The Hunt For The Secret Netaji Files

A tireless journalist-turned-author and campaigner, a team around him, a publisher and this helpful media house, Swarajya, have been pressuring the government to tell the people what fate Subhas Chandra Bose actually met with

After August 1945, when the news broke that Subhas Chandra Bose had died in a plane crash in Taiwan, Jawaharlal Nehru never admitted the possibility that Netaji could be alive. Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel were cocksure even when Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was in two minds — even when the Mahatma feared that Bose might return to free India with the help of Russia. It is surprising then that Nehru and Patel were desperate to find out if Bose was still alive. Or, did they know that he was alive and wanted to monitor his movements as far as possible?

Whatever the reason, the government of free India decided to continue the British practice of snooping on Bose’s family members.

News reports suggest that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be meeting Netaji’s kin in Germany on his current Europe trip. The significance of this meeting cannot be understated. This could be the start of a process that could rewrite the history of India’s independence struggle, and destroy the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.

What started under the Nehru government continued under the Lal Bahadur Shastri’s. And then under the Indira Gandhi government. Two official inquiries in the meantime confirmed what the government of the day wanted to hear: that Bose was undoubtedly dead. But the snooping continued. Then sensitive files on Bose’s mysterious disappearance disappeared as mysteriously from the Prime Minister’s Office. When the third inquiry commission appointed under a Calcutta High Court order by the NDA I government reported that the story of Bose’s death was nothing more than an eyewash for his escape from the southeast Asian theatre, the Manmohan Singh government, which had come to power in 2004, promptly discarded the findings. Without giving any reason!

The year 2005, when the UPA government discarded the Justice Manoj Kumar Mukherjee Commission Report, was in a sense a turning point. Justice Mukherjee did not hide his frustration at the resistance he had to face from the then government in accessing documents. It could not escape the notice of anyone who had followed the progress of the case that there was a concerted effort by the government to hide something. The question was — what? Why have successive governments been so desperate to put a lid on the mystery?

A bunch of young men, who met over cyberspace, started talking about the issue. Anuj Dhar, who was earlier investigating the case as a journalist at The Hindustan Times, had already published the story of his startling investigation in his first book Back from Dead: Inside the Subhas Bose Mystery. Dhar led the discussions as ideas started flying on what can be done to blow the lid on the mystery. His book was phenomenal, but not enough to force the government to solve the issue. People had to be made aware about the intricacies of the case, going far beyond the oversimplified folklore that Nehru was responsible for Bose’s disappearance. The media had to be sensitised. Above all, the pressure of public opinion had to be mounted on the government. It was a Herculean task for a group of ordinary, unknown young men who had a professional life and families to take care of. The mere thought of resolving India’s longest standing mystery was irresistible. They coalesced around Dhar to form a pressure group and named it Mission Netaji (MN). MN took over the baton from the earlier generations who had kept the issue alive.

Two developments at this stage worked in favour of MN’s endeavours. First was the Right to Information Act (RTI) of 2005 and the second was the increasing reach of social media.

MN’s approach from the beginning was to bring out documents, which were till then seen only by politicians in power and by bureaucrats, in the public domain. It was probably beyond the government’s imagination that the RTI Act would be used for a case which was projected as a matter of history. So, went out application after application seeking release of documents from the PMO, the Home Ministry, the External Affairs Ministry, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW). The responses, unsurprisingly, were rejection after rejection, although the essence of the replies remained unchanged: Relations with foreign countries would be damaged, India’s national security would be compromised, so on and so forth.

The first success came in 2007 when a full bench of the Central Information Commission (CIC) asked the Home Ministry to provide Sayantan Dasgupta of MN over 100 documents related to the first two inquiries on Bose’s disappearance, overruling the Home Secretary’s contention that if those files were made public, there would be serious law and order problems in the country, especially Bengal. The government, however, refused to part with around 20 files that they considered too sensitive. Again, in 2009, after three years of struggle, the CIC asked the Home Ministry to handover all the files marked as “exhibits” by the Justice Mukherjee Commission to me.

These documents were consequently declassified and sent to the National Archives a couple of years ago. This was the achievement of the UPA government. They were compelled to declassify the files. But much before these documents were formally declassified, Dhar had accessed many of them, and others to enrich his book. The result was India’s Biggest Cover-Up, a masterpiece of investigative journalism, published in 2012. In the book, Dhar unmasked the less-than-honest roles played by many politicians who rose up to high ranks in their political careers. He (and his publisher — Vitasta Publishing) took the risk of publishing many documents which were still classified.

The BJP kept making the right and — at times — very encouraging noises as long as they remained in opposition. The people had a right to know what happened to Netaji, they said. The government must declassify all files, they said. That is, until they became the government in May 2014. Then a curtain of silence fell on all those who were the most vociferous. New Prime Minister Narendra Modi would talk much about “Subhas babu” but not about the need to tell the country about papers locked away in the secret vaults.

The most sensitive files were still locked away in the PMO and the External Affairs Ministry. The IB and R&AW were outside the ambit of the RTI Act. We, at MN, were making progress, but not enough to crack open the case. More and more people in the meantime were joining the campaign in Facebook and Twitter (it started with Orkut) asking the government to declassify those locked up papers.

The members of the Bose family — Subrata Bose (son of Sarat Chandra Bose and former Member of Parliament), Surya Bose, Madhuri Bose and Chandra Bose (children of Amiya Nath Bose) — lent their unstinting support to our efforts. They mobilised the extended Bose family to go public with their demand for finding out the truth. Chandra Bose met Modi before he became the prime minister. The PM-to-be assured Chandra that he would take the matter up if he came to power. More people offered their support — some helped us fight court cases, some helped in building network with people who know but wouldn’t speak, and a few politicians (notably Sukhendu Sekhar Roy of the Trinamool Congress) took it up in Parliament.

What we really lacked was strong media support. There would be plenty of stories in newspapers, news portal and occasionally on television shows, but none to coherently run an effective campaign. Everybody needed justice, except Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose!

This is when the re-launched Swarajya came forward to provide a platform to publish what Dhar had dug out from various sources over the past decade. The result has been insightful and often sensational stories such as on the loot of the treasures of the Indian National Army and manipulation of government records.

In fact, the story on snooping on the Bose family was first published by Swarajya.

It is a positive sign that many news portals are showing interest and providing space for this issue now and the response in the social media is extremely encouraging.

Hopefully, the build-up of this momentum will lead the Modi government to break its spell of silence, and the country will finally get to know the truth. The full truth. As and when that happens, Dhar will stand high as the indefatigable researcher-cum-campaigner who managed to transform a personal quest into a movement that forced the government’s hands, with the support of a small group around him.