India's biggest cover-up

by Anuj Dhar

  Another secret follower of Bhagwanji was renowned Sanskrit scholar, philosopher and tantra expert Gopinath Kaviraj. One day, so reads the diary of a follower, Sampurnanand asked Bhagwanji: “Do you know Tripathi?” Bhagwanji replied that he had heard his name. Sampurnanand then said: "Tripathi's guru Gopinath Kaviraj has told him about you."

  “Tripathi” was then a state minister and would-be central minister Kamalapati Tripathi, a believer in tantric rituals. One can only conjuncture what had actually made Dr Sampurnanand broach the question of Subhas Bose’s fate—as was claimed by a former IB man—with Clement Attlee when the former British Prime Minister visited Lucknow in October 1956. [See Appendix V. The land of conspiracy theories]

  In a Bangla letter to Leela Roy in 1964 Bhagwanji wrote that according to the Indian government estimate “someone dead is not in south of the Himalayas”. “Do you understand? That is, to say that officially Mritabhoot is not on this side…on the other side; somewhere else”.

  Bhagwanji’s strange syntax had to do with caution, sounded to him by Leela Roy. “The vocabulary you use, you cannot change and the vocabulary would lead to your identification. No Bengali uses the words, idioms etc. that you do,” she wrote. He replied: “Can you write 20/25 pages in diametrically opposite composition and send to me? I will see if I can change.” [39] So he took great care in anything that he wrote. He used capital letters while writing in English and Devnagari script for Bangla.

  Bhagwanji is believed to have reckoned that it was around 1959 that the Government came to know of “his” being in the vicinity of India. The year was significant because this was the time when the Shaulmari sadhu emerged from nowhere. Since it has been alleged that he was propped up by the Intelligence Bureau, it must be asked what prompted that sort of measure at a time when the Bose mystery had ceased to be a burning issue.

  Bhagwanji offered an alternate abstruse explanation: He himself came up with the Shaulmari stratagem so as to mislead “combine”. The believers rebuff the suggestion that “combine” was an imaginary opponent. Bhagwanji counted the then Indian leadership as part of “combine”.

  Your Dead Man not only believes, but he knows directly that Sri Sri Ma Jagadamba Durga Kali herself is sitting inside him and driving him. There are hundreds of proofs. The biggest proof is MacArthur’s final report. Staying like this till now even after that report and its resultant efforts! That is why the arrangements had to be made for the game of Shaulmari. When we used to discuss each move of the JN combine amongst ourselves, I used to choke with laughter. [Translated from Bangla, except the highlighted words]

  “You had mentioned about going to Shaulmari,” he wrote to Sunil Das once, adding, “go there and you will see the mystery...he [Saradanand] has written this time that he liked Pabitra [Mohan Roy] very much....” On another occasion he spoke, “If you go to Shaulmari, you will find 200-300 letters in this faquir’s handwriting”.

  But what for?

  Written in lighter vein was his this comment in Bangla: “Darned stubborn man, like Prahlad [a mythological figure who survived several attempts to kill him], he is alive—this is known to all three parties; they have put the bait on the hook but are not able to pull the fish out on the land.”

  Bhagwanji claimed he created the “parallel bluff” of Shaulmari to keep “combine” occupied. That is why Saradanand himself did not emerge to proclaim in front of a big crowd who he really was and end the controversy. If he had, “combine” would have been “free to concentrate” in one direction, in search of the “real” person. Bhagwanji further claimed he couldn’t lower his guards because any “carelessness” on his part would “give the key of the puzzle” to combine. “Then this ghost that is sitting on their shoulders would be removed by the ghostbusters.” [Translated from Bangla]

  Stranger still was Bhagwanji’s assumption that the Americans were part of “combine”. This was for the “damage” he had caused them in post-1945 period as his big gameplan for a new order in Asia and also a payback for their contribution to the INA's defeat. Bhagwanji was determined not to be taken alive and hinted that he carried a cyanide capsule:

  Your Dead Man carries something within him, is fully sufficient to bring eternal sleep within 6 seconds...that something cannot be activated accidentally...no one of the combine can ever expect to get him alive.

  All this sounds crazy, but it has been reported that in the sixties the CIA had actually “trained senior Indian intelligence officers and helped build the nucleus of India’s counter-intelligence network”. [40] Quite interesting was journalist Barun Sengupta’s evidence before the Khosla Commission that intelligence sleuths of various hues were looking for Subhas Bose in India in the 1960s.

  Whenever there is a rumour or a story, the central intelligence people and the state intelligence people go and investigate into it. They also come to us [journalists] for further enlightenment and to know whether we have any information. Not only they but even foreigners like Americans, Britishers and Russians go there and investigate into these things. …If they are sure that Netaji had died in the plane crash, why…go there to chase this wild story? [41]

  And rather perplexing was Gobinda Mukhoty’s point during the argument session before the same commission on 21 January 1974 that the Intelligence Bureau had sought to know from him [Barun] on November 6, 1970 on Netaji’s disappearance”. Mukhoty “asked if the Government was certain about Netaji’s death, what was the purpose of the IB asking the correspondent about Netaji?” [42]

  My own guess is that Bhagwanji’s identity and whereabouts were known to some higher-ups in India from the late 1960s onwards. He himself alluded to this in Oi mahamanaba asey: “My real identity is that I am a dust particle of Bengal. My false identity is Frankenstein, which I neither did want nor deserved. You have raised this Frankenstein and now feelers are being sent to him. It is too late.” [Translated from Bangla, except the highlighted words]

  From 1967 or so Bhagwanji was frequently visited by then UP Home Minister Chaudhury Charan Singh. The would-be Chief Minister, Union Home Minister and Prime Minister remained in the good books of Bhagwanji until the mid or late 1970s. He praised Singh’s ideas and efforts about improving India’s agrarian output.

  Perhaps Ajit Singh would be able to throw some light about his father’s reported acquaintance with Bhagwanji. Should the Lok Dal chief—currently a minister in the Congress-led government—speak out by any chance, there is a most revered guest in our midst who might be implored with folded hands to help in clarifying if there was anything more to his arrival in India than we have been told.

  Check out another insupposable from Charanik:

  The baby ran to the mother without fear and trusting her, but instead of giving shelter to him he was handed over to the dragon. Can there be a worse act of betrayal? When he was helpless and was not able to find a way to protect himself, General Death told him, “I am showing you the way to India as a representative of India. You go to India—the people will accept you and give you shelter.” The leader of the Indian government gave him shelter because of the pressure of public opinion. [Translated from Bangla]

  Bhagwanji claimed that he under the nom de guerre of General Death or General Shiva had played a part in the Dalai Lama’s historic escape to India. But how do we reconcile it with the official version that the only outside helping hand to the Lama was of the CIA?

  Lowell Thomas, Jr is a man who has been a part of history. Along with his father Lowell Thomas, he was the last Westerner to reach Lhasa before the 1949 Chinese invasion. In 2005, the Dalai Lama bestowed on him the International Campaign for Tibet’s Light of Truth Award. Thomas’s 1961 book The Dalai Lama throws some light on an event which probably occurred around 1955 and involved “a spokesman for the Khamba tribesmen”.

  He called himself General Siva, a threatening title, for Siva is the god of destruction in the Hindu religion. We may call him General Death as the nearest English equivalent. [43]

  According to t
he book, General Siva was of some help to the living Buddha. But who was this General Death?

  “A total mystery to me,” Thomas, a former Lt Governor of Alaska, wrote to me when I emailed him a few years ago.

  Bhagwanji made many such imagination defying claims and statements to his followers. One of his two most staggeringly inconceivable claims had it that he from behind the scenes played a pivotal part in the Bangladesh liberation war.

  You are free to scoff at it, but the believers take it as the truth. Sunil Das, the publisher of Oi mahamanaba asey, recalled before the Khosla Commission on 6 September 1972 that in 1965 Leela Roy had forewarned her close associates about the influx of a large number of refugees from east Pakistan. "In March 1971 Indo-Pak conflict came about... Whether this was a hint sent to her or whether it was a divine disclosure I do not know."

  Das did not tell the commission that months before the 1971 war started, Bhagwanji had asserted that “free Bangladesh will be established due to the secret moves of a particular great chess player” and that “after some time history will record that this area was known for a short time as east Pakistan”. He even said that after freedom in the east, “the other side—Pakistan, Balochistan—will turn volatile”. Oi mahamanaba asey has many astounding passages relating to Bangladesh:

  One voice, very well known, was heard from the free autonomous radio station. The announcer said, “You will now hear a voice which you have always known.” That voice was heavy and heart-touching. It said: “I have gone around many countries in the world with a rifle on my shoulders. I was in Germany and Japan and have roamed around in many places in Southeast Asia. For the last nine months I was with you and even now I am with you.” …

  Why do we hear in the southern, eastern, western and northern areas of Bangladesh the same story that there is someone, some secret power! He is behind everything, even the inspirer of our imprisoned leader! [Translated from Bangla]

  Hidden truth or hallucinatory patchwork, I really don’t know what to make of all this. Bhagwanji’s two closest followers in Naimisharanya and Basti, Srikant Sharma and Durga Prasad Pandey said that during that period former revolutionary Amal Roy involved himself in running of a clandestine radio on India-east Pakistan border at the instruction of Bhagwanji, who knew of the developments “before they were reported on the All India Radio”.

  I also heard claims that certain Bangladeshi fighters of those times alluded to the guiding hand of a great figure during the war, but I never saw any of the contemporary press reports people said they had seen. What I find quite interesting is that Sitaram Omkarnath is said to have played some role in the war. The holy man, who had some sort of a connection with Bhagwanji, “directly imparted his spiritual power to the freedom struggle” states a website dedicated to him. It further claims that a general had made a statement that “the commander-in-chief of this war was indeed Thakur!” [44] This general, I learnt from an article by senior journalist Praveen Swami, an authority on Indian intelligence and national security matters, was Omkarnath’s follower Sujan Singh Uban. In 1971 the Uban headed and R&AW-controlled Special Frontier Force had carried out military offensives in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. According to Swami, who is too sophisticated a person to take any interest in the holy man angle to the Bose mystery, Uban “later said he had received a year’s advance warning of the task that lay ahead from the Bengali mystic, Baba Omkarnath”. [45]

  In a letter to a follower, Bhagwanji dissected the semantics of names used in the Ramayan and disapproved of Omkarnath's approach in his translation of the epic. Also located in Rambhawan was a newspaper story about secret visits of some special person, not Omkarnath, to then east Pakistan. I don’t have the details of this newsitem, but I do have a clipping from Anandabazar Patirka where Sheikh Mujibur Rahman himself is quoted as saying on 17 January 1972 that “the fact that Bangladesh has become a reality proves that Netaji is alive”.

  “It’s just a general statement. Only someone with a fragile grip on reality can think along the lines the Bhagwanji’s followers do.”

  I actually browsed through declassified US records of the 1970s—as far as it was possible for me to—and found only one reference to Subhas Bose. A derisive, stray comment made in a State Department telegram originating from the US embassy in Dacca on 3 January 1975. Referring to the reported shooting of one political leader, the embassy telegram said that unless his body was displayed, “there will soon grow up stories that he still lives, a la Subhas Chandra Bose”. The Indian records were destroyed long ago and the surviving ones are classified.

  Yes, it is matter of common knowledge that Subhas’s memories were summoned as a psychological boost during the Bangladesh liberation war. Bose’s classmate at Cambridge and later ICS officer CC Desai, who used to be India’s envoy to different countries including Pakistan before becoming an MP, saw shades of his friend in Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s tactics. Mujib’s “directives immediately before Yahya troops struck, may be well compared with Netaji’s thesis of anti-imperialist struggle and Samveda propounded by him in 1933”. [46]

  It is well known that Mukti Vahini’s war cry “Joi Bangla” was inspired by “Jai Hind”. So, Mujib’s statement had to be a metaphoric expression, or he was misquoted. Certainly nothing more than that!

  But if you flipped through Oi mahamanaba asey and, for a moment, believed in the contents as Bhagwanji’s followers did, you would be tempted to think of Mujib’s statement as a Freudian slip. Because Charanik claimed that “in the three decades between 1945 and 1975 one man has attained a divine power, much above all physical powers, which is beyond comprehension of mind and senses”. [Translated from Bangla]

  If it is of any help, here’s how Bhagwanji put it in English: “You cannot comprehend to what end your Mahakaal is working and with what powers. Your imagination will be awed, your brain will reel if even by chance you could come to know even a fractional part of his present activities.”

  But why despite such “powers” did he remain in hiding? What was he afraid of? Is it not cowardly for someone who talks so big not to have the courage to come out?

  Cowardice is not the right word. Whatever it is, it is an entangled issue involving interrelated conundrums for which there are no quick and simple answers. Bhagwanji was asked several times why he was not going public. His standard answer would be: “It won’t be in India’s interests.” It would seem that circumstances and his “post-death” activities had put him into some sort of spot. He talked about his having been branded an “international war criminal” and his playing some unpublicised role in world politics, all of which put together made him spend years within the confines of four walls—from where he would regularly escape to do things he said people could not imagine.

  For the last example I have saved the most staggering of them all. If this Bhagwanji really thought he did what he claimed, then, you would have to agree with me, he was entitled to feel that his emergence would have landed India into serious trouble.

  Bhagwanji would claim that he had been involved in the efforts to drive the American forces away from Vietnam. For argument’s sake, if there’s any truth in this fantastic claim, and if this man was indeed Bose, then this would have been reason enough to make his reappearance rather risky in those days of intense Cold War rivalries. Viewed in this assumed context, Bhagwanji's claim that India would face international wrath by way of economic sanctions and even armed intervention if his location was disclosed rings somewhat credible.

  Once in the early 1970s, Bhagwanji claimed that "about 50-60 wars have been fought in the world since WWII, but America has not been able to win even a single one of them". The cigar-chomping holy man pronounced "single" as "thingle"—mocking someone he did not like. "Churchill could not pronounce ‘S’; I am alive to tell you this." In a similar tone, he claimed that on his advice Ho Chi Minh dumped free cocaine and opium in south Vietnam. "The Americans have consumed at least a thousand tons till now—avidly," he chuckled, adding derisivel
y, "Keep a pet dog in my name if America, the greatest might of the present world, can win north Vietnam even in thousand years." [Translated from Bangla]

  Muddying the water further was this claim in Oi mahamanaba asey that

  whenever the country at war had meetings with foreigners, on one side of the meeting used to be, in Mahakaal's words, "A pride of nine generals and a shadow behind them." Charan does not want to say whose shadow it was because that shadow has caused many upheavals in the world in the last few decades. [Translated from Bangla, except the quote in bold.]

  That's kind of interesting because I saw a grainy picture, evidently lifted from an old newspaper, in some conspiracy theory booklets with the claim that it showed Bose at the conclusion of the Paris peace talks between Vietnam and the US on 23 January 1973. But Bhagwanji was in Basti on this day, celebrating his birthday and telling his followers about his secret activities in Vietnam. For instance, he said he was lodged at a "fort" by his gracious host Minh. He wouldn't specify its location and would only say that it faced a bay and mountains in the distance. The first thing he did after checking into his room was to see if it had been bugged—it wasn't. Then he went out on the balcony and saw bombers carrying out strikes far away. Any logical deductions are obviously not possible with such sketchy details.

  Bose admirer Siddhartha Satbhai, a Dutch national, and I traced the original of the purported January 1973 picture to an Associated Press wire photo. The picture turns out to have been taken on 25 January 1969 in Paris. It unmistakably shows the Vietnamese delegation at the first open session of the truce negotiations. The eight officials at the table include Le Duc Tho, the former revolutionary and general who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. Chief negotiator and former foreign minister Xuan Thuy is sitting on left in the cropped picture used in this Kindle edition. He's facing the American delegation led by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge on other side of the big round table. Seen in the picture is a bearded man with an intense look on his face, standing alongside expressionless journalists and other officials behind the Vietnamese.