While finding that "the
evidence is still overwhelming that atrocities were perpetrated by the members of the Japanese armed forces against the civilian population of some of the territories occupied by them as also against the prisoners of war", he produced a judgement questioning the legitimacy of the
tribunal and its rulings. He held the view that the legitimacy of the tribunal was suspect and questionable, because the spirit of retribution, and not impartial justice, was the underlying criterion for passing the judgement. He concluded: Judge Pal never intended to offer a juridical argument on whether a sentence of not guilty would have been a correct one. However, he argued that the United States had clearly provoked the war with Japan and expected Japan to act. He argued that "Even contemporary historians could think that 'as for the present war, the Principality of Monaco, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, would have taken up arms against the United States on receipt of such a note (
Hull note Judge Pal noted, "I might mention in this connection that even the published accounts of Nanking 'rape' could not be accepted by the world without some suspicion of exaggeration..." Furthermore, he believed that the exclusion of Western colonialism and the use of the
atom bomb by the United States from the list of crimes, as well as the exclusion of judges from the vanquished nations on the bench, signified the "failure of the Tribunal to provide anything other than the opportunity for the victors to retaliate." Pal wrote that the Tokyo Trials were an exercise in victor's justice and that the Allies were equally culpable in acts such as strategic bombings of civilian targets. Regardless of his personal opinions about Japan, he deemed it appropriate to dissent from the judgement of his "learned brothers" to embody his love for absolute truth and justice. In academic context, it has since generally been argued that the underlying aim of the trials was to shift blame from Emperor
Hirohito to Prime Minister
Hideki Tojo as the culprit of the war. Psychologist and cultural critic
Ashis Nandy, as well as other scholars, have argued that Judge Pal's lone dissenting opinion, that the Japanese soldiers were only following orders and that the acts committed by them weren't illegal in an indictable sense, was because of "his long exposure to the traditional laws of India", combined with a sense of "Asian solidarity" within the "larger Afro-Asian context of nationalism".
Significance in Indo-Japanese relations In 1966, Pal visited Japan and said in a speech that he had admired Japan from an early age for being the only Asian nation that "stood up against the West". The monument was erected after Pal's death. Judge Pal's dissent is frequently mentioned by Indian diplomats and political leaders in the context of Indo-Japanese friendship and solidarity. For example, on 29 April 2005 Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh referred to it as follows, in his remarks at a banquet in New Delhi in honour of the visiting Japanese Prime Minister
Junichiro Koizumi: On 14 December 2006, Singh made a speech in the
Japanese Diet. He stated: On 23 August 2007, Japanese Prime Minister
Shinzō Abe met with Pal's son, Prasanta, in Kolkata, during his day-long visit to the city. Prasanta Pal, now an octogenarian, presented prime minister Abe with four photographs of his father, of which two photographs were of Radhabinod Pal with Abe's grandfather, former Prime Minister
Nobusuke Kishi. They chatted for half an hour at a city hotel. ==Personal life==