Bengaluru:

Looking at the accused, the judge thundered: These five men are guilty of being ‘enemy agents’ and have to be hanged by the neck till they are dead. The five subsequently vanished off the face of the earth; there were no records to show where they were killed and buried. This was in 1943.

Cut to 2017: The five men have been resurrected as unsung heroes of the Indian Independence movement in the book titled Unsung Freedom Struggle, brought out by the Karnataka State Archives in Bengaluru on Tuesday. The book is based on the judgment delivered by special judge E E Mack (the then district judge in Ballari) on April 1, 1943 under the Enemy Agents Ordinance (Madras) against the five: V Mohammed Abdul Khadir, S A Anand alias Thanu Pillay, S C Bardhan, Boniface B Pereira and Fouja Singh.

These five men, along with 14 others, had been charged on two counts — for conspiring against the British empire by colluding with the Japanese government and for entering India as enemy agents of the Japanese government.

Historian Ko Chennabasappa, who has written the foreword, stated: “This case has been a well-guarded secret; it is not known to historians or the outside world. It is for the first time that this sacrifice for the country’s freedom is coming to light.”
The 19 accused were working in Malaya and Singapore when they were picked up by the Japanese army (following the fall of Singapore on February 15, 1942) to go to India and spy on the British. They were enrolled into the Malaya’s Swaraj Institute, a front for espionage training, where the Japanese tried to generate patriotic feelings in these men.

However, the British Empire was of the view that the Japanese adopted an insidious policy of preferential treatment towards Indians in order to capitalize and exploit the latter’s nationalist feelings for expansion of their military domination under the cover of a new order in East Asia. The Japanese employed Indians working in Malaya as Fifth Columnists.

The 19 men landed in India in three groups: While one group got off a Japanese submarine and arrived in two rubber boats at Tanur on the Malabar coast on the night of September 27,1942, another group comprising three men arrived in two rubber boats at Okhamadi village on the Kathiawar coast two days later. The rest entered India by land. However, some of the members were picked up the British military following suspicion and, subsequently, the cover was blown away.

While the five were convicted as they maintained they had arrived in India to gain independence, the rest were acquitted as they claimed they came to escape from the Japanese. The five martyrs included a muslim, a christian, two hindus and a sikh.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> City News> Bangalore News / TNN / May 03rd, 2017