India's biggest cover-up

by Anuj Dhar

  They even suggested that Bhagwanji’s books, correspondence etc. could be sent to the National Archives. The court’s intervention was sought as there was “no other alternative remedy available” due to “the callous inaction of the opposite parties,” especially the Chief Minister, who had been “absolutely unreasonable”.

  Making up for the executive’s inaction, Justices SS Ahmad and GB Singh announced an interim relief on the same day. The opposite parties were called upon to file a counter-affidavit “within six weeks”. (It would take 13 years before the government responded). The main request was agreed to. The DM of Faizabad was ordered to oversee the preparation of an elaborate inventory, giving details of and about the items, correspondence, books etc. found from Bhagwanji’s room at Ram Bhawan and then keep all these in his safe custody.

  The High Court order should have made news across the nation but it didn’t. Maybe because the event was overshadowed by a major development people say was triggered by a deliberate political move of the Government in Delhi. In January 1986, an appeal was filed at the district court in Faizabad to unlock the Ram Janambhoomi-Babri Masjid complex. The petitioner was not a party to the dispute. But that did not deter the judge in showing an “utter disregard for procedure” and in “undue haste” he allowed the prayer promptly.

  There was a heated discussion in the UP Legislative Assembly on 25 February 1985. Krishanpal Singh and Nityanand Swami, who would be the Chief Minister of Uttaranchal in future, asked about Bhagwanji and Jagdambika Pal of Congress—still in public life— too spoke about the need for an extensive probe, even though he saw no Bose link. Standing in for the government, Finance Minister Baldev Singh Arya stated that an inquiry had revealed that Bhagwanji was not Subhas Bose. The members wanted to see the inquiry report, but the minister refused to make it public.

  The process of cataloguing Bhagwanji’s belongings lasted from 23 March 1986 to 23 April 1987 during which 2,673 mostly invaluable items left by the holy man were described in an inventory. This inventory and the wealth of information which has piled up since 1985 is a great help in profiling the unseen Bhagwanji. Though immersed in spiritual practices and studies—he had loads of unabridged treatises on Hinduism in Sanskrit, Hindi and Bangla—Bhagwanji was also a man of culture and refinement in the Western sense of the term. He mostly survived on a shoestring budget, but never let go the tastes of a man who had seen affluence and been to places. A passing remark by a follower about her brother in Stuttgart made Bhagwanji recall his own strolls in the scenic German city. Another day he thought back to his “student days” in London.

  Bhagwanji occasionally puffed away at his pipe or rolled a cigar in his mouth and once mentioned that he picked up the habit from Mussolini. He had bread and butter for breakfast and savoured the best of Western literature—William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and PG Wodehouse being his favourites. Some of the other books in his collections were Gulliver’s travel by Jonathan Swift, The Odyssey and Iliad by Homer, The Bermuda triangle by Charles Berlitz, Flying saucers farewell by George Adamski, Life beyond death by Swami Abedanand, Celebrated crimes translated by IG Burnham, The Hunch Back of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Alice in wonderland by Lewis Carroll, The sacred Rome, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Flying saucers have landed by Leslie and Adamski.

  His taste in music was mostly Bengali and Indian classical. His collection included records of Pannalal Bhattacharya, KL Sahgal, Juthika Ray, Ustad Faiyaz Khan, Sumitra Sen, Dr Govinda Gopal Mukherjee, Atul Prasad Sen, Bismillah Khan, Vilayat Khan, Pt Ravishankar, Pannalal Ghosh, Dilip Kumar Roy, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Firoza Begum of Bangladesh and more. Among the popular musicians, he admired Bollywood great Naushad Ali not only for the music he created, but also his politeness and willingness to help friends from his rainy days. “The jewel amongst your radio announcers is Melville de Mellow,” Bhagwanji told a follower. “I have myself seen that many dramas from India have been translated in many Russian theatres,” he claimed on another occasion.

  The watches Bhagwanji probably wore on his long tours outside—but never displayed to any local so long as he lived—were Rolex and Omega gold. When these watches were discovered at Rambhawan, quite a commotion followed because Bose always wore round watches ever since his parents presented him a round Omega gold watch in his younger years.

  A typical discourse by Bhagwanji during a communion with his followers would be a heady mix of religion, history, current politics and sometimes an outlook for the future. He would summon his thoughts scattered far and wide to give examples of world events as if he had witnessed them first hand. Once he spoke of having been on a submarine for a long time, but more frequently discussed the possibility of life on other planets. He would refrain from referring to himself and whatever little remarks he made would be in passing, addressing himself in second person or as “your Dead Man”. He did not refer to Bose unless compelled to and used the phrase “your Netaji”. “This body” was another of his pet phrases while alluding to his past. "'This body’ was closely associated with Kazi Nazrul Hasan,” he said of the Bengali singer, a friend of Bose.

  The unlikely holy man made predictions which his followers claimed came true cent per cent. Hitting the bull’s eye was his 1971 English comment about Soviet Russia: “It is God’s truth, and take it from the horse’s mouth. Communism shall die at the place of its birth.” He missed it when he calculated around the same time that “within the next 15-20 years” the wisdom flowing from ancient Hindu scriptures would find great acceptability among high society in Russia and France. Bhagwanji was also said to have prophesied before 1970 that in time Germanys and Koreas would be united.

  When thinking back, Bhagwanji reflected on memories made around big people and events. Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Azad were no historical figures for him; he spoke as if he knew them intimately, dealt with them personally. In a retrospective mood one day, he spoke of having “no rancour” even though “it has been kept a secret that your Dead Man went [out of India] with Bapu’s full blessings and concurrence of the inner committee”. He said that Bapu [Gandhi] “wept like a child…praying against Partition but he was overridden roughshod”. He thoroughly detested Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, but said Indira was “very brave” and felt bad when she was assassinated in 1984. “No one should ever hurt a woman,” he told a follower. He could hear when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was delivering a speech at a Faizabad venue in 1985, not so far from Rambhawan.

  A follower asked Bhagwanji what he thought of Rajiv and he said: “Better than his grandfather.” Bhagwanji thought “bright future” awaited Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narasimha Rao. He remembered meeting “Chancellor Hitler” at his mountain resort and becoming privy to his interest in playing the violin. This was strange, for it was only in the 1990s that the Russians first displayed the war trophies they had picked up from the Reichschancellery in Berlin in 1945. Among them was a violin from Hitler’s private collection. It even carried his carved image on its head.

  Being under “24 hours vigil by the SS” was irksome, but Dead Man nonetheless lavished praises on German and Japanese soldiers for their patriotism. He sympathised with the Jews for their ordeal through the centuries and lauded them for their “unswerving faith in their destiny”. He spoke as if he had visited deep interiors of Tibet and China. “I know the Himalayan region like my palm.”

  This extraordinary holy man’s personal belongings were mostly books. His big collection included voluminous Britannica and other encyclopaedias and the complete collected works of Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhya. Books dealing with recent history, such as Between the lines and India: Critical years by Kuldip Nayar, Himalayan blunder by Brigadier John Dalvi, India’s China war by Neville Maxwell, carried his outpourings as comments on the margins. “A man always wrong,” Bhagwanji thought of Morarji Desai. He praised Dalvi, who had been taken a PoW during the 1962 war: “God bless you for your nobility and honesty. He saved you
from death and brought you back to your people.”

  In the same book, he scrawled several offensive words for Prime Minister Nehru. On page 316 of the book, against the PM’s quote “We were stabbed in the back,” he scribbled: “A lie—black as hell. He was a clown and a knave at that.” In the context of the 1962 war, he dubbed the Chinese as “100% correct students of Maharshi Kawtilya”, and the Indian soldiers as “simple honest sons of India” who were “offered as a ‘free sample’ at the altar of total stupidity, ego and greed!” Bhagwanji did not approve Dalvi’s lauding a certain army commander. “Aren’t your high praises sentimental?!” he asked, adding that “I know” the general “only as a ‘yesman-lapdog’ to the high command and the political bosses”.

  “Oh God, what blunders from HQ & ND”, “Oh, blast you all”, “Well, that’s that”—hardly the expressions of a holy man dwelling in a back of the beyond part of India.

  Durga Prasad Pandey of Basti beseeched "the great Bhagwanji" for an access through his letter in English as he knew it." An old and very religious ex-revenue officer late Sri Jawala Misra Vakil, Basti, told me as to your identity while breathing his last keeping full confidence in me to maintain the secrecy of this vital secret." Bhagwanji declined the access at that time. He dictated his response to another follower:

  I am a bona fide dashnami sanyasi and you will know that a man under the holy orders incurs death according to the civil laws. And a sanyasi is dead to his former life; it is in the keeping of divine Mother Durga and Father Lord Shiva…. In passing, you shall find cogent answers to all your hypotheses, queries, thoughts…both as expressed in your letter, and which remain unexpressed in your heart. Peruse with your heart calmly, quietly, lovingly. Every word, phrase, sentence and their constructions are pointers for you, they are pregnant with possibilities. Seek and thou shall find.

  As Hindu godmen go, Bhagwanji was clearly out of the ordinary. In the sense that any Indian holy man who could speak and write in English like him usually found salvation in Europe or America or at least had droves of hippies flocking to him in his sprawling ashram.

  Bhagwanji could have easily gotten out of his life of anonymity, misery and self-imposed solitary confinement—he described it as “vexatious dog-life”—but he wouldn’t. He did not even allow the number of his close disciples to go beyond a dozen at any given time. Each would keep an eye on the other for any violation of the culture of secrecy. For what? The best places to undertake spiritual quests in India have always been the Himalayan caves—Bhagwanji himself claimed to have lived in some—and not isolated houses in small towns. This man simply hid himself away, as if he was a fugitive of some sort.

  Bhagwanji's collection indicated the wide spectrum of his interest covering every conceivable topic—from terrorism in Punjab to the constitutional developments in Bangladesh. Followers recalled that he spoke like a bureaucrat while talking of the Motor Vehicles Act and like a counter-intelligence expert when alluding to the rings of spies in the nation. He claimed that in UP alone there were nearly 40 meeting points for international spies and the Indian agencies had penetrated only three of them.

  Quite a few books Bhagwanji possessed were interesting just by their subject matter. International Military Tribunal for the Far East: Dissentient judgment of Justice Radha Binod Pal—which he underlined at several places—Dr RC Majumdar’s epic The history of the freedom movement in India, Leonard Mosley’s The last days of the British Raj, Peter Sengar’s Moscow’s hand in India, Rajni Mukherjee’s Moscow’s shadow over West Bengal, Sita Ram Goyal’s Nehru’s fatal friendship and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The gulag archipelago.

  Bhagwanji’s daily dose of news came from a number of English, Hindi and Bangla newspapers. The Pioneer was said to be his favourite, but from the TIME magazine to the RSS mouthpiece Organiser, he browsed a host of magazines. He took note of events by underlining the newspapers. For example the death of British botanist and birth control advocate Marie Stopes in 1958 and the assassination of Bangladesh President Zia ur-Rahman in 1981.

  In Lalita Bose’s presence the team preparing the inventory also discovered several pictures of Bose family members, especially of Subhas Bose’s parents. Those who had sent these thought they were Bhagwanji’s parents as well. One of the holy man’s most treasured possessions was an old-fashioned umbrella sent to him from Kolkata with a note that it was of “father Janaki Nath Bose”.

  Lalita Bose also came across typed copy of her father’s lengthy testimony before the Khosla Commission on 17 August 1972. It turned out that Suresh Bose had insisted that his brother was still alive at that time. This assertion of his had been duly recorded in the testimony. Lalita Bose noted that the typed copy bore corrections in her father’s handwriting. She was dumbfounded when the summons sent by the Khosla Commission to her father in West Bengal was located in Rambhawan. She was not around when a copy of her freedom fighter cousin Dwijendra Nath Bose’s testimony before the same commission was located among the heaps of papers. Suresh Bose was not the only family member who had “fantasized” about a living Subhas Bose more than two decades after his reported death.

  During his examination, Dwijendra Nath, son of Subhas’s eldest brother Satish, was pointedly asked if he had tried to find out the identity of Parda wala baba, or the holy man behind the curtain, a name by which Bhagwanji was sometimes referred to in Naimisharanya and Basti. He denied that he was his uncle. But then many confirmed followers of Bhagwanji like Pabitra Mohan Roy and Samar Guha also deposed before this commission and said absolutely nothing of their holy man connection. They followed as an article of faith his directive to make endeavours to get the air crash theory dismissed, and not go beyond.

  Dwijendra strayed into the areas deemed forbidden for Bhagwanji’s followers. He was asked by a counsel if he had indeed made a statement on 6 March 1966 in Thiruvanathapuram that “Netaji was still alive and was working in a place very near the borders of India”. “Yes I did say,” Dwijendra affirmed. An Amrita Bazar Patrika report on his statement was quoted and brought on record: “I can tell you that last September, Netaji had an attack of pneumonia and was examined and treated by some very eminent doctors whom I know, but I won’t name. Mr Bose told reporters.”

  “Yes, I did say that,” Dwijen told the commission—without any hitch.

  A letter available with a Bhagwanji follower proves that in 1966 the counsel of Dr SK Das, former personal physician to President Rajendra Prasad, had been sought for then ailing Bhagwanji. Was Dwijen making an allusion to this?

  Asked why Subhas Bose was still in hiding, Dwijendra retorted that “it was not correct to say that”.

  “He is still working for India. He will come out...at the appropriate time....”

  “Therefore, may I understand that your case is that though all these sadhus are not Netaji, but Netaji is still alive?” the counsel put to him.

  “Yes.”

  “And it is within your knowledge.”

  “I do not get this information day to day, I mean, where he is. Not only me but there are others also, I would not name them, of course, who get information after he had left a place say months or one year after that Netaji was at such and such place.” [2]

  Who could have been passing Dwijendra the information about “dead” Bose’s movements? Was it the same group which kept Bhagwanji posted about each and every development with direct to remote link to Subhas Chandra Bose?! Their letters found in Rambhawan read more like intelligence reports, and indeed some of them were INA secret service veterans and former revolutionaries.

  Sample this: On 24 January 1964 former revolutionary Sunil Das informed Bhagwanji about his “chance meeting” with Surendra Mohan Ghose, the lawmaker who had gone to Shaulmari ashram, in Bengal Chief Minister Prafulla Chandra Sen’s office. Forward Bloc chief Hemanta Basu was also with Das [pictured].

  Describing Ghose as “an agent of Sri Jawaharlal Nehru”, Das wrote:

  Then he [Ghose] went on to say the Allied Powers (t
his is Govt's opinion) have by common consent struck off the name of Netaji from the list of war criminals because they have officially concluded that Netaji was dead. Now, if Netaji reappeared he would immediately be declared an 'imposter' by the Allied Powers!

  I am also intrigued by an October 1970 newspaper report quoting Hemanta Basu proclaiming in a public meeting at Kolkata that “Netaji was still alive”. I wonder what would be the take of the current All India Forward Bloc leaders on this. Since they publicly support the Russian angle, they must throw light on what exactly Hemanta Basu meant. I am sure he was not implying that Bose was alive in Siberia in 1970.

  The followers from Kolkata and elsewhere regularly despatched Bhagwanji digests of newsitems concerning Subhas Bose—especially those dealing with the mystery. He carefully read everything, underlining the parts he regarded important. Rambhawan yielded clippings of all the articles Barun Sen Gupta wrote on GD Khosla’s sham inquiry. A copy of the Times of India story of 26 October 1982 titled “Soviet scholars revise opinion on Netaji” was also located. Some of the newspaper reports were not in original but typed copies. There was this supposed “extract” from an April 1970 story in the Times based on an interview with Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan in Pakistan by KN Kulkarni:

  To Mr Kulkarni’s utter surprise and ignorance over the fate of Netaji, Badsha Khan visualised that Subhas might have come earlier in 1947 but the fate and destiny helped him to reach somewhere other than this sub-continent. The day would come when Subhas might appear in the midst of his own countrymen, astounding the whole world like mid-day sun.

  Many of those who wrote to Bhagwanji viewed him as someone endowed with an immensely exalted persona. “You have attained the position of Brahma Rishi for the good of the nation,” extolled Surendra Singh Chaudhury in a letter. One Gurucharan Singh Bedi of Dera Baba Nanak, Gurdaspur, who had sent a copy of the Guru Granth Sahib to Bhagwanji, wrote, “Crores of Indians have put their eyes upon you”. A letter from Kolkata likened Bhagwanji to Bhishma, the invincible grand old warrior. Bhagwanji drew the same analogy for himself, saying he was “the legal inheritor of this earth” but was “stepping aside from the path of ruling”.