India's biggest cover-up

by Anuj Dhar

  Note verbales are used when one of the parties does not want to communicate in a fully official manner with the other party. Therefore, what is sent is an unsigned letter/communication/note to the other side. It usually means that it should be used in a semi-official manner. Often, a note verbale summarises a discussion/meeting that has been held confidentially or not as part of the regular diplomatic schedule. An official communication between two sovereign countries is usually referred to as a démarche.

  I saw a secret MEA noting defending the dispatching of note verbales to Russia over the Bose case for it is “the most formal method of communication between States”. This, I believe, undermines the seriousness of the issue involved. I don’t want to get into linguistics, but may I ask why this “most formal method” was not utilized in 2007 when then External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee was frisked at the Moscow airport? Why did the ministry issue a démarche to the Russians instead? Because what had happened at the airport was a serious matter, constituting an insult to all of us, and, therefore, we needed to tell the Russians that we were quite unhappy about the incident.

  You don’t have to be a diplomat to know that when a government wants to get something done by another government, it makes direct approaches, preferably through top officials, envoys or ministers. A recent example is of the arrest of Pakistani singer Rahat Fateh Ali Khan by Directorate of Revenue Intelligence in Delhi in February 2011. Following this, Pakistan made “frantic efforts” to secure his release. The Foreign Secretary of Pakistan called up the Indian High Commissioner in Islamabad around midnight. If that government had issued a note verbale, the singer would not have gotten out so quickly.

  Obviously, the worldly-wise officials of the Government of India know what does the trick. Actually, it all depends on what the issue is and who are the affected parties. In 1985 just before Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was to arrive in the United States on a state visit, President Ronald Reagan granted a presidential pardon to Adil Shahryar, an Indian serving a 35-year sentence for offences that included an attempt to blow up a ship.

  How did that happen? Shahryar’s devastated father Mohammed Yunus scrambled to get his only child out. He was able to pull some strings, for he was “a former foreign service official and long-time sycophant to the Gandhi family”. [29] In fact, it is on record that Yunus handled matters related to Bose. Some of the Nehru-era papers where his name appears were found to have been destroyed illegally.

  Yunus tried various ways in which the Government also helped him. His friend and Hollywood legend Charlton Heston wrote to the US Attorney General. Their correspondence shows that the Indian officials did their bit to get Shahryar released. One official in Delhi even took a swipe at the US, telling Heston that America was “a strange country, where a man could shoot the President and get off scot-free, while another could launch a failed fraud and get thirty-five years”. [30]

  Our officials lose their tongues to cats when it comes to Netaji.

  Shahryar was not set free until, the story goes, Rajiv Gandhi had made a personal intervention. Why he did that is the stuff of conspiracy theories.

  The issuance of a mere note verbale in the case of Subhas Bose signalled to the Russians that the Indian side did not consider the issue a very serious matter. Otherwise, what does it really take to say a few words politely to a minister or ambassador of an extremely friendly foreign nation?

  “Your Excellency, may I draw your kind attention to the old issue about Subhas Bose. Some of our people and media continue to insist that he was in the USSR after his reported death. We have some circumstantial evidence. We will be most happy to present a dossier containing intelligence reports and other records for your government’s consideration. It is being alleged that Bose perished in a gulag. We would like these rumours to end in our mutual interests, for the sake of friendly relations between our people and governments.”

  Wallenberg was just a junior official, but his heroism made the Swedish Prime Minister pitch in for him. Subhas Bose, head of the Provisional Government of Free India in exile, deserved far better efforts than what were made by the ungrateful lot who reaped the harvest of his struggle.

  The 1991 note verbale was unlikely to yield anything and it did not. On 8 January 1992, the Foreign Ministry of Russian Federation, which had replaced the USSR, sent a flat denial:

  According to the data in the central and republican archives, no information whatsoever is available on the stay of the former president of Indian National Congress, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, in the Soviet Union in 1945 and thereafter.

  The Russian note bore striking similarity to the Soviet formulation over Wallenberg matter—he is not in our country and is unknown to us. New Delhi, however, took the Moscow missive as gospel. In August 1992 Prime Minister Rao decided that the “question of whether Netaji is dead or alive or the circumstances of his disappearance, need not be reopened”. Foreign Secretary JN Dixit moved to squash Samar Guha’s inquisitiveness, writing to him in November that “our own enquiries with the Russians, pursuant to your suggestion, indicate that they themselves accept that Netaji died in the plane crash in 1945”.

  Other indications were in the air as well. In Russia, a palpable unease was growing over resurgence in the interest in Subhas Bose both in India and at home. A 1990 article on Bose in official mouthpiece Soviet Land was introduced by the magazine editor in a most telling manner:

  For a long time Soviet researchers were not allowed even to mention this passionate patriot and staunch freedom fighter because of the complexity of his destiny…. Glasnost is removing many blank spaces in Soviet history and in the USSR’s relations with foreign countries and restoring the truth about various events and personalities. Thus, quite a few complicated episodes in Soviet-Polish relations have been brought to light.

  The reference to Soviet-Polish relations was about a matter more damning than the Wallenberg affair. For nearly half a century the Soviets feigned ignorance about the slaughter of virtually the entire top Polish brass, some 22,000 officers, in 1943. They had once even set up a commission which after what they called “rigorous inquiry” fixed the blame for the Katyn Forest massacre on the Nazis. So long Poland remained in the Communist bloc, the demands for the truth were successfully suppressed. Then Poland became democratic and its people and government did what the Swedes had done for Wallenberg.

  The outcome couldn’t have been more dramatic. Mikhail Gorbachev went on TV to accept the Soviet guilt. The same Gorbachev who, according to a story in Hindustan Times, had once “evaded a direct answer” to a researcher’s query about Bose, “and is alleged to have said it was up to both governments to solve the issue once and for all”. [31]

  In 1992, journal Echo Plantei carried an essay titled “The life and death of Netaji Bose” by a former Tass correspondent in India. Again the editorial comment hinted at the hidden subplot. It said that the officials in New Delhi and Moscow were “keeping silence as regards the true fate of Bose” and that Moscow had “confirmable documents” as to what the “true state of affairs” actually were.

  Alarmed by such reports, Russian authorities tried to deflect the attention through a leak. Victor Touradjev, deputy editor-in-chief of the Russian journal Asia and Africa Today was clandestinely shown some of the records on Bose kept in the KGB archives. He found the papers “scrappy” and the information contained by them “chaotic”, but—probably nudged by the officials—Touradjev made up for the gaps by coming up with a fantastic thesis. The death mystery was sought to be trashed and the British were dragged into the picture.

  The Indian embassy came to know what Touradjev was up to. On 24 June 1993 Ambassador Ronen Sen informed Foreign Secretary Dixit that the journal “will soon start publishing a series of articles, based on classified KGB archives, alleging inter-alia that Netaji Subhas Bose was a MI-6 (British) agent and that one of his close aides was a KGB agent”.

  Asia and Africa Today had limited circulation but was subscribed to by libr
aries, academic institutions and scholars in Russia and abroad. “If such a sensational story appears in the journal, it will be picked up immediately by journalists based in Moscow. Some Indian journalists have already got wind of it,” Sen wrote. He was worried about the spillover effect.

  From time to time, there has been media speculations on Netaji’s visits to the then Soviet Union in 1941 and during and after 1945. The Russian foreign ministry had informed us in January 1992, on the basis of the documents available in their central and republic archives, that there was no evidence that Netaji had stayed in the Soviet Union during or after 1945. We had also sent to MEA some archival documents obtained from the Soviet foreign office in 1990. None of these materials contained even hint of such scurrilous allegations.

  Ambassador Sen twisted the Russian intimation about having no “information” about Bose to their having no “evidence”. “Evidence” is one thing, “information” another. Anyway, Sen directed the Counsellor (Information), Ajai Malhotra, to check up facts and try to persuade Touradjev “not to publish articles containing charges about a highly respected national leader”.

  Malhotra—now India’s Ambassador to Russia—met Touradjev, who confirmed that his forthcoming articles portrayed Bose as a British agent and were based on “KGB archives which he had been privileged to personally examine and which had been shared with him by contacts he had in the Russian intelligence service”.

  Touradjev told Malhotra that “his articles did not bring out that Netaji was an MI-6 agent, in the sense of his being a ‘paid functionary’”. In Touradjev’s views, his assessment actually made Subhas “go up in his esteem, since, it showed that he (Netaji) had contributed to the defeat of Fascism”. He even claimed that “to the best of his knowledge the Russian intelligence service did not possess a separate file on Netaji. In his view, this would seem to show that Netaji had never visited the Soviet Union since, at least in earlier years, a file was usually opened on every foreigner arriving in the country”.

  The Russian did go ahead and publish his pieces in the journal in the autumn of 1993. He wrote that his “careful and intent study of the archival documents of the KGB” had convinced him that “Subhas Chandra Bose collaborated with the English Secret Intelligence Service [MI6]”. Touradjev based his hypothesis on two pieces of information which appeared to him as converging. The first related to Bose’s 1941 escape from Kolkata to Kabul. It seemed so incredible a feat to Touradjev that he suspected that it could not have materialised without British collusion. Most likely Touradjev picked up this conjucture from something on file because in February 1941 the incredulous Soviet ambassador in Kabul had thought along the same lines for a while. According to a German record captured by the Americans after the war, he suspected the “English intrigue behind Bose’s wish” to seek a safe passage through “for the purpose of creating a conflict between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan”. [32]

  Touradjev built the old theory up with his own fanciful ideas reflecting his ignorance about Bose. “It is again clear why the English colonial authorities kept silence for so long about Bose’s flight.” He posed why the British did not capture or kill Bose during his submarine voyage from Germany to the Far East, when they were in the know of his movement. “How did this highly secret information come to the English?” he asked before providing an explanation: “There is also enough ground to assume that the person who informed them was Bose himself.” [33]

  Touradjev got it wrong. Bose had worked out his escape from Kolkata in such an ingenious way that by the time his disappearance was discovered, he had already crossed Peshawar. According to Suresh Bose, his younger brother “was an arch secret service man, with a dogged determination in carrying out his plans, always unmindful of the difficulties and consequences that they would entail”. [34]

  The Allies came to know of Bose’s undersea voyage because they had broken secret German codes. Bose was not targetted for it would have sabotaged their overall strategy to defeat the Nazis. The Bose file in the National Archive of Australia also shows that even the Japanese secret telegrams were being intercepted by the country’s navy during the war. This is what the item no 12 of series B5555O shows:

  The most incriminating detail for Touradjev was that the man who took Bose from Peshawar to the Russian border, Bhagat Ram Talwar, later “became a collaborator of the Soviet intelligence service and simultaneously a highly secret agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service”. “The main secret and all the smallest but very important details are concealed in the English archives,” Touradjev now claimed. He wrote that the Indians should demand from the British “to make their secret archives public, which can reveal the entire truth about Subhas Chandra Bose”. [35]

  Something did emerge in 2005 and it served as a reminder that the colonial British wanted to get rid of Bose. Prof Eunan O'Halpin of Dublin’s Trinity College stumbled upon records proving that the British foreign office, which controls the MI-6, “had ordered the assassination” of Bose “just after he had made his ‘grand escape’ from Kolkata”. [36] Adding more insight was Anthony Paul, a leading columnist for Singapore’s Straits Times. Paul referred to his talk with an acquaintance in the MI-6. On his asking whether James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s “fantasies had any basis in fact, whether London ever really licensed its agents to kill”, the officer replied that “there have been rare, very rare exceptions” [37] and named Subhas Bose as one of the two possible targets.

  There’s one 007 connection worth mentioning. The man who’s said to have inspired Fleming’s fictional character—his spy brother Peter Fleming—once handled Bhagat Ram Talwar as the head of counter-intelligence organisation called GSI(d). Talwar’s linkages with several intelligence services had been exposed before Touradjev’s writings appeared.

  Unbeknown to the Indian media, Asia and Africa Today disclosures caused much consternation in the Prime Minister’s Office, Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of External Affairs and Research and Analysis Wing during 1993-94. Shockingly, some of the official records that I saw appear to peddle the view that “Bose was an MI-6 (British) agent…[because] one of his close associates was a KGB agent”. This implied calumny in the government records consequently became the main reason for Home Secretary Kamal Pande to make a startling statement in a 2001 affidavit before the Mukherjee Commission. Pande refused to hand over certain classified Bose records because their disclosure would “hurt the sentiments of the people at large and may evoke widespread reactions as these documents if disclosed may lower the image of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose”.

  My own feeling is that with this blood-curdling averment the Home Ministry besmirched Bose’s image and hurt public sentiments. When the Home Secretary put it down in writing on a sworn affidavit that there were records which would spoil Bose’s reputation, he actually conveyed that there was something terrible behind it all.

  I fail to see the logic behind the Government’s stand that since Talwar was a traitor it somehow dented Bose’s credentials. If you accepted this logic, someone might say that since we know now—thanks to unassailable declassified CIA and State Department records—that during the 1971 war one minister of Indira Gandhi’s Cabinet betrayed India’s war plans to hostile Richard Nixon administration, Prime Minister Gandhi’s image stands tarnished as well. No, it doesn’t. The minister betrayed Prime Minister Gandhi’s trust and committed high treason. Bhagat Ram Talwar was not Subhas Bose’s childhood friend. He was one small operative of communist orientation and Bose knew many like him.

  Rather than going hyper about Touradjev’s crass assessment, the government officials should have dismissed it out of hand. Actually, in 1988 Touradjev’s article was translated and reproduced in a special commemoration volume brought out by Kolkata’s Scottish Church College, Bose’s alma mater. No one took the demeaning inferences seriously.

  The official records further show that the Indian officials did not attach any importance to Touradjev’s reproducing in his article the
complete text of a letter that officially did not exist previously. Whatever overtures Bose made towards Soviet Russia were shared by him with his aides in bits and pieces. No one had the complete picture. A missing link surfaced when Touradjev found in the KGB archive a letter Bose had written in October 1944 to Yakov Malik, the Soviet Ambassador in Tokyo, seeking USSR’s support for India’s freedom. The letter bore a comment from the Commissiar of State Security (NKGB) to the chief of the 5th division of the first command of NKVD—the forerunner of the KGB. Bose had written to Malik that he wanted “to pay a visit to Your Excellency and find the way through which your Government can help us for success of our struggle for freedom”. [38]

  The least our government could have done was to request the Russians to send this document of historic value to the National Archives in New Delhi. Many renowned Bose experts continue to hold that such a letter—which bolsters the evidence for Bose’s plan to escape to the USSR—was never written or received by Malik.

  On a positive note, and giving Touradjev the credit for this remarkable discovery, he was good enough to testify before the Mukherjee Commission that there are records on Bose in the KGB archives—a term loosely used for the archives of the FSB and SVR, housing old KGB, NKVD-era documents.

  Reverting to the exchange of note verbales, in March 1994 the Indian embassy received a “non-paper” from the Russian foreign ministry. It revised their note verbale to say that “according to the data of the central archives of the former USSR and the Russian archives, no evidence of stay of the former president of the Indian National Congress, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, in the Soviet Union in 1945 or in subsequent years, had been found”. That is, there was some information but it could not be construed as evidence. The modification was probably made necessary by the Asia and Africa Today articles. Or did it have something to do with Ronen Sen?