8 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
Sahgal, Shah Nawaz, and Dhillon were found guilty of the weighty
charge of having forsaken their oath of loyalty to the British king-
emperor and taken up arms against him. “When you are nominally
fight ing against the King but really fight ing to liberate your coun-
try,” the defense counsel had argued, “then the point is whether the
question of allegiance can arise at all. Unless you sell your soul, how
can you ever say that when you are fight ing to liberate your country,
there is some other allegiance, which prevents you from so doing. If
that happens, there is nothing but permanent slavery.” The INA, Desai
claimed, had fought under Bose’s duly constituted government, which
had declared war and waged it in observance of international law.^16
The Cambridge- educated Subhas Chandra Bose had plunged into
Gandhi’s Indian freedom movement after resigning from the Indian
Civil Service in 1921. In the subsequent two de cades of mass agitation
against colonial rule, the soldiers in Britain’s Indian Army had re-
mained insulated from the swirling currents of civilian po lit i cal dis-
content. They were the ones who were deployed, wherever and when-
ever necessary, to defend Britain’s imperial interests worldwide. Bose
had made up his mind that at the climactic moment of India’s anti-
imperialist struggle, the loyalty of Indian men in arms to the British
king- emperor had to be replaced by a new allegiance to the cause of
Indian in de pen dence. A world at war afforded him the opportunity to
gain access to these soldiers taken as prisoners- of- war by Britain’s ene-
mies. An armed thrust from outside India coinciding with an uprising
within, Bose believed, could bring about the final dissolution of the
British raj.
“When Netaji arrived in Singapore,” Shah Nawaz Khan testified at
the Red Fort trial, “I watched him very keenly. I heard a number of his
public speeches, which had a profound effect on me. It will not be
wrong to say that I was hypnotized by his personality and his speeches.
He placed the true picture of India before us, and for the first time in
my life I saw India through the eyes of an Indian.” Shah Nawaz came
from a Punjabi Muslim family of Janjua Rajputs (a royal warrior clan)
in Rawalpindi; they had a tradition of serving in the British Indian
Army. His father had served the British for three de cades, and more
than eighty members of his clan were enlisted as of fi cers during the