Written by Nishant Chandravanshi & Deepa Chandravanshi.
Subhas Chandra Bose Jayanti 2022: The Giant Life of a Great and Courageous Indian
It has been 77 years since the alleged plane crash in Taipei, Japan. In these seven decades, three commissions of inquiry failed to bring this issue to any conclusion and every prime minister of the country from Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to Manmohan Singh handed over this mystery to his successor, which Narendra Modi tried to solve but the puzzle remains. Wherever it is.
It has been 77 years since the alleged plane crash in Taipei, Japan. In these seven decades, three commissions of inquiry failed to bring this issue to any conclusion and every prime minister of the country from Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to Manmohan Singh handed over this mystery to his successor, which Narendra Modi tried to solve but the puzzle remains. Wherever it is.
The British themselves, in their way, got a secret investigation of Netaji’s condition done. There was also a lot of political accusations and counter-allegations regarding this topic and there were also many mutual disputes among the researchers. But no one could authentically solve this biggest puzzle of the political history of India. Even the files which were kept very secret for 7 decades were made public, yet the secret remained where.
He was declared a war criminal by the British after joining Japan and starting a war against the Indian government during World War II for the freedom of the motherland. That is why the mystery of Netaji’s disappearance deepened.
The investigation sat on the investigation but the truth remained veiled
Japan first announced on 23 August 1945 that Netaji died in a plane crash on 18 August 1945. But when doubts arose over the contradictory statements of Tokia and Tahaiku,
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on 3 December 1955 announced the formation of a 3-member inquiry committee consisting of Shahnawaz Khan, Parliamentary Secretary and Netaji’s close aide, Netaji’s elder brother Suresh Chandra Bose and ICS. NN Maitra was involved.
While Shahnawaz Khan and Maitra of this committee justified Japan’s announcement of Netaji’s death, Suresh Chandra Bose disagreed.
So the controversy persisted. After this, on July 11, 1970, Justice G.D. When a commission of inquiry was set up under the chairmanship of Khosla, the commission considered the side of the plane crash to be correct, but Netaji’s family members, including Samar Guha, termed it unreliable.
Meanwhile, the Calcutta High Court also ordered the Government of India to investigate the matter thoroughly, and in 1999, the Vajpayee government set up another inquiry commission under the chairmanship of Supreme Court Judge Manoj Mukherjee. After 7 years of investigation, the Commission submitted its report on 6 May 2006.
In this, the commission found that Netaji did not die in a plane crash. But the Mukherjee Commission also accepted that Netaji is no longer alive, but he was not the victim of any plane crash in Taipei on August 18, 1945.
The commission said in its report that Taiwan stated that there was no plane crash on August 18, 1945, and the ashes kept at Renkoji Temple (Tokyo) are not of Netaji. The commission’s investigation also found that there was no concrete evidence that Gumnami Baba was Netaji.
Two members of Netaji’s family had questioned the credibility of the Mukherjee Commission report to probe the mysterious death of Netaji.
Were the sadhus of Dehradun Netaji?
The commission also did not confirm Swami Sharda Nand, the founder of Sholmari Ashram on Rajpur Road, Dehradun, as Netaji. It was claimed before the commission that Sholmari Ashram is built on the lines of Fakata Cooch Behar.
It was told before the commission that this ashram was established around 1959 by the said sage, which was later expanded to 100 acres and about 1500 followers started living there.
Armed guards were also kept in the ashram which made the local people apprehensive. In 1962, Major Satya Gupta, a companion of Netaji, reached the ashram and talked to Sadhu and on his return to Calcutta, he held a press conference claiming Sadhu to be Netaji, which appeared in the newspapers of 13 February 1962. The matter also arose in the Parliament.
The said Sadhu died in 1977, the Commission of Inquiry took the statements of 12 people through affidavit, out of which 8 described Sadhu as Netaji but a lawyer Nikhil Chandra Ghatak, who also looked after the legal matters of Sadhu, said before the commission.
That Sadhu himself had clarified many times that he is not Subhash Chandra Bose and not his father Janaki Nath Bose and mother Vibhavati Bose but he was born in a Brahmin family in East Bengal. The commission could not confirm Netaji’s stay in Dehradun.
Similarly, the claims of Sadhus of Shevpur Kalan, Madhya Pradesh and Faizabad to be Netaji were made before the Commission, which the Commission rejected.
Cabinet Secretary Ajit Seth Committee Recommendations
After the story of surveillance of Netaji’s family members for 20 years by the Intelligence Bureau in India Today in the April 10, 2015 issue, the Modi government in April 2015 constituted a committee under the chairmanship of Cabinet Secretary Ajit Seth, in which the Ministry of Home Affairs, IB, RAW and officials from the Prime Minister’s Office.
This committee was to see whether the confidential files related to Netaji could be declassified in light of the Official Secrets Act. This Act is also outside the purview of the Right to Information. The Official Secret Act has been going on since the British era. It has been clarified in the Act that any action which helps the enemies of the country comes under the purview of this Act.
It has also been said in this that no one can see or demand to see the restricted area, papers etc. Following the recommendation of the Ajit Seth Committee, the government had decided to declassify the files related to Netaji and make them public.
Confidential files: Khoda mountain turned out to be a mouse
The mystery of Netaji’s death has not been solved even after about 200 confidential files related to Netaji are made public. Whereas when the NDA government was formed in 2014 under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, there was hope that when the new government at the Center fulfils its election promise when the files related to Netaji will be made public, then the layers of mystery related to Netaji’s death will be one after the other. One will open.
This election promise was also made so that the people of the country could know the truth about the death of one of their great heroes. Prime Minister Modi had announced to make those files public on 14 October 2015 as per his promise and according to that announcement the Prime Minister’s Office handed over the first batch of 33 unclassified files to the National Archives on 4 December 2015.
After this, 37 files were handed over to the National Archives by the Ministry of Home Affairs and 25 by the Ministry of External Affairs as the first batch, so that the researchers could unearth the hidden truth in those files.
Taking steps in line with the expectations of the public, on 23 January 2016, the Prime Minister himself released digital copies of 100 files related to Netaji for public information, which have more than 15,000 pages.
The National Archives also released copies of 75 unclassified digital files related to Netaji for public information in two instalments on 29 March 2016 and 27 April 2016.
The Archives released the fourth batch of 25 files to the general public on 27 May 2016 in which 5 files belong to the Prime Minister’s Office, 4 files belong to the Ministry of Home Affairs and 16 files belong to the Ministry of External Affairs.
Similarly, the West Bengal government also handed over some confidential files to the state archives. In Kolkata, the state government on 18 September 2015 distributed 64 files related to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in the form of CDs among the common people and the family members of Netaji.
Page 12744 of these files have been digitized. These files related to Netaji have been kept safe in the Kolkata Police Museum itself.
But even after passing so many years, even the proverb about the dug mountain and the mouse that came out did not come true, because, in such a big exercise, even the mouse did not come out.
It was also alleged in this case that the purpose of making these files public was less to cover up the mystery of Netaji’s death and more to implicate Jawaharlal Nehru because a section of Indian politics was involved in events ranging from the Partition of India to the detriment of every country. Has been blaming Jawaharlal Nehru for this.
