The Homfreyganj massacre

In the early morning of 30 January 1944 Japanese soldiers took 44 inhabitants of the islands by lorry from the Cellular Jail in Port Blair to the village of Homfreyganj on South Andaman. All of them were Indians, and most belonged to the local branch of the Indian Independence League – an organisation that was supposed to work with Japan in the struggle to free India from British rule. They were accused of spying for the British. They were shot beside a freshly dug pit – according to accounts cited in India, in groups of five, some finished off with bayonets – and buried in a mass grave. It was the largest single execution of the Japanese occupation of the Andaman Islands. It took place barely a month after Subhas Chandra Bose had ceremonially taken possession of the islands on behalf of his Provisional Government of Free India.

The islands under occupation

The Japanese landed at Port Blair unopposed on 23 March 1942, after the British had withdrawn their small garrison. The archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, a former British penal colony, became a forward base for the Japanese navy, which from there covered the sea route from Singapore to Rangoon and patrolled the waters off the coast of Burma. According to the estimates cited, the islands then had about 40,000 inhabitants – the overwhelming majority of them descendants of convicts and settlers from India, alongside a few thousand indigenous people.

At the start of the occupation the Japanese encouraged the local educated class – officials, doctors, teachers – to join the Indian Independence League. Its branch was founded in April 1942, and in June a local unit of the Indian National Army was also formed. The League was headed by Dr Diwan Singh, a physician who – as the inhabitants’ accounts agree – tried to temper the occupiers’ treatment of the population. Collaboration quickly proved a trap. The Japanese military authorities and the Kempeitai military police, fearing a British landing and listening out for radio transmitters that were never found on the islands, suspected precisely the most influential local Indians of contacts with the enemy.

The repression came in waves. In the autumn of 1942 several hundred people were arrested; according to accounts collected after the war, some of them were tortured in the Cellular Jail, and seven – among them the chief and deputy chief of the police force set up by the Japanese themselves – were shot; Indian sources date this execution, on the shore at Dignabad, to 30 March 1943. In 1943, after a change of garrison commander, came a second, wider wave of arrests, which the inhabitants called the “spy case”. According to the accounts on which historians of the occupation rely, several hundred people were detained. In the prison the British had built for Indian revolutionaries, the Japanese now held Indian nationalist activists. By all accounts the interrogations involved torture; Dr Diwan Singh, arrested in the autumn of 1943, died under torture in January 1944, a few weeks before his comrades were executed.

Sentence without trial

Little is known about how the decision to carry out the execution of 30 January 1944 was taken. Before their surrender the Japanese destroyed the records of the occupation, and later findings rest mainly on post-war accounts by inhabitants, on an unpublished report by one of them, Rama Krishna, and on the report of a British officer, D. McCarthy, who was on the islands on a secret mission in 1944. All these sources agree in presenting the espionage charges as fabricated or extracted under torture: detainees were made to name accomplices, and those named ended up in further cells. According to these accounts, if any proceedings took place at all, they were a sham, and the accused had no opportunity to defend themselves.

Early on 30 January the prisoners were led out of the Cellular Jail and driven to Homfreyganj, a village in the interior of South Andaman. There they were made to stand at the edge of a pit and were shot. Indian sources and English-language studies alike give the number killed as 44. The bodies were buried in a mass grave at the execution site; for a long time the families did not know what had become of those arrested.

A government that did not govern

The massacre laid bare what the handover of the islands to the Azad Hind government, announced by Japan in the autumn of 1943, meant in practice. Bose visited Port Blair on 29–31 December 1943, raised the flag of the national movement there and announced that the islands would be renamed Shaheed and Swaraj. According to the inhabitants’ accounts, his Japanese hosts carefully kept him away from the local population, and attempts to inform him that members of the League – an organisation formally under his authority – were being tortured in the Cellular Jail came to nothing. Historians differ in their assessment: some believe that Bose did not know about the repression, others reproach him for making no effort to find out. Among the people of the Andamans the conviction took root that the Free India government had “failed its own people”.

The chief commissioner of the islands appointed by Bose, Lieutenant Colonel (later Major General) A. D. Loganathan of the Indian National Army, took up office at the beginning of 1944 but had no real powers. Japan retained control over the police, the military, communications and supplies. After the war Loganathan testified that the only department he fully controlled was a rudimentary education department, and that in protest he had refused to accept responsibility for the rest of the administration. He could not prevent the Homfreyganj execution or the crimes that followed. The Japanese navy, which ruled the islands, treated the local Indians not as allies in the fight against the British Empire but as a potential fifth column.

The worst was yet to come

Homfreyganj did not end the terror. In 1944 and 1945, as Allied submarines and aircraft cut the islands off from supplies ever more effectively, famine took hold in the Andamans. According to accounts cited by historians of the occupation, in the last months of the war the Japanese, wanting to be rid of “useless mouths”, shipped elderly inhabitants and those unfit for work to uninhabited islands, where they were expected to fend for themselves; in August 1945 some of them were forced to jump into the sea hundreds of metres from the shore. Estimates of the number of victims of these deportations range from several hundred to more than a thousand and are uncertain. According to the most frequently cited estimates, about 2,000 inhabitants of the islands died during the occupation from executions, torture, hunger and disease – some publications give much higher figures, which cannot, however, be confirmed.

The Japanese garrison of the Andamans surrendered to the British only in the autumn of 1945, several weeks after Japan’s capitulation. After the war some of the crimes committed on the islands were tried by British war crimes courts, but the Homfreyganj execution, lacking documents and to a large extent living witnesses, has never been fully explained.

Remembrance

In independent India the memory of Homfreyganj long remained a local matter, overshadowed by the legend of Bose and the Indian National Army, in which the Andamans figured as the first “liberated” Indian soil. Only in 1979 did a committee of the victims’ descendants erect a memorial at the execution site, with plaques bearing the names of the dead. Every year on 30 January – the anniversary of the massacre and also of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, observed in India as Martyrs’ Day – an interfaith memorial ceremony is held there.

The Homfreyganj massacre was one of many examples of the gulf between Japanese propaganda and the reality of occupation. Tokyo presented its war as the liberation of Asia from colonial rule and granted formal independence to Burma, the Philippines and Bose’s government. In the Andamans, the only part of British India held by Japan for any length of time, the first victims of Japanese rule were precisely those Indians who had believed the slogan “Asia for the Asians” and joined the independence organisations. Among the islanders, the years 1942–1945 are remembered above all as a time of terror that the Free India government was powerless to stop.