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THE NATION: NETAJI MYSTERY
Refusing To Die
Fifty-six years after Subhas Chandra Bose's plane crashed,
the Mukherjee Commission goes globe-trotting in a bid to end speculations
about his death
By Sumit Mitra
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HERO
FOREVER: Two panels that confirmed Bose's death have not found acceptance
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It is still within
the logic of drama that Hamlet's father reappeared after his death before
his son and his friend. Guess what would have happened if the slain king's
visitations were periodic and stretched over every nook and corner of
Denmark?
There is a similar ring of melodrama about the
disappearance of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, arguably the most romantic
of the Indian freedom fighters. Every witness says he died in an air crash
on August 18, 1945 in Taipei, but many people, including most of his family
members, disagree. Till the 1970s, there were testimonies galore of Bose
being sighted at many unexpected places-as a general in the Chinese People's
Army, a businessman in Mongolia, a prisoner in Stalin's Gulag and, of
course, in several corners of India masquerading as a godman. The Union
government had instituted two inquiries, the Shah Nawaz Khan Committee
in 1956 and the G.D. Khosla Commission in 1970. Both concluded that the
Indian patriot, who had befriended the axis powers to fight the British,
died in a Taipei hospital after the Japanese bomber carrying him to Dairen
in Manchuria, crashed seconds after take-off.
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"There's no shred
of primary evidence to support the view that he had not died in
the air crash."
Sugata Bose, Netaji's grandnephew
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If Bose were alive now, he would have been 103.
So now there are not too many people who claim to have met him at a street
corner the other day. But the demand for a fresh probe into his "disappearance"
was so strong that the Vajpayee Government had to institute yet another
inquiry in 1999, this time by former Supreme Court judge M.K. Mukherjee.
This followed a unanimous resolution passed by the West Bengal Assembly
calling for a third probe and the Calcutta High Court directing the Union
Government, in response to a public-interest petition, to further inquire
into Netaji's disappearance. The Government was in a double bind like
its predecessors. The Morarji Desai administration (1977-79) had discarded
the findings of the previous commissions under pressure from then MP and
Netaji's associate, Samar Guha. The P.V. Narasimha Rao government's move
to bring back Bose's ashes from Japan was scuttled by the leader's overzealous
fans. The Vajpayee Government had to abandon a move to confer the Bharat
Ratna on Netaji posthumously in the face of similar protests.
Next month, the Mukherjee Commission, which
has examined 24 witnesses in India including Bose's private secretary
E. Bhaskaran and Indian National Army heroes Pritam Singh and Lakshmi
Sehgal, will begin a globe-trotting hunt that will take it to Britain,
Japan, Taiwan and Russia. "There are over 700 declassified files
in the British Library pertaining to the Indian National Army," says
Mukherjee. In addition, there are documents from the Soviet archives that,
some historians claim, offer another perspective on Netaji's death. While
obtaining a fresh angle to the Bose story in post-Cold War archives is
a matter of speculation, a big question mark undoubtedly hangs on the
panel's ability to accomplish the task of finding "if he (Bose) is
dead, whether he died in the plane crash as alleged".
The incident took place 56 years ago at a troubled
time when the Japanese were more anxious to retreat than to keep records.
Besides, none of the seven survivors of the 13 passengers is alive. The
Shah Nawaz Committee had examined five of them, including Habibur Rehman,
Bose's adjutant. Bose, who had been severely burnt, breathed his last
at 8 p.m. at the Japanese military hospital nearby. It is quite impossible
for the Mukherjee Commission to reconstruct the story from primary evidence
as not only the people but the landmarks too have disappeared. While the
hospital folded up with the Japanese retreat, there is little chance of
salvaging bits of air-to-ground conversation as it was not recorded in
those days.
Bose's body was reportedly cremated in Taipei
itself. Later, the ashes were flown to Fukuoka and carried onward to Tokyo
where, after a low-key funeral ceremony, the urn containing the ashes
was kept at the city's Renkoji Temple. It is preserved there even today.
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