China’s WWII victory parade has an Indian foundation

Spectators and military personnel gather ahead of a military parade to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Japan's World War II surrender held in front of Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2025. (Source: AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

China on September 3 held its largest ever military parade to mark the 80th anniversary of its victory over Japan in World War II. Viewing the parade along with Chinese President Xi Jinping was Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose connection to events of that war is through both personal loss and national consciousness.

A conspicuous absence among the guests at the parade was Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose visit to China this week signalled a thaw in bilateral relations. His absence has been linked to the complexities of contemporary geopolitics, where a vanquished nation at the end of WWII, Japan, is one of India’s closest partners.

Indeed, none of the members of the Quad, who include both victors and vanquished off WWII, were in attendance. To that extent, interpreting Modi’s absence at the Beijing parade through the lens of contemporary geopolitics is reasonable. Yet, it’s incomplete.

As a thought experiment, imagine a scenario where India and China have resolved all outstanding disputes. Even then, it’s highly unlikely any Indian prime minister would attend an event such as the one in Beijing. That is because India has never really tried to come to terms with its role in WWII.

Did we win or lose?

A long surrender

There are two important dates of surrender which marked the end of WWII.

On September 2, 1945, Japan took part in a formal surrender ceremony aboard the U.S. flagship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. A separate surrender ceremony between Japan and China took place in Nanjing on September 9, formally bringing WWII to an end.

The largest volunteer army in history

Historian Srinath Raghavan wrote a comprehensive book on the role of undivided India in WWII, and its lasting impact on contemporary South Asia.

In ‘India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia’, he wrote that under the British Raj, the Indian army raised, trained and deployed some 2.5 million men, making it the largest volunteer force in history. Nearly 90,000 of them were killed or maimed.

Indian soldiers fought in all major war theatres, Italy, North Africa, West Asia, Southeast Asia, and most significantly, India.

Among almost forgotten vignettes of former Odisha CM Biju Patnaik is that he was honoured by Russia for his help during WWII. As a pilot in the Royal Indian Air Force he made multiple sorties to keep the besieged Red Army stocked during the Battle of Stalingrad.

As Raghavan explained, India’s contribution to the outcome of WWII was not limited to soldiers. In terms of material contribution to the Allied cause and through extending credit to Britain - of course without any say in the matter- India’s contribution was consequential.

It is no exaggeration to state that from Washington to Beijing a lot contemporary political heavyweights are holding forth from atop a foundation that has been built partly through Indian blood and treasure.

Whose forgotten army?

A decade ago, Raghu Karnad wrote ‘Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War’, in which he retraced the paths of long forgotten kin who participated in WWII but did not survive it. Indeed, the trigger for the book is a question that must have occurred to many Indians who stumbled upon family histories intertwined with WWII: why were we never told?

It’s on India’s eastern front as the British and the Japanese clashed that the multiple tragedies of a war among imperial powers, with Indian contribution to both sides, played out.

To put this in context, consider a poll conducted by the UK’s National Army Museum in 2013 to pick the country’s greatest battle. The polling resulted in the Battle of Kohima/Imphal being picked as the country’s greatest battle, ahead of WWII’s D-Day landings in Normandy and other celebrated 19th century land battles. It barely registered in India that an informed group in the UK picked one of the most bitterly contested battle sites in WWII, located in India, as their most celebrated of victories.

Perhaps, Indians who noticed it and were aware of its backstory chose to stay relatively quiet because there were Indian soldiers on both sides. Indian National Army, organised by Subhas Chandra Bose, fought alongside the Japanese. In one of the most desperate battles, at one point two sides were separated by a width of a tennis court and grenades were hurled across them. The bitterness, or distrust, arising out of this battle and subsequent ones as the Japanese retreated through Burma would have a fallout after Independence.

The soldiers who fought there are sometimes referred to as “The Forgotten Army”, as the European theatre hogged attention. It took decades of distance to take a more objective look at the Kohima/Imphal front and its consequence to the outcome.

Tragically in India, “The Forgotten Army” depends on one’s approach to WWII. For Western war historians, the Indian soldiers fighting for the British were forgotten.

Ironically, the very soldiers they fought against were resurrected in popular consciousness in India by a Kabir Khan-directed OTT series in 2020 titled ‘The Forgotten Army- Azaadi Ke Liye’. Khan’s ‘Forgotten Army’ is the INA.

Two batchmates, two rivals

The legendary Sam Manekshaw, one of India’s two soldiers to have been conferred the rank of Field Marshal, was inducted as into the Indian Military Academy as a part of its first batch. One of his batch mates was Mohan Singh, who was commissioned into the Indian army with Manekshaw but later switched and became a founder of the INA.

KM Cariappa, the only other Indian soldier to be conferred the rank of Field Marshal, who was independent India’s first native army chief, pushed back against the then government’s desire to induct soldiers of INA into the Indian army. The fallout of the WWII on decisions taken after Independence still reverberate.

If Bose and Mohan Singh are contemporary heroes, so are Manekshaw and Cariappa, who were soldiers in WWII and in wars for India after Independence.

There are no linear trajectories

India’s role in WWII is rarely brought up by public figures. Perhaps it’s the absence of linear trajectories which can be presented in a neat capsule that is responsible for it.

Or, the possibility that India is yet to come to terms with the fact that British imperialism in South Asia was built on collaboration rather than conquest with an alien army that is responsible for collective amnesia about WWII.

However, the price of kicking the can down the road is that some contemporary foreign heavyweights, not kindly disposed to India, are spinning narratives that is built partly on Indian blood and treasure. That’s the forgotten story.