India's biggest cover-up

by Anuj Dhar

  Amiya also made his own enquiries about his uncle’s disappearance. I leave it to your discretion whether to rely on this London-educated barrister’s wisdom or that of a child specialist. Amiya, who was a lawmaker and high commissioner during the 1960s and the 1970s, came to contest the Taipei death story like his father and all the siblings, except Sisir. He did so publicly till his death in 1996. For instance, brothers Ashoke, Amiya and Subrata wrote to Prime Minister VP Singh in May 1990 that

  during the lifetime of our youngest uncle late Shailesh Chandra Bose, a statement signed by him and all sons of every one of Netaji’s brothers was issued to the Press at Calcutta stating that the “ashes” at Renkoji temple were not the “ashes of Netaji”.

  They termed any attempt to bring the Renkoji remains to India and fob them off to the people of India as Netaji’s ashes as “an act of sacrilege”.

  Interestingly, in his 27 January 1996 letter to then Leader of Opposition Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Amiya disclosed in Sisir’s and his presence Radha Binod Pal had told Sarat Bose about an American intelligence report dismissing the air crash story.

  In contrast to Amiya’s frank demeanour, Sisir was not very forthcoming in making his case. Nor did he appear before any of the official inquiries set up by the Government and enlighten them with his great discoveries that have given the professor the courage to allude that the findings of a former Congress party MLA carry more weight than that of the Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry.

  Dr Sisir Bose did not put his money where his mouth was; his own siblings said that in front of media in 2005. After the Mukherjee Commission was set up in 1999, it was expected of him and the Harvard professor to file affidavits as other family members did and help the commission and the nation in overcoming the controversy. When Sisir did not, the commission summoned him. He refused to appear. The nephew showed no inclination to cooperate with the inquiry into his uncle’s fate. “Since the end of World War II in August 1945 till today I have not received any direct information from him (Netaji) or about him,” he wrote to the commission on 22 September 2000 and made this eye-opening admission. “I have no personal knowledge as to the issues referred to the commission. I am therefore not competent to depose in this matter.” [5]

  The motive for Dr Sisir Bose in backing the official line on the sidelines, before media and inspired elements, has been explained in most uncharitable words by his own relatives as well researchers in private as well as publicly. Ever since Subhas and then his brother Sarat were ousted from the Congress, the Bose family in general and Sarat Bose family in particular has come to detest the grand old party. Dr Sisir Bose, in a sense, became the black sheep of the family by joining it and becoming an MLA on the Congress ticket.

  In April 1999 a rumour circulated in Kolkata that Sisir Bose would be given an official position in the new commission. This sent tempers soaring high. “I will file a case in court if Dr Sisir Bose is included in the probe panel,” Dr Purabi Roy foamed at mouth as she spoke to the Pioneer. "He is making money by trying to prove to the world that Netaji died in the air crash at Taihoku." [6]

  It wasn’t just Sisir, his wife Krishna Bose, a Congress MP who shifted her loyalties to the Trinamool Congress as the Congress faced a rout in Bengal, implored the Mukherjee Commission to excuse her “from any personal appearance as a witness”. She preached a former Supreme Court judge that he should study “the relevant primary evidence”. [7]

  The commission also summoned Sugata Bose to make an appearance so that he could spell out his stand. The professor was busy with his work in America, so the commission requested him “to send an affidavit duly sworn by him in respect of his contention that there is strong evidence that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was tragically killed in the aircrash in Taipei on 18th August, 1945 and that there is absolutely no evidence that Netaji was spotted in a variety of places subsequent to that day”. [8]

  Sugata never turned up and nor did he ever file any affidavit detailing his case for Netaji’s death in Taipei. What would have happened if he had can be gauged from the record of the examination of someone associated with him. Netaji Research Bureau treasurer Suman Chattopadhya, a stylish senior journalist we often get to see on TV, penned some articles supporting the NRB-GoI view around the time the commission was formed. He even prejudged the inquiry in one such piece: “It will be a sheer idiocy to even say that the findings of the third commission of inquiry would be different of the earlier two commissions [sic] appointed to solve the mystery of disappearance of Netaji.” [9]

  It was assumed that such a knowledgeable man must have based his writings on something solid. Summons for appearance before the commission were served on him by registered post, but he had no time to respond to the commission’s office situated in the heart of Kolkata. Justice Mukherjee stated on 28 September 2000 that “Chattopadhya has neither presented himself before the commission nor sent any communication explaining his failure to appear”. Issuing fresh summons, he pressed that if Chattopadhya failed to appear "this time as well" without any justifiable reason, "appropriate legal action" would be taken against him. Chattopadhya finally showed up on November 23. All those who were present there remember how he took the commission on an ego-trip:

  For the information of the commission, I like to mention that I am the translator of Netaji’s work from English to Bengali published by Ananda publishers. Currently, I am the treasurer of the Netaji Research Bureau. I had the privilege of travelling to various places including Tokyo, twice with then Prime Minister [Narasimha Rao]. During one of such visits, I took off time from my official assignment to visit the [Renkoji] temple to see for myself what was happening there. [10]

  Justice Mukherjee interrupted this pompous speech to ask Chattopadhya if his faith in the crash story stemmed merely from the reports of Shah Nawaz and GD Khosla.

  Chattopadhya responded: “As I told you, I am associated with the job for quite some time now. I tried to do my own research. It is a fact that I have not been able to get any fundamental evidence, but I have been trying to collate all the evidence that have been recorded already in the various forms.” [11]

  Justice Mukherjee wanted substance, so he put to Chattopadhya if he had “any documentary evidence” to back his case. “I don't have,” was the answer he got.

  Thereafter, a counsel drew Chattopadhya’s attention to one of his articles: ““You have written that John Figges who was the head of the British intelligence agency at Mountbatten’s headquarters conducted an inquiry into the plane crash... and came to the conclusion in his report that Netaji expired in that air crash. Do you have any copy of the said report?”

  “I don’t have any copy of such report. I am told that the report is in the India Office Library in London and I think it is now available for anyone.”

  “Did you yourself see the report?”

  “No.”

  “In the article you have mentioned that in 1945 the Government of India deputed two teams of representatives headed by Finney and Davies to Saigon and Taipei and they came back and submitted their reports. Do you have a copy of that report?”

  “No. I don't have. These are available in the office of Government of India.”

  “Have you seen the report?”

  “[I] Have seen the gist of the report.”

  “Gist prepared by whom?”

  “Prepared by biographers and scholars.” [12]

  The counsel felt irritated. “You have written the articles on the basis of this type of evidence?!” he poked Chattopadhya. Shaken, the journalist divulged that the moving force behind his belief was information given by Pranab Mukherjee. I don’t know why all of this comes around to this man.

  After Justice Mukerjee’s report was made public, Sugata Bose’s family went hammer and tongs against him. The tirade continues in His Majesty’s opponent.

  Back in May 2006, in a well-orchestrated media blitz, Krishna Bose and her children targetted Mukherjee. Krishna Bose’s editorial opinion in the Tim
es of India countered the commission’s finding and asserted that “Netaji’s remains were received in Tokyo by his trusted colleagues SA Ayer and Ramamurti”. Ahem! “The Taiwanese authorities have always said they could not provide any documentation of that period.” [13] To whom did they tell this to?

  Prof Sugata Bose’s write-up in the Indian Express on May 21—“The mortal end of a deathless hero”—attempted to beguile the readers into accepting a seemingly impartial view of a Harvard don and a representative of the Bose family. But what the paper described—on the basis of the professor’s piece—as “compelling facts” were selective tit-bits lifted from some readily available sources. The same pattern more or less is there in the book. Dishing them out, the professor pontificated in the Express article that “there is a good deal of pertinent documentary evidence regarding Netaji’s mortal end”. [14]

  A former judge of Supreme Court of India would have known better what constituted evidence. Especially, if he had studied the records of complete, on-oath depositions of Japanese and Indian witnesses to the events in 1945, examined the living ones and scoured through voluminous official records consigned to the Government of India’s vaults as classified material, not accessible from the Harvard University library.

  At the end of his Express piece, Professor Bose used the greatest stratagem available to naysayers to block the voice of truth seekers in this case. The Netaji mystery, Prof Bose wrote, “has been mercilessly exploited by a handful of people to make all sorts of fraudulent claims”. [15] His Majesty’s opponent uses it again, much to the delight of some of the reviewers mesmerized by the writer’s credentials—the Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, Harvard University. Here too the professor makes a sweeping remark that the widespread disbelief in Bose’s death in 1945 was misused by “a handful of people” to “advance their own interests”. In one swoop, he questions the motives of numerous eminent people, including great historian Dr RC Majumdar, whom the UNESCO had entrusted with its compilation of world history, and several members of his family, beginning with his own grandfather.

  Sorry to be bursting the bubble, people! Celebrated writer Nirad C Chaudhury, who was at one point of time secretary to Sarat Bose and whose niece married one of his sons in 1957, held up a mirror to those claiming they were celebrating Netaji’s life with no ulterior motive. In 1996 Chaudhury told an Asian Age correspondent at his residence in Oxford that Subhas Bose had become “a good business preposition” for a section of his family. He minced no words in identifying which section it was. It was the one which included his niece Krishna:

  The likes of Sisir Bose cannot shed new light on Netaji’s life. All they can do is encash on their rangakaka [uncle] and claim that they have been an inseparable part of his struggle. [16]

  I can’t leave out Sugata’s sister Sharmila, who had a go with her op-ed article “Death by war” in the Telegraph on 28 May 2006. Sharmila too conjured up a narrative on a grossly faulty premise, quite similar to her brother’s. She began with recalling her grandfather Sarat Bose’s initial reaction to the news of Subhas’s death and, building on this, claimed that since Sarat Bose never got the opportunity to hear the testimony of the survivors of the aircrash before his death, he could not “bring his brilliant barrister’s mind to the considerable and consistent evidence regarding the tragedy”.

  In case Sharmila’s pediatrician father did not tell her, she could have asked her dad’s elder brother whether or not her grandfather was able to examine anyone who claimed to have a direct knowledge of Bose’s reported death or the claim of his being alive somewhere. Being a barrister himself, Amiya Nath Bose knew better all the more. The following is what he mentioned to Prime Minister VP Singh in his joint letter with brothers Ashoke and Subrata:

  In August 1946, General Zaman Kiani, Col Habibur Rahman and Col Gulzara Singh, all top-ranking officers of the INA, spent a fortnight at our Woodburn Park residence. ...Our father Sarat Chandra Bose questioned Col Habibur Rahman in detail and rejected his version of the alleged air crash and Netaji’s death.

  Sarat Bose did examine Habibur Rahman, the main man of the air crash story. How can two highly gifted, top-ranking academic grandchildren of Sarat Bose gloss over what is known to their entire extended family?

  Referring to the mystery, Sharmila wrote that there was “no excuse” for the Indian subcontinent “to be held hostage to the endless conspiratorial fantasies”. [17]

  Oh boy! Some time back I googled “conspiratorial fantasies” and somehow landed on a Pakistani defence forum where Sharmila Bose was being showered with praises. On the Indian forums that I later visited she was being savaged. Apparently she had come up with some fanciful ideas about the Bangladesh liberation war. I gathered from a quick read that at one place she painted in good light a man known to us as the “Butcher of Bangladesh”. Then she went on to question the charges of mass rapes and other atrocities perpetrated by the Pakistani army, thereby accusing the Bangladeshis and the Indians of bloating the figures. I am not sure how the people of the subcontinent would take it, but in the West, where Sharmila Bose is based, any attempt to lower the magnitude of war crimes invites instant censure. They don’t brook any argument there.

  Recently the Times of India carried an interview with Sharmila Bose. Here she urged “India to set an example in openness to the region”. What she implied was that there should be comprehensive declassification of Indian records pertaining to the 1971 war so that her conspiracy theories can get into prominence. Responding to a question, she characterized the Bangladesh freedom war, “a brutal struggle for power” whose “no warring party”, including India, “is in a position to take the moral high ground”. In other words, she wants us to feel that the Pakistani leadership of that time wasn’t as in the wrong as we, the Bangladeshis and the right-thinking Pakistanis have made them out to be. “India’s role [in Bangladesh freedom war] can only be properly assessed if official documents from 40 years ago are made public....” [19]

  I am all with Sharmila Bose so far as declassification in general is concerned. I myself have secured release of some secret Indian Cabinet and Nixon administration records on the 1971 war under the RTI and Mandatory Declassification Review. But I cannot fathom why at no point of time has Sharmila Bose or her brother, or their mum, or their know-all late father uttered a single word about the crying need to declassify dozens of classified files on Subhas Bose being maintained by the Government of India? Sugata Bose doesn’t make any allusion to this inexcusable secrecy in his “well-researched” book. What sort of academics are these people? They are associated with the finest academic institutions in the US and the UK, where transparency and declassification are the buzzwords, and yet there’s no inclination on their part to seek disclosure of secret records concerning their own granduncle?

  This lengthy backgrounder serves to give you an idea about the milieu from which the writer of His Majesty’s opponent comes and the context of his approach towards the issue of Subhas Bose’s disputed death. This will also enable you to better appreciate the following dissection of the “evidence” he has cited in “A life immortal”.

  Prof Bose begins filling the space on page 306 of the chapter with the account given by SA Ayer: How he heard with doubts the news of Bose’s death and how he received “Bose’s” ashes in Tokyo in the company of Ramamurti, who has also been given considerable importance by the professor. The whole account has been clobbered together with such a finesse that not so informed readers, especially foreigners, would take it for gospel.

  The problem is that this gospel doesn’t come from saints. Since it comes from sinners, it can’t be gospel. SA Ayer, Ramamurti have been exposed in the official files as the plunderers of the INA treasure and personal property of Subhas Bose. By placing too much reliance on such characters, the professor proves the shallowness of his research and ulterior motives at the bottom of it. The charges of these individuals appropriating the INA property were levelled by many people over the ye
ars, so the excuse that all this was official secret hitherto won’t wash. The whole thing was so blatant that even Shah Nawaz Khan had to refer to it in his report. A member of the Bose family should have been quite sensitive to it, but I suppose Prof Sugata Bose, as well as his mother, think very highly of late SA Ayer and Ramamurti. On the backcover of His Majesty’s opponent one of the laudatory editorial reviews has been attributed to Arjun Appadurai of the New York University.

  Prof Appadurai does not teach history and his interest and expertise concerning Subhas Bose is mainly due to personal reasons as the son of late SA Ayer. The senior Ayer was surely a close aide of Bose at one point of time, but post-1945 he worshipped the ground Nehru walked on—as evidenced by his own unabashed proclamation before the Khosla Commission:

  It takes one to know one. Prof Bose’s father also admired Nehru a lot.

  Elsewhere in the book, the professor has indicated his proximity to Ramamurti’s nephew, son of Jaya Murti. He would have done it better to examine Murti junior on the issue of INA treasure handed over to his uncle, which then vanished and next we know from various accounts that Ramamurti and J Murti have struck it rich.

  On pages 307-308, the professor reproduces the account of Bose’s death made by Habibur Rahman. May I ask what is the big deal in quoting from the Shah Nawaz Committee report? Where is the additional information, where is the analysis? This account of Rahman, like his others before the investigating officers, adds to the contradictions he couldn’t have made if the events described by him had indeed taken place. For example, the professor writes that “Bose” gave his last testament to Rahman at the hospital before his death.