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THE NATION: NETAJI MYSTERY
A Question Of Ashes
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Aug 6, 9, 1945
US drops atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Aug 14, 1945
Japan surrenders. Bose says INA will never concede defeat.
Aug 15, 1945
Bose leaves Singapore for Bangkok and then Saigon.
Aug 18, 1945
Plane with Bose on board crashes in Taipei, allegedly killing him.
1949
Brother Sarat Bose refutes crash story.
1956
Nehru sets up Shah Nawaz Committee.
1956
Brother Suresh Bose
disagrees with findings.
1970
G.D. Khosla Commission
backs Nawaz panel.
1978
Morarji Desai discards reports of both commissions.
1996
Plans to confer Bharat Ratna
on Bose dropped.
1999
Vajpayee sets up Mukherjee Commission.
2001
Grandnephew says no
evidence points to death
in plane crash.
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The
task before the Mukherjee Commission now is to ascertain "whether
the ashes in the Japanese temple are the ashes of Netaji". Despite
dramatic advancement in genetic identification technology, the answer
to this burning question is not easy to get. The deputy director of the
Central Forensic Research Institute has testified before the commission
that there should at least be a piece of bone in the ash sample to match
it with the DNA configuration of Bose's relatives. Only a scientific miracle
will make it possible for a bone tissue to retain its cellular content
after burning for hours in a crematorium.
Whether the DNA holds the secret to the INA supremo's
death is a question that the Mukherjee Commission alone can address. Of
more significance is the country's obsession with the belief that the
tragic end of Bose in Taiwan was no more than a red herring, the revolutionary
hero having used it to slip into some unknown country to avoid persecution
by the Anglo-Americans. The rider to it is that Jawaharlal Nehru, who
did not see eye to eye with Bose, helped to keep the "story"
alive because he did not want a "rival" in independent India.
The mass hysteria was triggered partly by the
statements of some members of the Bose family and partly by the Forward
Bloc. Sarat
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"The story of
the air crash is false. Most of our family members and a large number
of Indians feel so."
Subrata Bose, Netaji's nephew
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Bose, Netaji's politician brother, said as early
as in 1949 that the Azad Hind Fauj leader did not die in the air crash.
In 1964, Amiyanath Bose, Sarat Bose's son, declared that the Shah Nawaz
Committee findings were not acceptable to the family. And now Subrata
Bose, the youngest son of Sarat Bose who has recently been elected to
the state Assembly on a Forward Bloc ticket, has joined the chorus that
the story of his uncle's death in an air crash is concocted. "This
is the view of not only most of our family members but of a large number
of Indians," he says.
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"My task is to find
if he is dead and whether he died in the air crash."
M.K. Mukherjee, Former Judge
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But the family also includes those who believe
the previous inquiries have settled the issue-Krishna Bose, Sarat Bose's
daughter-in-law and Lok Sabha member, and her son Sugata Bose, the Gardiner
Professor of History at Harvard. Says Sugata: "There is not a shred
of primary evidence to support the view that Netaji hadn't died in the
Taihoku air crash." Anita Pfaff, Netaji's daughter who lives in Germany,
also shares this view. So did the late Sisir Bose, Krishna's husband who,
shortly before his death in 1999, refused to testify before the Mukherjee
Commission.
In January 1941, Sisir Bose was at the wheel
to spirit away his famous uncle from their Elgin Road house, kept under
close surveillance by the police. Netaji's great escape through Kabul
and the USSR to Germany is the stuff of folklore. It has also lent substance
to the belief that he did yet another Houdini act at the close of the
World War II, one afternoon at the Taipei airfield. There is no proof.
But who says mass hysteria is based on proof?
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