The search for a lost fragment of Netaji Bose’s Singapore memorial

For some Indian history buffs visiting Singapore, a pilgrimage to the Esplanade Park is essential. It is the site of what is locally known as the Former Indian National Army Monument. Here, in July 1945, Subhas Chandra Bose laid the foundation stone for a memorial dedicated to the unknown warriors of the INA.

Although the Japanese forces unveiled the completed monument later that August, it was swiftly demolished when British forces reoccupied the city-state. Decades later, in the 1990s, Singapore’s National Heritage Board, backed by financial contributions from the local Indian community, erected a new marker on the exact spot where Bose’s original structure once stood.

Yet, a fragment of that original monument survived.

When British forces destroyed the structure under the orders of Louis Mountbatten, a handful of INA members managed to salvage a fragment of it. Determined that this last remnant of a monument associated with the leader they called Netaji should not be lost, they secretly carried the relic back to India, risking punishment at a volatile moment in history.

By 1946, this fragment came into the possession of Shah Nawaz Khan, a former British Indian Army officer who served as major general in the INA.

Khan, a close associate of Bose, had been captured by British Indian forces near Pegu, Burma, in May 1945 and stood trial in Delhi’s Red Fort during the historic INA courts-martial, with his defence led by the legendary Bombay lawyer Bhulabhai Desai.

On December 31, 1945, Khan, alongside his co-defendants Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon and Prem Kumar Sahgal, was found guilty of “waging war against the King-Emperor” and sentenced to “transportation for life”. The punishment echoed the sentence imposed on India’s last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, nearly a century earlier in 1858. However, the verdict sparked widespread protests across the country, forcing the army chief to commute the sentences within three days and release the trio.

Secular army

For Khan, the primary attraction of the INA had been its commitment to secularism and communal harmony.

At a time when religious polarisation was growing in India and the demand for Pakistan was rising among sections of the Muslim elite, Bose’s army stood for national unity. Khan, who was born into a Muslim Rajput family in the village of Matore in Rawalpindi district, praised Bose’s efforts to bring together people from different religious communities.

In his 1946 book My Memories of I.N.A. & Its Netaji, Khan wrote of Bose:

“He looked at everyone – Hindu, Muslim, Sikh – without any distinction, and his spirit animated, as his men. There was no ‘communal’ feeling of any sort in spite of the fact that every man had full liberty to practise his religion in any way that he liked.”

Khan noted that Bose successfully made his soldiers “realize that they were sons of the same motherland” and that religious differences in India were “the creation of an alien power”. He wrote that Muslims were among Bose’s most “ardent supporters and admirers” because he judged people by their worth rather than their regional or religious background.

“It is amazing to see that when Netaji selected one officer from Germany to accompany him during his most hazardous journey to Tokyo by submarine, it was Abid Hussain, a Muslim, on whom his choice fell upon,” Khan wrote. “Again when his troops were sent to the fighting line both divisional commanders were Muslims – Major General M. Z. Kiani and I. When he was on his last trip to Tokyo by plane in August 1945, it was Colonel Habibur Rehman whom he selected to accompany him.”

Khan’s memoir explicitly stated that Bose perished in the subsequent plane crash in Taiwan, a conclusion reaffirmed by the Shah Nawaz Committee in 1956.

Before India became independent, Khan had stored several of his possessions, including the smuggled fragment of the Singapore monument, at his ancestral home near Rawalpindi.

When independence arrived, it brought a painful tearing of ties. Close Muslim comrades of Bose, such as Mohammed Zaman Kiani and Habibur Rehman, chose to move to Pakistan, eventually fighting against India in the Kashmir War of 1947-’48.

Khan, however, chose a secular India over a Muslim Pakistan. He did so knowing that many of his fellow Muslim military officers, INA comrades and a large part of his extended family were becoming citizens of the newly formed neighbour state.

Among them, Rehman’s choice must have been particularly striking for Khan. In his writings, Khan had praised Rehman as one of Bose’s most trusted officers: “He is cool, calm and solid as a rock, a devoted follower of his Netaji, and a most selfless worker for Indian independence.”

Unfinished quest

In post-independence India, Khan enjoyed a successful political career, serving as a Union minister with several portfolios in the 1960s and 1970s. The Singapore plaque receded into the background of history until the late 1970s, when Samar Guha, an academic, Member of Parliament and old associate of Bose, persistently raised the matter on the floor of the Lok Sabha.

Speaking in the Parliament in June 1977, during the tenure of Morarji Desai’s Janata Party government, Guha criticised past administrations for failing to honour the memory of the man he called “the greatest revolutionary of India”.

Guha urged New Delhi to reconstruct the INA monument that had been demolished in Singapore in 1945. A Ministry of External Affairs note from June 1977 recorded his observation that Singapore’s foreign minister had once been “a member of the INA” who “fought with Netaji” and might therefore be receptive to an appeal to restore the memorial. While Singapore’s Jaffna-born foreign minister, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, was indeed a committed anti-colonialist, historical records do not suggest that he ever served in the INA.

Guha went further. He informed the Parliament that Khan had admitted to leaving the salvaged piece of the Singapore memorial at his old family home in Rawalpindi. He requested that the government send Khan to his ancestral home to recover the artifact, so it could be enshrined in an INA martyrs’ memorial “somewhere in the heart of Delhi”.

Following up on the legislative prompt, the Pakistan-Afghanistan section of the Ministry of External Affairs contacted the Indian Embassy in Islamabad to find out about the artifact. “You are requested to make discreet enquiries whether Shri Shah Nawaz Khan has indeed a house in Rawalpindi which continues to be in his possession and if so, whether it has any remnants of the monuments brought back from Singapore after all these years,” Deputy Secretary Indrajit Singh wrote to CP Khanna, first secretary of the embassy, in August 1977.

Two months later, an embassy counsellor reported that quiet enquiries had turned up nothing, but said further efforts could be made if more information or a specific address were available. Given that diplomatic relations were still recovering from the frost of the 1971 Bangladesh War, New Delhi chose not to formally approach Pakistan on the issue at the time.

The matter resurfaced in December 1977. Responding to Guha raising the issue again, the Minister of State for External Affairs, Samarendra Kundu, noted that while Khan had acknowledged taking the relic to Rawalpindi in parliamentary replies between 1971 and 1975, his immediate family had migrated to India, leaving behind few physical ties to the property.

“As the replies were given between 1971-1975, when diplomatic relations with Pakistan were broken, it was also added that efforts to trace the relic and to bring it back to India will be initiated only after relations with Pakistan are normalised,” Kundu told the Parliament.

A year later, Guha pressed the issue yet again. In response, Kundu confirmed that while the government, with Khan’s help, had attempted to trace the portion of the plaque, “the efforts...have not succeeded so far. These efforts are continuing.”

Guha additionally proposed that India request Pakistan to erect a commemorative plaque at the site in Peshawar where Bose had stayed during his escape from India to Europe. Pakistani authorities, however, showed little interest in either locating the site or commemorating it.

The small piece of the Singapore monument that survived Mountbatten’s demolition ultimately disappeared somewhere in Pakistani Punjab. Khan remained a member of the Congress party until his death in 1983. He was buried with full state honours, his loyalty never questioned in what was a very different India.

Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer, primarily based in Mumbai. His latest book, Colombo: Port of Call, has been published by Penguin Random House.