Why can't we know the truth about Netaji's death?

Beginning today, Swarajya will be carrying a series of articles on the mystery surrounding Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s death and how successive Indian governments have blocked all attempts to unravel it. We begin with the latest such incident of stonewalling—this time by a government which had promised to reveal the truth.

The office of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has triggered off a storm in both mainstream and social media after it turned down two separate RTI requests of S.C. Agrawal and this writer concerning the secret Subhash Chandra Bose-related files. The development by itself is a good one because commotion is a prerequisite to creating an atmosphere conducive for resolving controversial matters.

There is nothing new in our government’s not wanting to end the mysteries surrounding Netaji’s life and fate. One cannot bring about a closure to a controversy by continuing to sit on over 100 secret files that deal with it. The official narrative, that the Government of India formed two commissions of inquiry and a committee to resolve the Bose ‘death’ mystery, does not take into account the fact that on each occasion the authorities were forced to act under public pressure. Left to them, the statement of Interim Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1946—that Bose had died in Taiwan (the known as Formosa) in August 1945—was gospel.

Hopes of disclosure of the truth regarding Netaji’s fate were raised when, in 1999, the first NDA government instituted the Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry. Then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was not only India’s first truly non-Congress chief political executive, but also someone who openly said that he admired Netaji.

Never mind the present posturing, the Indian National Congress did not even think it fit to have a portrait of Netaji in Parliament House. It was Vajpayee, foreign minister in the Janta Party government, who helped Samar Guha, member of Parliament and close associate of Bose, in his mission. When the portrait was unveiled on 23 January 1978, for Vajpayee it was like the nation had ‘repaid’ its debt to Netaji, albeit “30 years after independence”. The same day he remarked that “historians and scholars should find out why the Congress government had done injustice to Netaji by ignoring him all these years”.

If it wasn’t for Vajpayee, Guha would not have succeeded in 1970 in compelling an unwilling Indira Gandhi government to set up the Khosla Commission of Inquiry—which turned out to be a fraudulent one later on.

When it emerged during the course of inquiry that Indira Gandhi’s government was unwilling to let Justice Kholsa—her father’s friend and her biographer—make an on-the-spot investigation in Taiwan, Vajpayee and 25 other lawmakers wrote to the PM that the commission “should be given facilities to visit Taiwan”.

And so, when the Mukherjee Commission was formed following a Calcutta High Court order, everyone hoped that, with Vajpayee as PM, things would proceed unlike they had under Congress regimes. But as it turned out, the Vajpayee government did not allow Justice Mukherjee to visit Taiwan either, taking a stand that would have pleased Indira Gandhi. The judge eventually visited the country in 2005 after this writer was able to get information from the Taiwan government that there was no evidence of Bose’s death, and passed on the same to the commission.

The Mukherjee Commission report made public in 2006 rapped the government—which for most part meant the one headed by Vajpayee—for putting “a spoke in the wheel of this inquiry”. Both the Prime Minister’s Office and the L.K. Advani-led Ministry of Home Affairs were indicted for not fully cooperating with the inquiry, which concluded that Bose had flown towards the USSR even as fake news of his death was planted.

In any case, in retrospect, one should give credit to the BJP for setting up the Mukherjee Commission. It can be safely hypothesised that had there been a Congress government in place in 1999, there would have been no such chance. In 1986, the Rajiv Gandhi government had ducked a Rajasthan High Court directive regarding the need for an inquiry into Netaji’s mysterious disappearance. With the blatant rejection in 2006 of Justice Mukherjee’s report, the Congress cast itself again as the villain in the story. Lawmakers, including those from the BJP ranks, accused the Congress government of a cover-up in Parliament.

Senior journalist and Rajya Sabha MP Chandan Mitra, for one, said he could not understand why certain Bose files were kept classified in the name of ties with certain friendly foreign nations. Mitra’s newspaper The Pioneer had given constant coverage to the Mukherjee Commission inquiry and had even deputed senior editor Udayan Namboodiri to accompany Justice Mukherjee to Russia.

“Are the friendly countries more important or are the people of India more important?” Mitra asked. “It is not a political question, it is a question of our nationhood.” He predicted that “the people of this country will not rest quiet even if it takes three more generations” to get to the truth about Bose.

In 2012, following the release of this writer’s book India’s Biggest Cover-Up, the demand for declassification of Netaji-related files began making news for the first time. On 9 April 2013, a letter signed by Netaji’s nephew D.N. Bose on behalf of 24 members of the Bose family was handed over to then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi by Chandra Kumar Bose, the spokesperson for the family. Modi was more than receptive while receiving the letter, and he promised to do something about it.

In August 2013, BJP leaders such as Najma Heptulla, Venkaiah Naidu and Smriti Irani joined Trinamool Congress member Kunal Ghosh in taking the Manmohan Singh government to task in Parliament following its refusal to release some Bose files. There was a media report that on 23 January 2014, Modi had written to Singh that something should be done to settle the mystery. The same day, which was Netaji’s birth anniversary, then BJP chief Rajnath Singh visited Bose’s birthplace in Cuttack and said that “the entire country is impatient to know as to how Netaji died and under what circumstances”. He made a solemn promise that if or when the BJP is in power, the matter would be settled.

This is a backgrounder to the BJP’s present ‘U-turn’ as is being talked about in media and political circles now, even though it manifested a few months ago when both PM Modi’s office and Home Minister Rajnath Singh began toeing the old ‘Congress line’.

Now, the real takeaway that the BJP leaders may not realise at the moment, but will at some point in time, is that the party’s nationalistic image is going to take a big hit if they renege on their promise to settle the Netaji case. Not only that, the BJP now runs the risk of filling the boots of the Congress as the main villain in the story.

There is still time. This writer is hopeful that Prime Minister Modi and the BJP will not want to go down in history as the leader and party which put paid to the decades-old quest to know the truth about the fate of the man but for whom India would not have become free in 1947.

Following Monday’s development when the PMO’s refusal to declassify Netaji-related files was greeted with snide remarks of ‘U-turn’ by the Opposition and dismay by the people who have been following the issue keenly, the author issued a press release. Details are made available below.