Death of Bose: The perpetual canard

Govind Talwalkar

CRITICS  of Jawaharlal Nehru always allege that he ignored almost all Indian leaders, especially Subhas Chandra Bose. But one of the released Netaji’s files reveals the following. In 1954, Chandra Bhal Tripathi, ex-president, Lucknow University Union, after returing from Rangoon wrote to Nehru that a suitable memorial should be erected inside the Mandalay jail, where Tilak was incarcerated for six years.

 He also suggested that the biographies, speeches and writings of the past leaders should be kept in the memorial. Nehru liked the idea and proposed that a memorial tablet be installed in the Mandalay jail with names of those leading Indian nationalists who were imprisoned there like Tilak, Lajpat Rai, Sardar Ajit Singh and Netaji.  

Then there is a case of jewellery collected from the crashed plane of Netaji, at Taihoku. Kept with his associates in Tokyo, it was brought to India in November 1952, by Damle, Joint Secretary, Department of Food and Agriculture. He handed over the boxes to the External Affairs Ministry. Among other things, it had a gold cigarette case studded with precious stones, a gift to Netaji from Hitler. Maulana Azad suggested that those jewellery boxes should be handed over to the Bose family. But, Nehru said, that as the family did not accept the plane crash, the boxes should be kept in the National Museum in the Rashtrapati Bhavan, as it was a national treasure. The bags were sealed in a diplomatic bag with a Pan Am tag and handed over with the key to J. K. Roy, superintendent of the National Museum, on December 30,1953. That sealed diplomatic bag was opened, later, by the Khosla Commission on October 9, 1978 in the presence of Director of National Museums, N.R. Banerjee and others (TOK/TS/1/78)(2/64/78/-PM).  Its status was the same. So reviving the canard about those boxes, off and on, only betrays perversion.

 As the demands for purchasing the houses where Netaji had stayed in various countries continued, memoes  from the secretaries voice the same opinion as that of  Natwar Singh, the then Foreign Minister: “If we were to acquire houses where our leaders of the past had stayed in different parts of the world there would be no end to it.” This advice is worth remembering and emulating by every politician of every party.     As the letters regarding Netaji never seemed to end, internal communication from the Prime Minister’s secretariat on June 2, 1965, notes that the Joint Secretary had given orders to ignore those letters. Another memo says, that, this practice was brought to the notice of  Prime Minister, Lal Bahdur Shastri who agreed with it. 

On August 28, 1978, a motion was tabled in the Lok Sabha to undo the Khosla Commision report and appoint a new inquiry committee by none other than Samar Guha and  discussion followed. Vasant Sathe, suggested that Guha being the most knowledgeable about the subject, should head a one-man Commission. 

 Guha, in his very long and unintelligible speech said, “In the name of God, I announce in this house today that Netaji is alive.” He ended it saying, “Jayatu Netaji”. The Chairman asked him whether he was withdrawing his motion. Guha said, “There is no necessity of a fresh inquiry as I know Netaji is alive”.  We are left wondering whether the House and the Chairman were as dumbfounded as we are after reading this parliamentary report. 

It is surprising that a sober and a well-read person like  N.G. Goray, a Socialist leader, fell under the spell of Samar Guha. This is revealed in his letter to Lord Mountbatten, on February, 27,1978.  Goray was appointed as our High Commissioner to Britain in 1977. 

At the outset, Goray wrote that “his love and loyalty to Bose far exceeded his love and loyalty to Nehru”. He thought Nehru abandoned Bose to his fate. He maintained that Mounbatten, Nehru and the Soviet Government knew that Bose was in the USSR, but all of them preferred to observe silence. Perhaps because Britain did not want to pick a quarrel with their erstwhile ally and Nehru did not want a rival. 

Goray believed that Mountbatten was against the Partition so he added that, “if Subhas had been on the scene, he alone, with the blessings of Gandhi and in cooperation with Badshah Khan, could have succeeded in holding India together”. 

On March 10, 1978, Mountbatten (without going into any details of Goray's letter) wrote that he “did not find an official record of Bose's death in his archives, and this doubt was shared by Wavell, but in the book, The End of War in Asia, Louis Allen, a Japanese language officer in India and Burma during the war, described in detail the air crash on August 18, 1945, in which Bose died. H. D Hodson, who had written The Great Divide, using Mountbatten's archives, was sure that Bose died in the air crash. The fact that he has never surfaced anywhere, makes it appear more than ever that he was in fact killed in the crash,”  concluded Mountbatten. 

It is strange that Goray was convinced about Mountbatten's opposition to the Partition, but insinuated that Nehru did not mind the Partition. The Bharat Ratna Award was conferred on Netaji in 1992. Among those who hailed it and thought that it was long due was Jyoti Basu, the then Chief Minister of West Bengal. On February 22, 1992, a citizens’ convention held in Kolkata, which included dignitaries, denounced government's decision as it felt that any such honour can be no honour to a “Man of destiny.” They also maintained that as there was no proof of Netaji's death, the qualifying word “posthumously” was not acceptable. Jyoti Basu and Siddharth Shankar Ray were the signatories among others. To Netaji's supporters, his stature was bigger than Bharat Ratna. What would they say to Subhas Chandra's mother, who when someone pictured her as a queen mother of Subhas, the would-be king of India, retorted, “I never wish even in my dreams that my Subhas be crowned as a king. I see him as a servant to his motherland”.

The writer is a former Editor of  Maharashtra Times. The views expressed are personal.