Days after declassifying the secret police files West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday threw open confidential Cabinet files on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose for public viewing. The pre-Independence files numbering 401 represent Cabinet reports between 1938 and 1947 on the great freedom fighter.
Apart from affairs related to Bose the digitised files contained facts on various other issues like Quit India Movement, said the Chief Minister, adding that the 401 files contained detailed reports on Cabinet meetings held between 1938 and 1947.
“The period between 1938 and 1947 is very important in Indian history and the files declassified today will provide a lot of information about the Cabinet decisions taken during the period on various issues including the Quit India Movement,” Banerjee said in the State secretariat.
The Chief Minister who was likely to hand over the related CDs to President Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday added her Government would digitise all the State Government files in a digitised manner. In the national Capital she was also expected to meet her Delhi counterpart Arvind Kejriwal and take part in a seminar.
Taking an apparent dig at the BJP Government, she said “Only talking about digital India does not suffice, you have to show that through your performance and maintain transparency by making documents public.”
“The people need to know about the contemporary history of the country and we are doing that by making public all these documents,” she said, added “We will digitise all the files in a phased manner as the people have a right to know their history.”
The Chief Minister who had earlier declassified 64 confidential Netaji files — that confirmed snooping on his family members by the Nehru Government on Monday renewed her demand for declassification of 134 files currently preserved with the Central Government as “this is the demand of the whole country that wants to know as to what happened to him.”
Some reports in the declassified files also suggested that Netaji was alive post 1945 air crash over Taihoku airport. One relevant document said he was alive and somewhere in Manchuria in 1948.
According to reports contained in file number 22 intelligence reports collected by the then Bengal Police quoted Debnath Das an INA veteran and a close Netaji associate saying the freedom fighter was alive and in Manchuria.
The report stated that “Debnath Das an ex-INA leader who is actively engaged in anti-Congress propaganda is preaching in political and party circles that Netaji is alive and is somewhere in Manchuria at present.”