Will Netaji's truth ever come out?

By: Subhadeep Bhattacharjee

He had once famously said "The greatest curse for a man is to remain a slave. The grossest crime is to compromise with injustice and wrong. The highest virtue is to battle against inequity, no matter what the cost may be.” As the nation celebrates the 113th birth anniversary of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose we still wonder will the conspiracy surrounding his mysterious disappearance ever come out? It has been 63 years since we achieved independence India's biggest mystery still remains unsolved.

Many would like to believe in the crash theory that Netaji had succumbed to the injuries after the plane crash while many believed that there was a huge conspiracy behind his disappearance. Subhash Chandra Bose might have become a political victim and people who were threatened by his image as leader made sure that his life and death remained a mystery. Following are some reasons why many do not believe the plane crash theory:

• The Taiwanese authorities have denied any plane to have crashed at the given time and date anywhere in their country. Can such a claim be out rightly rejected?
  
  
• Declassified documents of British intelligence says British Prime Minister Clements Attlee decided ‘Let him remain where he (Subhash C. Bose) is now’. This decision was taken in October 1945. It clearly indicates that he was alive even in Oct 1945.
  
  
• The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was looking out for Bose till about 1950s due to his closenss to the Communist block, If he was dead why were they doing so?
  
  
• In 1946, Gallacher, a British communist party worker publicly criticised the then Irish President D’ Valera for welcoming Netaji in Doublin! D’ Valera didn’t deny this. He visited India after 1946 and even commented publicly ‘I expected to meet Bose here’!
  
  
• The British intelligence has reported that Nehru knew where Netaji was. Nehru took the Foreign Affairs portfolio himself and appointed none other than Vijayalekshmi Pandit as the ambassador to Russia!
  
  
• Former Indian ambassador Dr Satyanarayana Sinha once met Goga, the son of Abani Mukherjee, a revolutionist in the Russian communist party; who told him that his father and Netaji were prisoners in adjacent cells in Siberia. He also told Sinha that Netaji had assumed the name ‘Khilsai Malang’ there. The most shocking of all information it contained was that Netaji had posted a letter from Russia to Nehru, telling that he wished to come back and he also asked Nehru to make amendments for his come back!
  
  
• One more British archive document also states that the entire theory of the plane crash, in Taihuku (Japan), was pre-planned and contrived. In fact as late as December 20, 1945, a Japanese newspaper even reported that Bose was on his way to the Soviet Union and passed through Tokyo.
  
  
• Netaji was in fact very much alive till at least 1946 one full year after his supposed "death". Russian archives had yielded two precious documents. The first concerned a discussion that Joseph Stalin had with his defense minister Voroschilov and foreign affairs minister Molotov in 1946. The second was a report filed by a Soviet field agent stationed in India, also in 1946 .