I.N.A. stands for

Concept — Expanding an abbreviation inside a passage is a comprehension task, not a memory test: the initials are decoded from the role their referent plays in the text. Settle the category of the body first — a law-making chamber, a civil political association, or an armed force — and then take the expansion whose initials fit that category.

Application to this passage

1. The people concerned are described as prisoners who were put on public trial, and 7,000 more were dismissed from service and detained. Dismissal from service and trial by the state are the vocabulary of military discipline.

2. The three men placed on the dock together at the Red Fort in November 1945 — P.K. Sehgal, Shah Nawaz and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon — are named as individual officers standing trial, so the body they belonged to was one that carried service ranks.

3. The passage states that the British feared this spirit spreading to the Indian Army, and that a Lahore reception for released prisoners was attended by Indian soldiers in uniform. The body is therefore being compared with, and is close kin to, a regular army.

4. An organisation of that category whose initials are I, N and A is the Indian National Army — the Azad Hind Fauj, raised in South-East Asia during the Second World War and reorganised in 1943 under Subhas Chandra Bose.

Cross-check against the other categories

• An assembly is a deliberative or law-making chamber; its members are legislators, who are not dismissed from service or court-martialled.

• An association of this period is a civil political body of members and subscribers, not of ranked personnel held as prisoners of war.

• An inter-national association draws its membership from several countries; the passage describes a body made up of Indians and set against the Indian Army.

Hence I.N.A. stands for the Indian National Army.