The First INA

The captain who raised an army from prisoners of war at Farrer Park in February 1942, and dissolved it in December rather than let Japan own it

Captain Mohan Singh was a prisoner of war six weeks before he stood in front of forty-five thousand Indian soldiers at Farrer Park, Singapore, and raised the first Indian National Army. He spent 1942 trying to keep it under Indian control, and when Tokyo would not agree, he dissolved it and was arrested. The army Netaji led a year later was built on what Mohan Singh had made and lost.

The Field at Farrer Park

It is the morning of Tuesday, 17 February 1942, at Farrer Park in Singapore. The city surrendered two days ago. About forty-five thousand Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army stand on the open field in the heat. They are still in their own uniforms. None of them is sure any more whose army they belong to. There are no British officers among them now. There are Japanese guards at the edge of the field.

A British officer, Colonel Hunt of the Malaya Command, speaks first. He hands the Indian troops over to the Japanese and leaves. Then a small Japanese major named Fujiwara Iwaichi speaks through two interpreters, Japanese into English, English into Hindustani. He tells them Japan has no wish to hold them as prisoners. He says they will be treated as friends. Then he says he is passing them to an Indian officer, and he names him.

A captain of the 1st Battalion, 14th Punjab Regiment walks to the front. He is thirty-three. Six weeks ago his battalion was cut to pieces at Jitra in north Malaya and he spent days lost in the jungle before he was taken. His name is Mohan Singh, and he is about to tell forty-five thousand men that there is now an Indian National Army and they may join it.

Nothing in his training prepared him for this. He had taken the King's commission in 1935. Every rule he had learned said that what he was about to do was treason. The question the rest of his life would turn on was already sitting in front of him, and he would write it down thirty years later.

The Man Who Had Two Oaths

Mohan Singh was born on 3 January 1909 at Ugoke, a village near Sialkot in Punjab. He joined the 14th Punjab Regiment as a boy in 1927 and was commissioned as an officer in February 1935. He was, by every measure the Raj used, a career soldier of the kind it trusted.