Roads to Delhi 283
Burma were “still very considerable,” and reinforcements from Malaya
since March may have raised the total to “something in the neighbor-
hood of 20,000.” “If for no other reason,” the report stated, “the num-
bers involved alone would make the INA a major security prob lem.”^91
Desertions from the INA were not only very limited in number; “going
over” was a two- way street. More than a hundred Indian soldiers on
the British side had crossed over to the INA in the early weeks of fight-
ing in Arakan, and were welcomed by Bose as our “new comrades” in
Rangoon. If the early successes had been sustained and if the INA had
reached the plains of Assam, “defections by Slim’s sepoys might have
grown from a trickle to a flood, and destroyed the 14th Army—as Bose
was convinced they could.”^92 Shah Nawaz Khan may have been too
harsh in saying that the Japanese had let them down badly and that but
for “their betrayal of the INA, the his tory of the Imphal campaign may
have been a different one.” Yet even the British assessment in Septem-
ber 1944 suggested that it was “the Japanese Army which failed the
INA,” and that the failure of the Japanese to attain their objectives pre-
vented the INA from “being used in the role for which it was de-
signed.”^93
The inability of the Japanese and the INA to break through into
Bengal undermined the planned strategy: fomenting an internal revolt
to coincide with a military thrust from outside. Over time, the British
were able to capture many of the secret agents sent by submarine to
India. Even the best- equipped and best- trained group, under S. N.
Chopra, had two weak links. The local Gujarati, Ismail Channia, in-
cluded in the party for his knowledge of local terrain on the Kathiawar
coast, gave himself up within two weeks, on January 3, 1944. Since the
group had planned to meet in Benares once a month, the others were
seized by the British police over the next few months, and five of them
were sentenced to death. Three were probably used for counterintelli-
gence operations.^94
The second vulnerable spot was the northwest frontier, where Bhagat
Ram was passing on information received from Bose to the Commu-
nist party leadership, for transmission to the British government. The
German minister in Kabul, Pilger, recorded in one of his dispatches
that secret agents had claimed that Sarat Bose’s son Sisir had authenti-