Declassify the files and end the controversy
The need for non-prejudiced history to be told and written for the benefit of present and future generations is necessary to prevent political parties from twisting historical material to suit their purposes. This is why classified files relating to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose must be freed from the veil of secrecy. Once these documents come into the public domain, scholars and the lay public will be able to take positions based on historical evidence and not conjecture. As things stand today, let alone have a genuine portrayal of Netaji’s contribution to the country’s independence movement, we don’t even know for sure whether this tall leader and an enduring icon died in a plane crash on August 18, 1945, in Taiwan, or went to Stalin’s Soviet Union and spent his last days in incarceration in the harsh Siberian environment. For decades, we have been led to believe by authors of history, no doubt sponsored and backed by successive regimes in New Delhi, that the former happened.
The few voices of dissent which rose were quickly shouted down as being ill-informed or motivated. This suited the Governments, especially the Congress ones, fine, since any move to bring Netaji Bose back into the public discourse endangered the carefully constructed, and aggressively promoted for decades, narrative of Jawaharlal Nehru being the foremost leader after Mahatma Gandhi in the freedom struggle. Thus, any move which had even the tiniest potential to rock the status quo was sabotaged. This ranged from suppressing a dissent note by a member of a panel the Government had set up years after independence to ascertain whether Netaji had indeed died in the air crash. The Congress had then, as it is doing today through its spokespersons, touted the committee’s majority report confirming the plane crash theory. But it had (and has) failed to explain its act of suppressing the dissent note which, incidentally, came from a member of the Bose family. The exercise to stifle the truth came to the fore more recently when the Congress-led UPA Government failed to place before Parliament the report of yet another committee set up by the preceding Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA regime. This panel had questioned the plan crash narrative on various grounds.
Over the past few days, some partially declassified documents have re-ignited the old debate which the Congress had been successfully dodging for decades. They do not provide a complimentary picture of the two tallest leaders of the party — Nehru and Indira Gandhi. The first is seen to have played a role in having members of the Netaji’s family snooped upon, in the months after news of the latter’s ‘death’ in the air crash came. Indira Gandhi is said to have presided over the destruction of crucial files relating to the whereabouts of the charismatic freedom-fighter. The allegation that these developments fit into the Congress’s pattern of not allowing inconvenient historical material to be revealed as it would dent the image of their iconic leaders and simultaneously raise Netaji’s stock, cannot be easily brushed aside. Nevertheless, politics on the issue is not what Netaji Bose deserves. There must be a satisfactory closure to the mystery behind his disappearance and death. The BJP had before the lok Sabha election promised to declassify the ‘Netaji files’. It has taken the first step in that direction by forming an inter-ministerial panel to do the needful.