The public will be able to access some untold stories of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s life as the Mamata Banerjee Government on Friday decided to declassify 64 such files on the great freedom fighter. Mamata said the files preserved with the Government would be declassified and made available for public reading from September 18.
Insisting that she had no idea of the existence of such files earlier, she told the media that the mystery behind the great freedom fighter has to be unravelled and so her Government has “decided to put in public domain all Government files on Netaji.”
The decision is seen as a “political master stroke” by the Chief Minister who is under considerable pressure from the Opposition on a host of issues like chit fund scam, deteriorating law and order situation and infighting in the Trinamool Congress, said experts, adding the decision would for quite some time divert the public attention from other issues.
The Chief Minister added “from next Friday the documents will be open to the public and will be kept at the city police archive,” saying she did not think that the documents had any implication on internal security.
“We were not aware of such files. Going through other files we came across these documents and we decided to make them public. It is a big decision,” Mamata added drawing immediate praise from Netaji’s grand nephew Chandra Kumar Bose, the convener of Open Platform a group that had been fighting for declassification of Netaji files.
He hoped the step would go miles in unraveling the mystery about Netaji’s life and death, particularly the Kolkata part of it when his successors, including an MP and Dr Sisir Bose the nephew of the great leader who had seen him off till Gomoh Junction, now in Jharkhand, during his grand flight from his Elgin Road House to Germany --- reportedly kept under Government surveillance.