Yes, the Army was a great career move for many Indians. I didn't mean to suggest that the British pointed guns at people's heads and said "fight for us or else".
My point was that these men (tiny fraction that they were) cannot be called traitors because they were fighting in Britain's wars, and decided to fight against Britain because they believed that was best for their country. A good analogy would be the Free French Resistance in WWII which decided to fight against their country's (Vichy) govt and Germany instead of for them.
The only difference is that the Free French wound up on the winning side, while these suckers wound up on the losing side. Don't get me wrong - I'm no supporter of Subhas Chandra Bose - the man was a fascist nutcase, and if he'd come to power, instead of Nehru, India would have turned out like Saddam Hussein's Iraq or something.
I do agree that the British Indian Army was no longer pro-British by that time, but I'm not so sure that that was a major factor in Britain giving Independence. (The lack of a white settler class was certainly a factor). But I don't think the British ever seriously considered ruling India by force, using the Indian Army, even if it had been reliable. Simply too many people, and too big a country, and too hard to handle.
The British came to power by playing Indian rulers against each other and stayed in power by co-opting the Indian elite. The Independence movement became serious when the Indian educated elite turned against the British when they realized that they might be allowed education at Oxford and Cambridge, but they were never going to be treated as equals like the Australians. It is to be noted that the racism against Indians *increased* in the last 70 years of the Empire - the early British assimilated a lot more.(Nehru once called himself "the last Englishman to rule India"). Gandhi's genius was in taking the movement of an educated elite and making it a mass, all-India movement, but the British lost their trump card when they lost the support of the elite.
Anyway, I've wandered wildly off topic so I'll stop now..
What loyalty does a private or NCO owe to an army in which he knows for a fact that his son will never have any chance to become an officer ?
An interesting fact in the employment of the Indian Army was that they were not used among "white" people (they were used in Italy but to the British "wogs" weren't white). They did not want a situation where a brown man was having sex with a white woman. That is why they were only used on the Western Front in WW1 only at the very beginning when the British manpower situation was dire.