by Anuj Dhar
The former civil surgeon said virtually nothing during his examination before the Mukherjee Commission. However, he told me that Bhagwanji was “Lord Shiva” and that “he shall manifest”. He uses the phrase “went away” to describe Bhagwanji’s passing way in the 2010 documentary “Black box of history”. There are people who think Dr Mishra is “another Habibur Rahman”. They think he is refusing to identify Bhagwanji and not revealing the truth about his death as per his instructions. I don’t know about death, but having spoken to Dr Mishra, his wife and their sons it is quite obvious to me that they think that Bhagwanji was both a holy man and Netaji.
I have known some close followers of Bhagwanji for long and from them have heard about those who have departed. All carry a religious faith in Bhagwanji’s “return”. My experience of last decade or so with these people tell me that they have an extraordinary commitment to Bhagwanji/Netaji. To give you two examples, at one point of time one of them wasn’t as worried about his cancer condition as he was about the fate of the Mukherjee Commission. Another one was troubled just before he accompanied the commission to Russia. “I have taken huge loan for it, and I have a daughter who will be marrying in future,” he said.
I must emphasise that if we are discussing the Netaji mystery in 2012, it is for large part due to the life-long, selfless efforts of people directly or indirectly linked to Bhagwanji. The Mukherjee Commission was set up when Bhagwanji’s followers filed a PIL. The origins of the Khosla Commission are in Prof Samar Guha’s activism. When the Mukherjee Commission was functioning, Bhagwanji’s followers attended each and every session in India and abroad as if they were the biggest stakeholders in the case. They supplied a lot of information to a host of journalists and researchers but never sought publicity for themselves.
All said, I cannot accept all the beliefs of these people I greatly admire for their genuine, life-long commitment to Bose. As a researcher, it is binding on me to draw conclusions on the basis of what can be regarded as evidence in its normal sense. If there is something which is in the realm of paranormal, I am not the one who can dwell into it. But being a part of a society whose all strata put immense faith in things with no scientific explanation, I will not brand some of my friends who are waiting for Bose to return as “lunatics”. If I did so, I would be indulging in hypocrisy because when I look around, I find that many beliefs and occurrences unexplained by science or reason are having a wide currency not just in India, but throughout the world.
The belief in Bose’s not dying in 1945 and even remaining alive till date has also been kept alive by statements and allusions made by some spiritual leaders with large following. Some time back, millions mourned the passing away of Sathya Sai Baba, regarded by his followers as an incarnation of God. Among those who paid their last respects to him included people as big as Dr Manmohan Singh and Sachin Tendulkar. I saw an interview in the Sunday Times of India on 2 May 2011. The headline “Sai Baba, my god, dictated my every single judgment” was the quote of former Chief Justice of India PN Bhagwati.
One person who I think will match Bhagwati’s faith is Shivraj Patil. I wish the former Home Minister was there to hear his God publicly rejecting the Taiwan air crash theory during his 15 August 2007 discourse in praise of Bose.
In 2010 there was a newsitem declaring that Barfani Baba, a revered holy man whose followers think he is more than 200 years old, spoke of Bose’s continuing existence. Barfani Baba’s views on Bose has been dwelt on in a book authored by Ranjit Majumdar, a former senior Intelligence Bureau officer. I cannot name another highly revered holy man who once approached a niece of Bose and told her that he had seen "Netaji" in the Himalayas in the 1960s.
You are free to laugh this holy man talk away in the privacy of your room, but what do you do when the views offered are of someone whose circle of friends included Mikhail Gorbachev and Al Gore? Sri Chinmoy, an India-born spiritual leader who passed away in 2007 in the US, was fascinated with the Bose mystery. Unlike others, Sri Chinmoy actually wrote about it:
Even regarding Netaji’s plane crash and death, Nehru’s own public pronouncements contradicted each other. Either Nehru suffered from uncertainty-nights or perhaps he deliberately wished to mould reality-day in his own way! …God alone knows if Nehru deliberately misrepresented the truth or if he himself was a captive of uncertainty. [3]
The belief in the paranormal is universal and it goes right to the top. I don’t think I can cite a better example from India than that of President Pratibha Patil. On 25 June 2007, when she was a contender for the top post, Patil made a revelation at a religious gathering that a long dead holy man had given her “a ‘divine premonition’ of greater responsibility coming her way”. [4] The Times of India also reported the incident which revealed “another facet of her personality”—“this time, of a mystic nature”. [5]
If you will dare to scoff at the President’s experience with the paranormal, keep in mind that even the most powerful people in the world, whose mental faculties and experiences people like us cannot match even in our dreams, are reported to have confronted things science doesn’t agree exist. A phenomenon your smart co-worker at the office may dismiss as “madness” might have a believer in the man who owns the company. If you have been reading newspapers, you will know what sort of people line up to meet big spiritual leaders.
I do not share Bhagwanji’s and many others’ belief that we have been visited by alien beings using UFOs. Inter-stellar distances make that possibility impossible. Star Wars and Star Trek are always fun to watch but we know that no machine can ever fly anywhere close to the speed of light. Even if it did, still you won’t reach anywhere. There are stars and planets where even light will take decades, centuries and millions and billions of years to reach.
And yet I know that there is this genial-looking old man by the name of Jimmy Carter who holds a different view. If you do not know who he is, and are a big fan of someone who thinks that all UFO spotters are either insane or cheap publicity seekers, you should note that Carter was the President of the United States of America and he spotted a UFO himself.
President Pratibha Patil is not the only important person to have communicated with a spirit. Hillary Clinton, current US Secretary of State and wife of former President Bill Clinton, both quite popular in India, according to a recent book by Watergate star reporter and former Washington Post editor Bob Woodward, has been friendly with some famous psychic researcher “who often wrote and lectured about the existence of unseen spirits of the dead”. [6] Woodward claims that during a session, Hillary even reached out to the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi.
In my scrapbook of newspaper clippings, the oldest one is an AFP story of 16 February 1987 quoting then US President Ronald Reagan that he would like to meet Abraham Lincoln’s ghost “which haunts the White House”. Reagan’s wish was not fulfilled—the closest he came to was noticing that his dog would not enter the bedroom Lincoln once occupied and just stand “glaring as if he’s seeing something and barking”. His daughter and son-in-law were convinced that they had “really seen it”. They joined many others who are believed to have spotted a transparent person with a pinkish aura. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill...the list is long.
All that Bhagwanji said about himself or all that his followers speak of him is something worth paying attention to in case you think the foregoing narrative is fascinating. Bhagwanji said that before he returned to India he spent some time in Gyanganj, a mythical abode in the Himalayas. Also known as Siddhashram, Shambala and Shangri-La, this Never Never Land of the yogis has fascinated many Indians and Europeans for long, though no one could prove its existence. Most agreed that it was situated close to the Mansarover region in Tibet, but in a different dimension and, therefore, reached only by extraordinary people. “References to Gyanganj or secret ashrams can be found in Hindu scriptures such as Valmiki Ramayan and Mahabharat. Guru Nanak called it Sach Khand.” [7] Incidentally, the most well-know
n, recent book on Gyanganj was authored by Gopinath Kaviraj, who was in contact with Bhagwanji.
Bhagwanji claimed that in Gyanganj he met sages and yogis, several centuries old and capable of performing supernatural feats, like kayakalp—leaving one's body and entering into another. A note left by him reads: "Many times, while travelling across the Himalayas alone, I have been taken in as a guest in the ashram of the great revered Agastyadev [Vedic/Tamil sage Agastya]."
He would call himself a sadhak, a practitioner, in tantra. Being so, Bhagwanji said, was the consummation of a desire he had always had. “A voice speaks in me. I don’t know whose, I think it was there in my infancy—in my childhood: dormant but spurring—spurring me on and on. And oh! I sought after it: just like a musk deer.” Oi mahamanaba asey quotes him further on his life’s aim:
Shakti-sadhana is to awaken the kulakundalini. The Mother is called kulakundalini energy. Shakti-sadhana is to awaken and direct this power. This is also the aim of the extremely secret rajayoga. On the way of awakening the kulakundalini, a sadhak has the option to move ahead of the point where rajayoga stops. He will go on if he has the courage. Rajayogis do not know of this path. That is the main difference between a rajayogi and a tantrik—though both their aim is to awaken the kulakundalini.
Those who are really tantriks will never claim to be one. Anyone who says he is a tantrik, can never be one. The way of tantriks is very hazardous. They are bound by strict laws. The network of their organisation is spread all over the world; but India is their nerve-centre. A tantrik will never divulge their secrets even if you cut them into pieces. Tantra-sadhana is the ultimate of ultimates. [Words originally in English appear in bold]
What was the aim of his gathering these "supernatural powers" then? Bhagwanji said he had been using them and would use them in future for the good of India and other nations. In one of his letters to Pabitra Mohan Roy, he stated:
This old faquir of yours gives his most solemn word of honour in the inviolable and most divine name of Mother Jagadamba Durga Bhavani Chandi that Bengal, India shall rise again in Her full glory. Corrupt people on my Motherland’s soil will be completely eliminated gradually.
As I look at it, there is no evidence that I know of which might tell me that Bhagwanji lived after 1985 or is alive today. But if I come across some people of integrity claiming that someone is going to appear in the next few years to start a process to make India "so great that it cannot be explained in words", I might not attribute that sort of public interest myth to lunacy. Any talk, howsoever fantastic, of India becoming prosperous sounds good to my patriotic ears. As an earthling, I feel it would be such a good thing if indeed Lincoln's ghost is there in the White House. With such dead people still around, the world will be a better place to live in.
12. Resolving the mystery
There is no dearth of people who while appearing to be agreeing that Subhas Bose did not perish in the manner the Government wants us to believe in would still argue that the matter should be closed “because there is nothing we can do about it now”. I agree when anyone says that this nation has had enough of the Netaji mystery. But I don’t quite think that being a mute spectator or burying heads into the sand would be of any help in bringing about a full and final closure.
The Bose mystery has to be resolved and there is no way it is happening so long as we continue to have a defeatist outlook. Before we get into the mystery busting mode, we must free our minds of the cynicism fed to us over the years by all sorts of people, ranging from Bose baiters to his pseudo supporters. I regard the second category to be more vicious because they are difficult to spot. One indication that some of them at times give out could be seen in the distracting remark that “we should be celebrating Netaji’s life rather than wasting our time worrying about his death”.
Let’s be frank about it. The people who have done the most for protecting Bose’s legacy in India are those who endeavoured to know the truth about his fate. If it wasn’t for the likes of HV Kamath and Samar Guha, our government wouldn’t be according the rudimentary honour to Netaji that it does now. Beginning 1947, Kamath started making bids to have his leader’s portrait adorn Parliament house. It was only in 1978 that due to Guha’s efforts that President Neelam Sanjiva Reddy and Prime Minister Morarji Desai unveiled Netaji’s portrait in the Central Hall of Parliament amid the rendering of Jana gana mana, Vande matram, Subhasji and Oi mahamanaba asey. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then External Affairs Minister, called upon the historians and scholars to “find out why the Congress government had done injustice to Netaji by ignoring him all these years”. [1]
Left to Netaji’s “followers” whose overt agenda has been to place him at a rung below Gandhiji and Panditji, our Government would have never put up his portrait in Parliament, nor begin marking his birth anniversary in our missions abroad, nor erected a statue of his near the Red Fort, nor named some public institutions after him.
I heard an INA veteran criticizing Samar Guha for “sensationalising” the mystery and I had to remind him that “Prof Guha was the man because of whom all of you got status on a par with the other freedom fighters”. It was no mean achievement that Guha was able to achieve so much despite his being in the Opposition for almost throughout his political career. Compare his feat of getting Bose’s portrait in Parliament with “let’s celebrate Netaji’s life” propagator and Congressman Dr Sisir Bose’s 1985 fizzle.
In the run-up to the centenary celebrations of the Congress party, Sisir was asked to write a small biography of his uncle. The celebrations got over but there was no sign of the published book, even though Sisir had sent the manuscript to the party bosses much in advance. To find out why, Sisir wrote to AICC vice-president Arjun Singh. On 17 March 1986 he received the rejected manuscript with the explanation that “the aim and object of our committee is to produce mass literature for the common people”. [2] Not just that, Sisir was not even able to ensure “even a passing mention in the editor’s introduction” in the centenary’s key publication “100 Glorious Years: Indian National Congress 1885-1985”. The opening quote in the publication was a joke: Attributed to Nehru, it actually belonged to Bose. But then, it was only a quote. No one remembered who had conceived the Planning Commission in the pre-independence days.
It is not difficult to see why Kamath, Guha acted the way they did. Chandrachur Ghose was once asked by a foreign filmmaker as to why we were focussed on Bose’s “death” when we would have done better to talk about his life and times. Chandrachur, who runs www.subhaschandrabose.org, arguably the best website on Bose, all from his not so big pocket, retorted: “It is like saying, ‘I love my father; but I don’t care how he died.’” If your heart beats for Netaji, you are bound to get disturbed by the theories of his fate. But if you are a Congress party supporter, there is a good chance you won’t undergo any emotional turmoil thinking whether his end came in Taiwan, Russia or Faizabad.
It is the duty of every admirer of Netaji to keep his memories alive for posterity as well as make efforts to know what happened to him. Today, even his former detractors and foreign biographers admit that he was a front-ranking freedom fighter but for whom India would not have attained independence in 1947. In popular imagination he finds his place up there with Mahatama Gandhi.
If you check the Transfer of Power documents, you will know how badly the British Indian Army was affected by the psychological jolt delivered by Bose’s INA. So much so that in February 1946, Prime Minister Clement Attlee was told by a delegation of British MPs that most Indians were desirous that the British should leave India.
There are two alternative ways of meeting this common desire (a) that we should arrange to get out, (b) that we should wait to be driven out. In regard to (b), the loyalty of the Indian Army is open to question; the INA have become national heroes under the boosting of Congress…. [3]
A lengthy caveat must be inserted here to provide a correct perspective of our past, which is in stark contrast to its fantasy interpretati
on given over the years by loyal Congressmen and their cronies in historical and intellectual circles.
PR Dasmunshi wrote in January 2006 that “Pandit Nehru, notwithstanding his political differences with Netaji, saluted the historical march of the INA and came forward to defend it as a lawyer in the Red Fort trials”. [4] In August that year, while defending his rejection of the Mukherjee Commission report, his Cabinet colleague Shivraj Patil proclaimed in Parliament that Nehru had “donned the black coat and gown and went to the Red Fort to defend” the INA men.
That was all to that? The Transfer of Power records are clear that the Congress leadership’s defence of the INA was motivated by a desire to excel in the provincial elections of 1946. It was a complete turnaround from their previous derisive views.
The British saw through the Congressmen’s change of heart. Commander-in-Chief of British Indian armed forces General Claude Auchinleck wrote to Field Marshal Viscount Wavell on 24 November 1945 that “the present INA trials are agitating all sections of Indian public opinion deeply and have also provided the Congress with an excellent election cry.” [5] Similarly, Wavell was informed by Sir M Hallett of the United Provinces on 19 November 1945 that “the publicity on this subject (INA trials) has been a useful gift to political parties, especially the Congress, in their electioneering campaign”. [6]
The most damning document in the Transfer of Power volume V is a 23 October 1945 report by Brigadier TW Boyace of Military Intelligence for the Secretary of State for India in London. To understand the Congress gameplan, the MI had used a mole of theirs, Capt Hari Badhwar—who first joined the INA, then switched sides and finally gave evidence against the INA men during the Red Fort trials. It is a great shame that Badhwar should have led a comfortable life as a general in free India.
