Prem Kumar Sahgal

Prem Kumar Sahgal was born on 25 March 1917 in Lahore, then the capital of undivided Punjab in British India. His father, Diwan Achhru Ram, was a distinguished lawyer who rose to serve as a judge of the Lahore High Court, and the family belonged to the city's educated professional elite ^[1]. The household prized public service and legal argument, an atmosphere that would later carry an odd irony when the son found himself the most prominent defendant in the most watched trial of late colonial India.

Sahgal studied at Government College, Lahore, one of the leading institutions of northern India, before choosing a military career over the law that his father practised ^[1]. In the late 1930s he secured a commission in the British Indian Army, joining an infantry battalion of the Baluch Regiment. For a young Punjabi officer of his generation, the army offered prestige, steady advancement, and, within a few years, a world war ^[2].

Any account of Prem Kumar Sahgal facts has to begin with this double inheritance: the discipline of a professional officer and the argumentative confidence of a judge's son. Both would be tested when the Japanese offensive of 1941 and 1942 swept across Malaya and destroyed the world he had trained for ^[2].

Sahgal was serving with his battalion in Malaya when Japan attacked in December 1941. The campaign went badly for the British from the first days, and after the fall of Singapore in February 1942 he became one of tens of thousands of Indian soldiers taken prisoner by the Japanese ^[2]. In the prisoner of war camps, Indian officers and men faced a choice that would divide loyalties for years: remain captives of the Japanese or join the Indian National Army (INA), a force raised from prisoners to fight for India's independence ^[3].

Sahgal initially held back, as many professional officers did, wary of the first INA under Mohan Singh and of Japanese intentions. The arrival of Subhas Chandra Bose in Southeast Asia in 1943 changed his calculation, as it did for thousands of others. Bose reorganised the INA, proclaimed the Provisional Government of Free India, and gave the movement a political leadership that commanded genuine devotion ^[3]. Sahgal committed himself fully to the revived force and rose quickly within it.

His ability brought him close to the top of the organisation. He served as military secretary to Bose, a position of considerable trust that placed him at the centre of INA planning during the campaigns on the Burma front ^[1]. Later in the war he held field command, leading INA troops during the desperate fighting in central Burma in 1945 as the Japanese position collapsed. Near Mount Popa, with his force exhausted and cut off, Sahgal was captured by advancing British and Indian units in the spring of 1945 ^[2].

In November 1945 the British authorities put three INA officers before a court martial inside the Red Fort in Delhi: Prem Kumar Sahgal, Shah Nawaz Khan, and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon. The charge was waging war against the King-Emperor, with additional counts relating to the treatment of fellow prisoners. The choice of defendants, a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Sikh tried together, turned the proceeding into a national event rather than a routine military hearing ^[4].

The Indian National Congress organised a defence committee of extraordinary weight. Bhulabhai Desai led the defence, supported by Tej Bahadur Sapru, Kailash Nath Katju, and Jawaharlal Nehru, who put on his barrister's gown after a gap of decades to appear for the accused ^[4]. Desai argued that the INA men owed allegiance to the Provisional Government of Free India, a government that had declared war as a belligerent, and that they could not be treated as mere traitors. Outside the courtroom, demonstrations swept Indian cities, and the slogan linking the three defendants' names became a cry for unity across religious lines ^[5].

The court convicted all three of waging war and sentenced them to transportation for life, cashiering, and forfeiture of pay. The verdict was legally unsurprising and politically impossible. Commander in Chief Claude Auchinleck, weighing the mood of the country and reports of unrest within the Indian Army itself, remitted the sentences of transportation, and the three men walked free in the first days of January 1946 ^[4]. Historians have long treated the trial and its aftermath as a turning point, evidence that the loyalty of the Indian armed forces to the Raj could no longer be assumed ^[5]. For anyone studying Prem Kumar Sahgal achievements, his conduct through the trial, composed, unapologetic, and openly proud of the INA cause, remains the defining chapter.

The war years also shaped Sahgal's private life. In Burma and Singapore he had come to know Lakshmi Swaminathan, the Madras-born doctor who commanded the INA's all-woman Rani of Jhansi Regiment. Their acquaintance, formed amid the retreat through Burma, grew into a lasting attachment after both returned to India ^[6]. They married in Lahore in March 1947, only months before Partition redrew the map of the city where he had been born ^[6].

The couple settled in Kanpur, the industrial city on the Ganges in the United Provinces, soon Uttar Pradesh. Lakshmi Sahgal established a medical practice that served the city's working poor for decades, while Prem built a career in business and industrial management ^[6]. They raised two daughters. The elder, Subhashini Ali, became a prominent trade unionist and Communist Party of India (Marxist) politician, carrying the family's activist streak into a new generation; the younger, Anisa, pursued a private life ^[7].

Contemporaries and interviewers described Sahgal in later life as genial, direct, and largely free of bitterness about the trial that had once threatened him with a life sentence. He spoke to historians about the INA years with a soldier's precision, and his recollections became a significant source for scholarship on the movement ^[1].

Unlike some INA veterans, Sahgal did not build a political career after independence. Former INA officers were not taken back into the Indian Army, a decision the new government upheld, so he made his way in civilian employment, working for many years in Kanpur's corporate and industrial sector ^[2]. The city's textile mills and factories gave him a professional footing far removed from parade grounds and courtrooms.

He remained a public figure of a quieter kind. INA anniversaries, commemorations of Subhas Chandra Bose, and the slow work of securing recognition and pensions for former INA personnel kept him connected to the veterans' community ^[5]. In the 1970s and 1980s he gave extended interviews to the American historian Peter Ward Fay, whose study of the INA drew heavily on the paired testimony of Prem and Lakshmi Sahgal and preserved their account of the movement in unusual depth ^[1].

Prem Kumar Sahgal died in Kanpur in October 1992, at the age of 75 ^[6]. His wife survived him by two decades, standing as a left candidate for President of India in 2002 and dying in 2012, occasions on which the press retold the story of the INA couple from Kanpur ^[7].

Sahgal's place in Indian history rests less on battlefield success, for the INA's campaigns ended in defeat, than on what his trial revealed and provoked. The Red Fort proceedings of 1945 converted three convicted officers into national heroes and demonstrated that punishing the INA would cost the Raj more than pardoning it ^[4]. Within months of the verdict, mutinies and protests, most dramatically in the Royal Indian Navy in February 1946, confirmed British fears that the armed forces were no longer a reliable instrument of colonial control ^[5].

Historians of the independence movement therefore return to Sahgal repeatedly. Peter Ward Fay's The Forgotten Army placed him and Lakshmi at the centre of its narrative, and Sugata Bose's biography of Subhas Chandra Bose treats the trial of Sahgal, Khan, and Dhillon as a decisive episode in the endgame of empire ^{[1] [3]}. The trial record itself, published soon after the hearings, remains a primary source for law students and historians alike ^[4].

Any balanced Prem Kumar Sahgal biography must hold two images together: the young regular officer who swore an oath to the King-Emperor, and the INA colonel who calmly told a British court that his true allegiance lay with a free India. That he lived to see the second allegiance vindicated, and then spent four unshowy decades as a citizen of the republic he had fought for, gives his story a completeness that few of his comrades shared ^[6].