India's biggest cover-up

by Anuj Dhar

  “He was very old, but definitely Netaji!”

  Dilip burst out in tears and fell on Bhagwanji’s feet. “Netaji, Netaji!” “No, Don’t talk to me like that,” the holy man told him softly.

  “He caressed me and I felt better. I was sitting there right in front of him for about an hour. I think of that meeting every day till today. It was an unbelievable sight, but no illusion,” misty-eyed Mukherjee kept talking. “He asked my name and I said ‘Dilip’. ‘Oh, can you sing?’ was his instant response.” “Do you know Netaji’s best friend Dilip Kumar Roy was a famous singer?” Mukherjee asked me. He reminisced further: “I spoke to him in Bangla. He followed every word of it, but replied in Hindi.”

  “At one point we were discussing political orientations. I praised the Communists and got scolded by him. He said: ‘What do you know about them? I have seen them from close. I have been to Russia. I saw how a few luxuriated while the rest suffered. I went to their grand palaces. This body [of mine] even endured torture in Siberia’.”

  To me, this was an interesting oddity. Of all the holy men proclaimed to be “Netajis” over the years, Bhagwanji was the only one who had spoken of Russia. I had queried a close follower of Shaulmari sadhu extensively. Assuming he was Subhas Bose for some magical reasons, Saradanand would have known what had happened to “him” on 18 August 1945. Wouldn’t he? So I asked the follower to enlighten me. But his response was made up largely of the ideas I traced back to Samar Guha. For the post-1945 scenario, the version of the follower was that a “defeated Netaji” decided to renounce the world and passing through Tibet, he came to India.

  Obviously, I couldn’t stand this theory. Bose was anything but a defeatist and there is no way the Russian angle could be taken out of the mystery. So when I became open to discussing the Bhagwanji issue—which I initially dismissed in disgust—I enquired if the holy man had ever alluded to any air crash or anything about Russia.

  I was then told that Bhagwanji had made some remarks in passing. “There was no air crash that day; it was concocted.” The plane which had reportedly crashed never ever took off from the Taipei aerodrome, he had further said. He was confident that a look through the aerodrome logbook would bear him out. He even indicated that “he had reached his destination” by the time the death news was announced. Interestingly enough, he spoke of having been in a gulag in south central Siberia, somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Baikal and the Ural Mountains.

  ***

  Three decades after it surfaced, the Bhagwanji angle appears to be fitting so well in the jigsaw of Bose mystery that more and more people are beginning to think that the final act of India’s longest-running controversy might not have been enacted somewhere amid the lush environs of Southeast Asia or the snowy expanse of Siberia, but in the dusty Faizabad town.

  What has converted the mind-boggling impossibility of Subhas Bose having been in India incognito all the while he was assumed dead into a near-possibility is a seemingly phantasmagorical and yet evidence-backed narrative. From the mid-1950s onwards, Bhagwanji lived in complete seclusion at various places in UP—Lucknow, Naimisharanya, Basti, Ayodhya and Faizabad. In the 1980s he was being referred to as “Gumnami Baba”—the holy man who had lost his identity—and the term stuck. Bhagwanji’s most preferred terms for himself were “Mahakaal”—son of Goddess Mother Kali—and “Dead Man”, because he was a “living dead”.

  The first disciple of Dead Man was a poor Sanskrit teacher Mahadeo Prasad Mishra. Around 1955, both lodged themselves in a rented house in Lucknow’s Singar Nagar locality. After a while, Mahadeo’s widowed daughter Sarsawati Devi Shukla, along with her infant son Rajkumar, joined them as Bhagwanji’s attendant. Soon Dead Man had found a disciple in Itwah aristocrat Surendra Singh Chaudhury.

  For some time, Dead Man lived with relative ease and comfort. There were hardly any occasions for him to step out into the city. The last was when he needed a new pair of eyeglasses. Accompanied by an unknown driver, he checked into a famous optician’s shop. Trying out a few spectacles, he removed his headgear. In an instant, his shaved bald pate, round eyeglasses and a familiar-looking visage had stunned another customer. “Netaji!” he said. The next moment two young men prostrated in front of Dead Man. His “cover” blown, he rushed out and the car sped away. “This is why I now keep this moustache and beard,” Bhagwanji summed up the moral of the story a few years later to former INA secret service man Pabitra Mohan Roy.

  Unable to cope with living in a populated part of the city and yet remaining unseen, Bhagwanji left Singar Nagar. He took up refuge in a dilapidated Shiv temple on the banks of river Gomati. When it became unbearable to live there too, he shifted to neighbouring Naimisharanya, a salubrious area dotted with temples. In 1958 Bhagwanji was in hiding away in a desolate temple here. Like other Hindu godmen in the area, he would spend most of his days and nights reading and meditating. But the rest of it was quite oddish. He would keep to himself all the time. If anyone visited him, he would communicate by scribbling on a slate, wiping it clean and scribbling again. Strange whispers about the holy man drew a curious relative of the temple priest to him. A few years ago, when he was in his 90s, Srikant Sharma’s most cherished memories of life were of seeing Subhas Bose when he was touring the area in the late 1930s, and then “again” in the temple.

  The swirling “Netaji” rumours never ceased and Dead Man kept on hopping from one place to another in futile bids to sidestep them. After Naimisharanya it was Darshan Nagar in Faizabad in 1964 and the next year Ayodhya. By 1967 he was at Basti, where another local, Durga Prasad Pandey, won his trust and lived to our times to echo Srikant’s views of having seen both Bose and Bhagwanji.

  Using Pandey’s contact and travelling in a car with him, Bhagwanji came to Ayodhya, where he shifted residences no less than four times. In mid-1970s he was lodged within the Brahmkund Gurudwara complex. Lastly, in 1983 he found a place in Faizabad, the twin city of Ayodhya so that he could be close to his new prominent disciples, surgeon Dr RP Mishra and homeopath Dr Priyabrat Banerjee, son of Dr T Banerjee. He was lodged in a rented shanty on the backside of a bungalow named “Rambhawan” by its owner Gurubasant Singh. No matter what the place and time was, the curtain never came down. But with advancing age Bhagwanji became more talkative and somewhat liberal in writing to his close followers.

  In Rambhawan, the disciples would sit next to a curtained, grilled window to hear Bhagwanji speak from inside in flawless English, Urdu-laden Hindi and Bangla, with the unmistakable accent of a man who had spent his formative years in Kolkata. “I never heard a voice like that in my life. The tone and tenor was more like that of an army commander’s than a sadhu baba’s,” Gurubasant told me. Surreptitious attempts by a young disciple, Ravindra Shukla, to capture it on tape failed. “I took a tape recorder with me, but could not muster courage to press the button.”

  The Banerjee family, Srikant Sharma, Durga Prasad Pandey and others who saw him or had caught a fleeting glimpse of him were in unison in insisting to me that he was a Subhas Bose lookalike, but older. Bhagwanji refused to be photographed but the followers saw gaps in his teeth and scalpel mark on one side of his stomach. Both of which would have been true for Subhas Bose.

  Bhagwanji had imposed a gag order on all his followers, local and special ones coming from Bengal, forbidding them to speculate about his identity to anyone. “Don’t tell anyone about me. It won’t do good to the nation,” he would warn his spellbound disciples. They more or less obeyed him till the last. Which is why almost everything about Bhagwanji that we know today, actually became known after he was said to have passed away on 16 September 1985. In Kolkata, Pabitra was told of the death and he said “the country would burn” if he opened his mouth.

  Late on September 19 evening a body draped in the Tricolour [India’s national flag] was swiftly moved out of Rambhawan and taken to the banks of river Saryu nearby for cremation, for which no permission had been obtained from the local authorities. “We are only 13 here to see
him off on his last journey. There should have been 13 lakhs,” bewailed Panda Ram Kishore who had housed Bhagwanji for a while at his residence in Ayodhya. The pyre was lit with a twig and within seconds the flames erupted. Before long Faizabad and surrounding areas were engulfed by pent-up rumours that Bhagwanji was actually “Netaji”.

  I was told by two former top police officers, one former Uttar Pradesh DIG and the other an ex-CBI Director, that the rumours of “Bose being alive and in Uttar Pradesh” were there even before September 1985 and known to many officers. Apparently, the cops had some occasions to crack the Bhagwanji mystery well before 1985. It is baffling that no one succeeded. In Faizabad, Bhagwanji was lodged in the heart of the town, at a walking distance from the local top cop’s residence and office. Just behind Rambhawan was, and is, the fencing of the HQ of the Gorkha Regiment of the Indian Army. Bhagwanji was said to be using a transmitter, receiving and sending some messages in English every day at six in the evening. How in the world did that not create a blip on the radar?

  There is actually no excuse because the police had been notified about the strange happenings more than once. There was even this silly story that Bhagwanji was a “CIA agent”. Back then, the standard way to discredit anyone in India was to brand them as such. In 1979, a journalist-cum-informer wrote to Faizabad Superintendent of Police (SP) in his gopniya (secret) letter that there was “something suspicious about Gurudev Swami” [Bhagwanji] then living in Ayodhya. “Some people say Babaji is a CIA agent. He has a transmitter and he sends messages.” This was good enough a charge to be reported to the local Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau office. Anyway, the journalist also jotted down that "people say Babaji is Subhas Chandra Bose and wants to remain in hiding".

  The SP launched an inquiry but was unable to get an audience with Bhagwanji. He insisted, and got transferred. A former beat constable at Basti, Mohammed Mobin, told me that men of certain air of importance about them would emerge from their cars and under cover of darkness walk towards the dilapidated house where Bhagwanji lived. There were hardly any street lights in that area when I visited it a decade back.

  Advancing age and a leg injury in 1980, which ended his occasional, secret long tours to the world outside, forced Bhagwanji to intermingle with people around him. Once Gurubasant Singh saw an army colonel going inside with “a puffed chest” and then emerging shaken. “He told me, ‘that man sitting inside is a general’.”

  In the last few years, I have interacted with many individuals who either had the occasion to speak to Bhagwanji or heard about him before 1985. One wealthy chartered accountant in Delhi called up memories: “My father and I both talked to him in the early 1960s and came to believe that he was Netaji. But I don’t have any proof to back my belief so I can’t talk publicly. I was a teenager then.”

  One little boy who got hooked to the Bhagwanji phenomenon in the 1980s is now one of India’s most outstanding filmmakers. Anurag Kashyap, creator of classics like Dev D and Black Friday, took me on a nostalgic trip to a time when his maternal grandfather stayed opposite Rambhawan. “I don’t know if it was my child-like imagination or it actually happened. Probably I chanced to talk to him as well,” he said with a sparkle of excitement in his eyes and a smile that never left his face for more than an hour that we talked. “I still think of Gumnami Baba at times.”

  The newspaper clippings that young Kashyap pasted on his scrapbook in 1986 were testimonials to a gathering storm. After September 1985, the local journalists got into action mode as a torrent of speculations and emotions surged in Faizabad and around. Many scrambled to chase the scattered leads unmindful of the dismissive attitude of the state officials, who had reached a conclusion beforehand. The state Chief Secretary rebuffed the suggestions that Bhagwanji could have been Bose. At best he was some associate of Bose’s, so he said. The personal views of Faizabad DIG Ajai Raj Sharma, a would-be Delhi Police Commissioner and BSF chief, were at variance at the start. He told journalists that “there was something about Gumnami Baba” and that it required a closer look. He suggested a handwriting test.

  As the state machinery adopted a wishy-washy attitude, journalists began connecting the dots. None went as far as Ashok Tandon, who wrote in Hindi and was first to link Bhagwanji to Bose, and the Northern India Patrika team comprising Nirmal Nibedon, VN Arora & Sayed Kauser Hussain. On the whole, the journalistic enquiries upheld the Bose link to Bhagwanji. Too bad that Nibedon, a national-level journalist especially brought in for the enquiry, died in a Delhi accident soon after. If he had lived on, this contemporary of Shekhar Gupta, editor-in-chief of the Indian Express, would probably have left an even better account than what the NIP team did.

  The NIP reports on "the man of mystery" pushed the people of Faizabad into a vortex of emotions. The instant reaction of the state government was to float a conspiracy theory that the Janata Party and the BJP were behind the public outcry. On 3 December 1985 the Home Department in Lucknow directed the DM of Faizabad to send “a detailed report in the matter in triplicate at once for transmission to Government of India”.

  The truth was that the public discontentment was spontaneous, with every section of the society, including local Congress leaders, pitching in. The locals completely ignored the vague findings of a counter “investigation” in another newspaper that Bhagwanji was “either a spy, or a blind Bose follower or some misguided Anand Margi”.

  Alarmed by reports that the authorities were contemplating auctioning the belongings Bhagwanji had left behind, activists Dr MA Haleem and Vishwa Bandhav Tewari approached the District Magistrate on 30 January 1986. Their letter, marked cc to the Foreign Secretary at Delhi and a disinterested UP Chief Minister ND Tiwari, called for an inquiry.

  An important English daily of Uttar Pradesh, Northern India Patrika, has after months of enquiry and investigations come to the conclusion that the saint was none else than Subhas Chandra Bose. The most important evidence which the paper has cited is based on the records, documents and materials found in his residence of which an inventory was prepared cursorily by a police officer of a lower rank.... We, therefore, submit to you that the documents and other materials found in the said house should remain sealed and preserved for the purpose of inquiry, and the guards posted there should continue to remain there in the national interest. We would like to be informed of the steps you propose to take in the matter.

  The District Magistrate did not revert to the two. Things changed when Lalita Bose, daughter of Suresh Bose, rushed in from New Delhi following the media reports. Her arrival put paid to the conspiracy theory that the BJP and others were causing the commotion as Lalita was a member of the Congress party at that time.

  In early 1986, she met Bir Bahadur Singh, the new Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, and found him to be hostile to the idea of an inquiry. Lalita’s request to have a proper catalogue of the belongings and correspondence left behind by Bhagwanji made by a senior police officer or advocate-commissioner was turned down. This was despite a section of the administration taking interest in the issue. What you see now is the letter written by then Administrator General JM Pant, who wanted the DM of Faizabad to ensure that Bhagwanji’s belongings were “not tampered or disturbed”.

  Lalita Bose made her own enquiries. It was both a humbling as well as traumatic experience for her. Breaking down occasionally, she admitted to many in Faizabad that Bhagwanji appeared to be her missing uncle. Asked to react to Dr Sisir Bose’s reported comment that “those who were claiming that the ‘mysterious’ Baba was in fact Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose were in fact ‘selling the name of the great national leader’”, Lalita charged her first cousin of toeing the government line for pecuniary gains. In the Gumnami baba file kept at the DM’s office in Faizabad there is a clipping of an 11 November 1985 report in Northern India Patrika to the effect that Sisir “visited Faizabad to check the veracity of the reports”. That is not correct because there is nothing whatsoever on the file to back up the newspaper report.

 
If at all Sisir paid any flying visit to the town during that period, he never met anyone of consequence in the episode. It were his cousins Lalita and Jitendra Nath Roy who dwelt into the matter. Elderly Roy, son of Bose’s sister who used to live in Gorakhpur, did not speak to media but Lalita could not hold herself back. She told the Pioneer on 1 April 1986 that the personal effects of Bhagwanji “were in one way or the other related to the kith and kin of Netaji”.

  The most remarkable point is that when I went through heaps of the effects I found an unusual Bengali silk in which a well-wrapped photograph of my father late Mr Suresh Chandra Bose was found. …I kept asking my father as to who is that rustic-looking man who comes to you often from Basti. My father parried my frantic enquiries. My father used to chat for hours together with this man in his private room. [1]

  While some Bose family members may want to dispute today what late Lalita Bose actually felt, the fact is that on 10 February 1986 she, Dr MA Haleem and Vishwa Bandhav Tewari moved the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court against the state of UP, Chief Minister, state Home Secretary and District Magistrate of Faizabad.

  Through their lawyer Robin Mitra, the petitioners described the enquiry by Nibedon-Arora-Hussain team as “a great national service”. They lamented that despite interest evinced by the public, the District Magistrate was merely “sitting tight over the matter”. They stated how perfunctorily the police had made an inventory of the items left by Bhagwanji. To preempt the state government’s plan to auction Bhagwanji’s belongings, they argued that “the petitioner No 1 [Lalita Bose] being the niece of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose has a right to the property, if the nameless saint is found to be Netaji”.