Conspiracy Theories, Inquiries And The Truth

August 14, 1945 - The Japanese surrender to the Allied forces and accept their terms at the end of World War II (WW2).

August 25, 1945 - Indian newspapers report, quoting the Japanese News Agency, that Mr. Subhas Chandra Bose, the head of the Provisional Government of Azad Hind, had died in a Japanese hospital succumbing to injuries he sustained in an air crash. The air crash, reportedly occurred on Aug.18 near Taihoku (now Taipei) when Mr. Bose was traveling from Singapore to Tokyo. Mr. Bose was scheduled to hold talks with the Japanese government about his situation in light of the Japanese surrender to the Allied forces.

April 1956 - Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru constituted a committee headed by Congress MP (Member of Parliament) and formerly of the INA (Indian National Army or the Azad Hind Fauj), Shah Nawaz Khan which eventually reports that Netaji had indeed died in the air crash in Taipei.

June 1974 - The Indira Gandhi Government appointed a one-man commission headed by Justice GD Khosla and it upholds the Taipei crash theory.

April 30, 1998 - The Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court, responding to a PIL (Public Interest Litigation) orders the Indian Government to "launch a vigorous inquiry as a special case for the purpose of giving an end to the controversy surrounding Netaji's disappearance". The Vajpayee Government then appoints the Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry (JMCI).

April 2006 - The Government is slated to make public the findings of the JMCI along with their Action Taken report (ATR). Media reports speculate that the JMCI has infact rejected the air crash theory.

In light of the soon to be public JMCI findings, its interesting to take note of how this controversy has evolved and still stays fresh in people's minds even after 60 years of the disappearance or alleged death of Netaji.

As soon as the Japanese made the announcement in Aug.'45, doubts were raised. The British thought it was an attempt to save war criminal Bose from death, which is what his fate would have been if he was handed over to the Allied forces by the Japanese. This was a perfect way to get him away. The timing was too good to be fortuitous. Even Gandhi did not believe it, infact he would not believe even if "someone showed him the ashes". The Calcutta Municipal Council was not unanimous on the condolence resolution for someone "who is not dead".

But there are indeed several flaws in the air crash theory. There is no direct evidence of his death, there were no pictures taken at all and the news was reported by the Japanese almost a week later. In '45, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) discovered that Bose's destination on the day of the reported crash was not Japan, but Soviet Russia. And the backing to this theory is that Bose had contacted the Soviet Ambassador in Tokyo in Nov.'44 and formally sought Soviet help.

There are many other pieces of evidence that disprove the air crash theory. Bose's confidential secretary Major Bhaskaran Menon heard Bose saying on the day before the flight "and who knows an air crash might not overtake me". Four days after the reported crash, an American WW2 correspondent is said to have seen Bose in Saigon, Japan. Seven days after the reported crash, the Japanese intelligence reportedly informed an important minister in the Provisional Government of Free India that the crash was not a real one. Ten days later, the US intelligence intercepted a secret despatch from the Japanese mission that said Bose had left for Manchuria (now Mongolia) bordering the then USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and not for Tokyo. Infact, a member of the erstwhile Soviet Union's Politburo, the highest policy making body in that country, Babajan Gouffrav has said that Bose crossed into the Soviet Union near the Manchurian border, where he was taken into custody by the Soviet Frontier Guards. According to Gouffrav, India's Ambassador to the then USSR, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was actually allowed to see Bose sometime in the 1950s on the condition that they would not converse in any manner. Radhakrishnan is supposed to have informed Prime Minister Nehru of this meeting and Bose's presence in the Soviet Union. But nothing at all was done to secure Netaji's release, and thus, it seems, ended a dark chapter in the history of independent India.

In '46, the American State Department informed the British Military Intelligence that there was no direct evidence of Bose's death. Americans had to know best as they were in Japan since Sep.'45. In Jul.'46, Gandhi's secretary wrote a letter to the United States (US) President's advisor saying "If Bose comes with the help of Russia neither Gandhiji nor the Congress will be able to reason with the country"!

And recently a secret note written by the Prime Minister's Secretariat dated Dec.'54 and signed by M.O. Mathai, Nehru's long-time personal secretary, has surfaced, which says that the Ministry of External Affairs received the ashes of Bose among other things from the Indian embassy in Tokyo. So if the Indian Government received the ashes way back in '54, what's in the Renkoji Temple in Tokyo where the real ashes is supposed to be kept?

So until now, the Government of India has never officially acknowledged the death of Bose. However, successive Indian governments seem to have systematically scuttled efforts to disprove the air crash theory. The Nehru government refused permission for the committee to visit Taiwan and allegedly forced the Khan committee to concur with the crash theory. Suresh Bose, elder brother of Netaji, who was part of the committee, quit and published his own dissenting report claiming that Bose had escaped to the USSR. GD Khosla reportedly sabotaged his own commission at the behest of the government and towed its line. In '78, the Morarji Desai Government said that the conclusions arrived at by the commissions were not decisive, and that's the last official word that any Indian Government has uttered over the matter until today. So we take it that Bose, after all, may not have died in the air crash.

After the collapse of the USSR at the start of the '90s, the new Russian federation was freely declassifying the Soviet records, but the Indian Government refused to seek records about Bose that the Russians said they had.

In '92, the Narasimha Rao Government conferred the Bharat Ratna on Bose posthumously. A PIL was then filed that questioned the basis for believing that Bose was infact dead; and then in '98 the court ordered the Government to launch an inquiry, and that's when the JMCI was formed. The JMCI would ascertain whether Netaji was dead, if so how; and if he is alive, what are his whereabouts; also whether the ashes in Tokyo are truly of Netaji.

But as Justice Mukherjee himself has said many times, he has got little cooperation from the Government. He was not given access to important documents. He was not allowed to approach Japan for a DNA test of the ashes kept in Tokyo. He was not even given a phone connection for six months! On the contrary, the government made attempts to humiliate him. And strangely it was the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) led government that was in power then, not the Congress. In Feb. '05, Justice Mukherjee said that the Government and specifically the PMO (Prime Minister's Office) had destroyed the master file and some important documents about Bose's death. The government was also reluctant to allow Justice Mukherjee to visit Taiwan to talk to the Taiwanese government, but eventually it had to relent. But the government has always claimed that excessive investigation will only spoil India's relations with some friendly countries, but it doesn't say how and why. It also claims it will hurt the sentiments of people at large and evoke wide spread reactions. How this can happen by digging some facts about an Indian freedom fighter who supposedly died 60 years ago, it doesn't say.

So why the suspicion that the Government is hiding something? It turns out Gandhi and Nehru may have something to do with it. Apparently, they were aware that Bose was not dead in '45 and they didn't want him to come back to India. That may also have been a factor leading to the partition, if he ever came back there would be no united Bengal to support him. Ofcourse its well known that both Gandhi and Nehru never really liked Bose much.

Bose's family always stood by the air crash theory, as Bose would probably have wanted, and never testified in front of any of the commissions. Communist leader and formerly with the INA, Lakshmi Sehgal, also publicly believed she thought Bose had died in the air crash, until she told the first commission that Nehru may have hatched a sinister plan to spread the lie, thereby committing perjury.

The British Government has told the Justice Mukherjee commission that they would not declassify some relevant documents until 2021. The Japanese and the Russians were not too forthcoming either. And the Government seems to want just that.

A former MP has told the commission that he had been told of a classified '46 document by a retired Russian general, that talked about Bose's stay in the USSR at the time. A retired Indian engineer who was in the USSR at the time has told the commission that he had heard of Bose being in a Siberian camp at the time. All this justifies the speculation of a breakthrough in achieving the commission's goal of finding the truth. But we will know only when the government makes the report public.

So while we anticipate the findings of the JMCI, we must realize how important it is in the context of how far the government could go to hide hard facts from the nation, to suit itself. Eminent lawmaker Dr. Satyanarayan Sinha says in his book Netaji Mystery that not finding out the truth about Bose's fate will be a blunder of national magnitude with far reaching consequences and that posterity will never forgive us for such a criminal negligence in the affairs of a national hero of the highest order. We can only hope that, when the Government makes the JMCI report public soon, the truth will prevail.