Shah Nawaz Khan (general)

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Major General Shahnawaz Khan of village Matore, Kahuta, Rawalpindi, Pakistan was an Indian freedom fighter, politician and an army officer, hailing from the Janjua Rajput clan of Matore.

1 Indian National Army
2 I.N.A. Trial
3 Ministerial career
4 Shahnawaz Committee
5 Other
6 References

[edit] Indian National Army

Lt. Colonel Shahnawaz Khan was a commissioned officer in the British army in India. He was captured during the Second World War by the Japanese and interned in Singapore. Subhash Chandra Bose encouraged him to join the Indian National Army, to fight the British Empire.

[edit] I.N.A. Trial

At the conclusion of the war, the government of British India brought some of the captured INA soldiers to trial on treason charges. The prisoners would potentially face the death penalty, life imprisonment or a fine as punishment if found guilty. After the war, Lt. Col. Shahnawaz Khan, Colonel Prem Sehgal and Colonel Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon were put to trial at the Red Fort in Delhi for "waging war against the King Emperor", i.e. the British sovereign. The three defendants were defended by Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, Jawaharlal Nehru, Bhulabhai Desai and others based on the defence that they should be treated as prisoners of war as they were not paid merceneraries but bona fide soldiers of a legal government, the Provisional Government of Free India, or the Arzi Hukumate Azad Hind, "however misinformed or otherwise they had been in their notion of patriotic duty towards their country" and as such they recognized the free Indian state as their sovereign and not the British sovereign

[edit] Ministerial career

Shahnawaz Khan joined the Congress party after dissolution of the I.N.A. and was invited by Jawaharlal Nehru to join his cabinet as Minister of State for Railways. He was elected thrice to the Lok Sabha from Meerut.

[edit] Shahnawaz Committee

In 1956, the government constituted a committee to look into the circumstances around Subhash Chandra Bose's death. Major General, Shah Nawaz Khan, headed the committee, whose members included Suresh Chandra Bose. The Committee began its work in April 1956 and concluded four months later when all three members of the Committee signed a paper that stated that Netaji indeed died in the aeroplane crash at Taihoku (Japanese for Taipei) in Formosa (now Taiwan), on August 18, 1945.

They stated that his ashes were kept in Japan's Renkoji Temple and should be reinstated to India.