It is now official that state government will set up a memorial of Gumnami Baba at Ram Katha Sanghralaya in Faizabad as it has sanctioned Rs 1.50 crore in its supplementary budget that was tabled in Vidhan sabha on Monday.
This museum is expected to be inaugurated on January 23.
A large number of people believe that Gumnami Baba was actually Subhas Chandra Bose living incognito in Faizabad, where he died in 1985. However, as per the record, Netaji died in an air crash on August 18, 1945 in Japan.
A senior official in Chief Minister’s office had told The Pioneer that CM wanted to inaugurate the memorial on August 15. The department of culture was asked to make arrangements but the department failed to meet the deadline as there was no separate budgetary allocation for the scheme.
In this supplementary budget the Government has sought a fund of Rs 1.50 crore to display the items used by Gumnami Baba at the international Ram Katha Museum and Art gallery in Ayodhya.
Official said that Chief Minister has gone through the documents and the articles recovered from the Ram Bhawan in Faizabad where Gumnami Baba lived. “He was convinced that Gumnami baba was Netaji and therefore decided to set up a memorial in the memory of Gumnami baba,” the official.
The articles include letters written in Bangla, a pair of German binoculars, a Corona typewriter, a pipe, a Rolex watch ,— a box of five teeth and a pair of silver, round-rimmed spectacles.
This memorial will give a new twist to the mystery shrouding death of Netaji. In January 2013 the Allahabad high court had ordered that a memorial should be set up to keep the belongings of Gumnami Baba. The court while hearing two writ petitions filed by Faizabad’s Subhash Chandra Bose Vichaar Manch and Netaji’s niece lalita Bose had ordered that a memorial housing articles left by Baba should be constructed within three months.
Justice M K Mukherjee, who headed the commission probing Netaji’s death between 1999 and 2005, visited the Faizabad treasury to check the articles kept there.