Officially, Subhas Chandra Bose was killed following an air crash in Taipei on August 18, 1945 — three days after Japan decided to surrender to the Allies. But many question this theory and believe Netaji was very much alive for decades more
Standard commemorations of modern Indian history have, for most part, been giving scant attention to Subhas Chandra Bose. Those fleeting references tread along familiar lines, ritualistically ending with a mention of his death, as it were, in a disputed air crash. End of the story.
There is a dialogue in the 2011 movie based on John la Carre’s classic of the same name, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, about the hunt for a Russian mole in the highest echelons of the British Secret Service: “Things aren’t always what they seem!” When it comes to the controversy surrounding Subhas Bose’s death, it’s perhaps just as well. Whatever happened to Netaji makes for a mindboggling plot with three options to choose from. Hindsight and newly available information have connected quite a few dots now, ruling out any fourth option.
Option one is the official one: Netaji was killed following an air crash in Taipei on August 18, 1945, three days after his benefactor, Japan, decided to surrender to the Allies. Number two holds out that he was in the USSR after August 1945 and later liquidated at the behest of his political rivals in India; God forbid this should be true! Which is why some would wish that the last option was true, for it places Netaji in India as a holy man right up to 1985, when he would have been 88 years old!
The air crash theory has been discounted for some good reasons. There was never any direct evidence of Bose’s death in Taiwan. The whole claim was based on hearsay, the statements of witnesses. When these people were run through interrogations by the Intelligence and military officers, several holes were blown in the theory. For one, the Japanese should not have lied about Bose’s destination at the time of his “death”. The official version had it that he was on his way to Tokyo to discuss the INA’s surrender and would come back to Singapore. But things that emerged subsequently showed that the Japanese had actually helped him escape under the ruse of an air crash that never was.
An Intelligence Bureau despatch noted that when Bose left on his last known flight, he “took a formal farewell of everybody”, indicating that he was “not likely to come back to this part of the world”. The Japanese general whose plane he boarded was a Russia expert heading to Manchuria to negotiate surrender with the Red Army. Japanese interpreter Kinji Watanabe told his IB interrogators that a day or two before Bose “died”, he was called to a closed door meeting, which was about “how to get Mr Bose to his destination”.
“It was generally understood that he was to get to the Russians,” reads the formerly secret record of Kinji’s examination. INA chief of Staff JK Bhonsle blurted out during his examination that “Bose was certain that once the Russians agreed to take him, they would give him all the necessary protection” and that “in the event of an Anglo-American split with Russia, which he (Bose) definitely foresaw, he might be of some service to the Russians and thus further the cause of his own country”.
Reports were received towards late 1944 that Netaji had made a secret trip to Moscow. A little earlier, he had actually written to the Soviet Ambassador in Tokyo, Yakov Malik, for help. This letter remained unknown to history till it was discovered in the early 1990s by Russian researcher Victor Touradjev in the KGB archives.
Some eight months after Netaji was reported dead, several military and intelligence officers chasing the “Bose mystery”, as they called it, sat down to assess all available information. “Most important was the information coming from outside the country,” read the only traceable record of their meeting now available at the National Archives in New Delhi. It elaborated that the Russian diplomats in different countries were speaking of Bose in Soviet Russia. “There is little reason for such persons to bring Bose into fabricated stories,” it commented.
In the early years, the government of free India received reliable inputs that reinforced the Netaji-in-Russia theory. But none of them was allowed to be displayed in public and nor did the government deemed it fit to raise the matter with the Soviets. From 1960 onwards the government agencies began getting inputs that Bose was alive and in India. The claim about the sadhu of Shaulmari created quite a flutter, even though it was known and proclaimed by the sadhu that he was not Bose. He met an emissary of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru face to face for hours to scotch the rumours and yet was tailed by the Intelligence Bureau till he died in 1977 in Dehradun.
At the same time there was another holy man called Bhagwanji who remained completely out of the picture. He did not show his face to anyone except a very few people, one of which probably was Sampurnanand, the then Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. Bhagwanji had surfaced in lucknow in 1955 and went on to live in different places in the State, lastly in Faizabad. In between, he would vanish for weeks and months and later say that he had been outside the country. His claim was: “Your imagination will be awed, your brain will reel if even by chance you could come to know even a fractional part of my present activities.”
Bhagwanji was not a regular holy man. He spoke in English and Bangla and seemed to know about things that were not in the public domain back then. Cigar rolling in his mouth, he prophesied at the peak of Soviet Russia’s power that “Communism shall die at the place of its birth”. His sermons were mostly about current affairs. “A race which cannot bind itself to its history and culture cannot ever win. This is the axiomatic truth.”
Bhagwanji kept himself fully abreast of the worldwide happenings, reading variety of magazines and newspapers among others. The Pioneer was his favourite. Several aides of his, including two INA intelligence veterans, kept on supplying him all sorts of information.
When the Shaulmari controversy raged in the country, Bhagwanji told a follower that it was his doing as he wanted to throw the authorities off his scent. He described it as a “parallel bluff”. But whyIJ Bhagwanji, who the locals mostly remember as Gumnami Baba, claimed that his going public was “not in India’s national interest”. He claimed that after the “concocted air crash” story, he spent some years in a gulag and left Soviet Russia in 1949. He claimed to have engaged thereafter in covert activities to counter world powers’ — especially America’s — clout in Asia. He feared that if he came out in the open, the world powers would come after him and Indians will be caught in the crossfire. He’d say, “There will be sanctions and my people will suffer.”
Atul Sen, a close acquaintance of Bose, met Bhagwanji in 1962 and then wrote a letter to Prime Minister Nehru which is now part of a classified PMO file. Sen claimed in his letter, accessed under the RTI Act, that Bose was “alive and is engaged in spiritual practice somewhere in India” and that “he is yet regarded as Enemy No 1 of the Allied Powers and that there is a secret protocol that binds the Government of India to deliver him to allied ‘justice’ if found alive”.
From what I have understood, from some point in the late 1960s onwards the authorities were aware of Bhagwanji. He said that feelers were sent to him, but it was “too late”. Rumours had it that Chaudhary Charan Singh visited him frequently and Indira Gandhi did at least once. Bhagwanji was very much annoyed when, for reasons not yet known, New Delhi decided to accede to the UN “convention on the non-applicability of statutory limitations to war crimes”.
Obviously, this scenario appears fantastic on the face of it but, nonetheless, the possibility that Bhagwanji was Bose cannot be ruled out in view of the following formidable reasons:
Well, we can go on arguing and counter-arguing whether or not Netaji was in Russia or if it was possible for him to be in Faizabad, of all the places in the world. The inspired elements will find ways to derail the debate, which cannot start in right earnest unless secret files are placed in the public domain.
Now, as we step into 2014, there is absolutely no justification for our Government to hide away over 150 of them. The PMO alone has 33 secret files on Netaji. Out of these 22 relate to his disappearance and are not being made public for fear of affecting relations with foreign states. The Ministry of Home Affairs insists that Netaji died in an air crash and yet claims that the disclosure of some Top Secret records may cause “law and order problem across the country”.
Time has come for us to strive and know the truth about Subhas Bose in the same way as we have made attempts in recent times over cases involving ordinary people. As a starting point, the people of India must impress upon the Government to place in public domain each and every record concerning Netaji, especially the ones held by our intelligence agencies. Truth has no place for secrecy.
The writer is the author of the bestseller, India’s Biggest Cover-up