284 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
cated a message carried by this group. This information found its way
into communist hands. Almost simultaneously with the debacle in Im-
phal, the British police raided the Calcutta hideout of the revolutionar-
ies who were seeking to support Bose. One of them was killed in the
raid. Others were arrested and transported to the Lahore fort, where
they were kept in con finement without trial. Sisir, the nephew who had
helped his uncle escape from India in 1941, was handed a charge sheet
which read as follows: “You, Sisir Bose, are informed that the grounds
for your detention are that you were acting in a manner prejudicial to
the defense of British India, in as much as in collaboration with mem-
bers of the Bengal Volunteer Group and others, you were actively en-
gaged in a manner calculated to assist Subhas Chandra Bose and the
Japanese.”^95 The quaint prose notwithstanding, the charge was clear
and accurate enough. Sisir was held without trial, though there were
other instances of trials in camera and harsh sentences. Richard Tot-
tenham of the Home Department, who interrogated the secret agents
and the Indian revolutionaries, reported a total of seven trials of “en-
emy agents” during 1944–1945: three in Delhi, three in Madras, and
one in Bengal. Altogether, twenty- three secret agents sent from South-
east Asia were sentenced to death, but the sentences of two of them
were later commuted to imprisonment for life. One prisoner sentenced
to death, Americk Singh Gill, escaped while being transported under
police guard in Calcutta.^96
On October 9, 1944, while Bose was in north Burma tending to his
soldiers, an invitation arrived from Japan’s new prime minister, Gen-
eral Kuniaki Koiso, asking him to visit Tokyo. Netaji returned to Ran-
goon and, in mid- October, held a conference with his top military
commanders about the INA’s future course of action. On October 18,
he was nearly killed in Mingaladon, fourteen miles outside Rangoon,
while he was reviewing an INA parade. The area was attacked by low-
fly ing Allied fighter jets as Bose stood on a five- foot- high platform, or
base, with the women of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment marching past.
“This is not the front, Sir, please step off the base,” Kiani urged his
leader as he ordered the soldiers to disperse and take cover. A splinter
from one of the ack- ack guns hit a soldier in the head and killed him
within a few feet of where Bose was still standing. Then, according to