indefensible and withdrew the Gurkha battalion stationed there. On 23 March 1942 the Japanese landed at Port Blair unopposed. British officials were interned, and the islands, important for covering the sea lanes to Burma, came under the administration of the Japanese navy. The occupation quickly turned brutal. According to the accounts of inhabitants and post-war findings on which historians rely (the Japanese destroyed their own records before leaving), a young man who had fired an air rifle at Japanese soldiers was publicly executed in the very first days of the occupation. The British deputy commissioner, Major A. G. Bird, was accused of espionage and beheaded. In the autumn of 1942 the Japanese arrested several hundred people suspected of spying – some were tortured in the Cellular Jail and several were shot, among them senior officers of the police force set up by the occupiers themselves. A second wave of arrests came in 1943; among its victims was Dr Diwan Singh, leader of the local branch of the Indian Independence League, who had tried to moderate Japanese treatment of the population.

A government without territory

Bose, a former president of the Indian National Congress who had escaped from India to Germany in 1941 and come to East Asia in 1943, proclaimed the Provisional Government of Free India in Singapore on 21 October 1943. He headed it himself, and its armed wing was the Indian National Army (Azad Hind Fauj), made up largely of prisoners from the British Indian Army captured in Malaya and Singapore, together with volunteers from among the Indians living in South-East Asia. The government declared war on Britain and the United States. It was recognised only by Japan, Germany and their allies, and by states dependent on Japan – Manchukuo, Wang Jingwei’s Nanjing government, Thailand, the Philippines and Ba Maw’s Burma.

This government, however, had no territory of its own – its authority extended only to the Indian communities in countries occupied by Japan. Bose therefore lobbied Tokyo to hand over a scrap of Indian soil. At the Tokyo conference of the leaders of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere on 5–6 November 1943, which he attended as an observer (India was not formally counted as part of “Greater East Asia”), Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō announced – on 6 November, according to the commonly cited accounts – that Japan intended to transfer the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to the Free India government. For Tokyo it was a cheap propaganda gesture, since the islands remained a rear base for the Japanese fleet and air force. For Bose it was a chance for his government to present itself as an authority on Indian soil.

The visit to Port Blair

Bose spent three days in the Andamans, from 29 to 31 December 1943. He stayed in the former residence of the British chief commissioner on the small Ross Island. On 30 December he drove into Port Blair in a motorcade in which, according to eyewitnesses, only Japanese officers rode with him, and on the Gymkhana Ground he raised the tricolour flag. In Indian memory the event became fixed as the first raising of the national flag on Indian soil freed from British rule – although in reality it was soil under Japanese occupation. Bose also visited the Cellular Jail and asked about the former political prisoners; he was told they had been moved to Calcutta.

The visit was carefully stage-managed. According to inhabitants’ accounts cited by historians of the occupation of the Andamans, his Japanese hosts kept Bose away from the local population, and attempts to tell him about the torture in the Cellular Jail – where Dr Diwan Singh was dying at the time; he died in January 1944 – came to nothing. Some scholars judge that Bose did not know about the repression; others accuse him of not wanting to know and of making no effort to look into the matter. Among the islanders his visit left memories far more bitter than the all-India legend.

Power on paper

As chief commissioner of the islands Bose appointed Lieutenant Colonel (later Major General) A. D. Loganathan, a medical officer of the Indian National Army, who arrived in Port Blair at the beginning of 1944. It soon became clear what the transferred authority amounted to. The Free India government could formally make laws and levy taxes, but the police, the military, communications and supply remained in Japanese hands. Loganathan testified at an interrogation after the war that he had full control only of a rudimentary education department, and that in protest he had refused to accept responsibility for the other branches of the administration. Bose himself, busy building up his army and preparing the offensive against India, hardly concerned himself with the islands at all.

Nor was the commissioner able to prevent the worst crime of the occupation. On 30 January 1944 at Homfreyganj on South Andaman the Japanese shot 44 civilians accused of espionage, many of them members of the Indian Independence League. In the last year of the war, when food ran out, they shipped hundreds of inhabitants – estimates range from 250 to 700 – to an uninhabited island to cultivate the land there; only a handful survived. Historians of the occupation estimate that about 2,000 people died in the Andamans as a result of Japanese repression, hunger and disease, roughly a tenth of the pre-war population of the Port Blair area.

Significance

The transfer of the Andamans was one of many gestures by which Japan in 1943 sought to present its war as a struggle to free Asia from colonial rule – alongside the formal independence of Burma and the Philippines and the Tokyo conference. As in Burma or in Malaya, where Japanese food policy led to hunger, the reality of occupation was far removed from the propaganda slogans. For Bose the islands were to be the first step: in 1944 the Indian National Army took part in the Japanese offensive against Imphal and Kohima, which ended in defeat.

The Free India government kept nominal authority over the Andamans until the end of the war. The Japanese on the islands surrendered to British Indian forces only in the autumn of 1945. In post-war India Bose’s visit to Port Blair became part of his legend: the anniversary of the flag-raising on 30 December is celebrated there with ceremony, and in 2018 the Indian government renamed three islands of the archipelago Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Dweep, Shaheed Dweep and Swaraj Dweep. Yet among the Andaman islanders who lived through the occupation, the memory of 1942–1945 remained above all a memory of Japanese terror, which the Azad Hind government could not – and, in its critics’ view, did not try to – stop.