A UK-based website set up to chart the last days of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose has released a new set of documents to dismiss claims that he may have been spotted in China years after his death in a plane crash.
The website —www.Bosefiles.Info — has reproduced a telegram from the Indian Embassy in Beijing contradicting claims in India about the nationalist leader being in the Chinese capital in 1952.
Bose was reported dead as a result of a plane crash in Taiwan in 1945.
But in 1955, SM Goswami, an ardent admirer of Bose, published a pamphlet in India with the heading ‘Netaji Mystery Revealed’.
It carried a picture of Chinese officials with a Mongolian trade delegation said to have been taken in 1952. Goswami pointed out one of the persons in the photograph to be Bose.
Appearing as a witness before the 1956 Netaji Inquiry Committee he presented the photo as evidence of Bose being alive, contrary to reports of his death in 1945.
The committee sent the exhibit to the Indian Embassy in Beijing for identification. The diplomatic mission forwarded it to the Chinese foreign ministry.