The Indian National Army in Wwii

The Indian National Army in World War II Usually when people reminisce about World War II in the Pacific theater they talk about the struggles between the Allied forces and Japanese powers in battles like the Philippines, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, but they never talk about struggles in places like India. India, literally a ticking time bomb, was under the control of the British and was known to occasionally fight back against the British Raj. As one can imagine, the Indian Nationalists of that period would have saw World War II has a perfect time to try to gain independence from British rule. What happened in World War Two to drastically contribute to the push for Indian independence in 1947? Moreover, what were the affects of such an event? Events in history tend not to happen very fast, but crawl toward a very slow climax and this was indeed the case in India when ideas of independence came on the horizon. In the early twentieth century Indian exiles/revolutionaries, having been prevented from agitation in India, found a safe haven for activity among the immigrants of the West Coast of the United States. There on the West Coast the Indian exiles created a newspaper called “The Ghadr” (Revolution) which was distributed to most Indian communities in America and regularly smuggled into India. In 1914, “The Ghadr” was able to persuade several thousand Sikhs to go back home to India, with trouble on their minds. With Indian Nationalists seeking trouble in India, Europe plunged into World War I and the Indian Revolutionary Society flourished while becoming openly pro-German. Indian conspirators figuratively used German diplomatic posts for Indian Independence billboards in places like Shanghai, Batavia, and the United States to assist its agents in India. Needless to say, this idea of Indian independence spread down to the grass roots of Indian/Asian society and motivated people to think about an independent India. For example, after World War One Indian movements like