Subhas Chandra Bose 23 January 1897 – 18 August 1945, was an Indian nationalist whose defiant patriotism made him a hero in India, but whose attempt during World War II to rid India of British rule with the help of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan left a troubled legacy.
According to one popular version of events, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose died in an air crash in Taiwan in 1945. But many of his relatives, friends and followers have disagreed with this narrative, forcing the Indian government to commission three different inquiries into the event between 1956 and 1999.Last year, the Indian government refused to provide information on Netaji's reported death under the Right to Information Act. The possibility of obtaining closure to the mystery was again lost.
Such has been the controversial discourse that the reported death has been called 'India's Biggest Cover-Up' in a recent book.
Here are five things about the controversial reports of Netaji's death that you must know:
What the official Japanese version says about the fatal crash
When Netaji flew out of what's now Taiwan on August 18, 1945, after the defeat of Japan in World War II, the plane crashed while taking off and he was badly burnt. He died a few hours later in a local hospital and his body was cremated within two days. His ashes were taken to Tokyo and handed over to the Renkoji Temple where they remain to this day.
As Netaji's family and friends disagreed with this sequence of events, the British government set up an inquiry, which ultimately corroborated the Japanese account.
The crash: Questions which led to controversies
Even as a multitude of "what if" possibilities have been explored in conspiracy theories, there were a set of critical questions that remained unanswered regarding the supposed plane crash, as journalist Vir Sanghvi pointed out in an analysis.
"Most of Bose's lieutenants who had accompanied him on his travels were not allowed to get on the plane with him. They never saw a body. No photographs were taken of Bose after the crash. There are no photos of the body. And there is no death certificate. So it is possible to argue that the Japanese faked his death to allow him to escape the advancing British army," Sanghvi wrote.
The legend of the sadhu and the USSR connection
A few years after Netaji's disappearance, reports emerged that he had returned to India and lived in the disguise of a sadhu in north India.Some reports even claimed that this sadhu was sighted at Jawaharlal Nehru's funeral, though no such claim could ever be substantiated.
Though the sadhu story was never proved, it resurfaced again when the Mujherjee Commission (1999-2005), led by Supreme Court judge M K Mukherjee, explored the possibility of Netaji living in the guise of a hermit in India. The report brought into light a sadhu named Gumnami Baba or Bhagwanji living in Uttar Pradesh..
Another conspiracy theory which gathered steam was that Netaji went to the USSR post his reported plane crash. In the political climate of the World War II, he thought that Russia could be a safe haven.
What the CIA thought 19 years after the disappearance
In 1964, the CIA still believed that Bose was alive!
According to media reports, declassified documents showed that the Central Intelligence Agency was told in 1964 that Bose survived an air crash of 1945. The documents also showed that the US spy agency was not convinced of the veracity of the official Japanese version.
The reports said that in May 1946, a CIA agent wrote to the US secretary of state saying he had been told that "should (Bose) return to the country, trouble would result which would be extremely difficult to quell".
The CIA document said: "There now exists a strong possibility that Bose is leading a religious group undermining the current Nehru government."
PMO's refusal to share Netaji files
In December last year, the NDA government, in its response to an application under the RTI law by activist Subhash Chandra Agrawal, declined to declassify files related to Netaji's death and claimed such a move would prejudicially affect relations with foreign countries.
The PMO's "top secret" files on Netaji are believed to include documents on the Mukherjee Commission's report, on correspondences with and about Netaji's widow and daughter and the purported transfer of his ashes to India.
Recent research by an Uk journalist.
London-based NRI Sidhartha Satbhai has hired a UK-based company, Spectre Solutions Inc., to investigate into pictures and videos of a man who is seen in pictures during Lal Bahadur Shastri's visit to Tashkent. The face mapping was done by Neil Millar, who is an expert in facial mapping/facial comparison of evidence/height analysis, comparison and identification of people/vehicles etc. According to his research, the Tashkent man indeed has a lot of similarities with Netaji and may well be Netaji himself.
Nations that forget their history lack the power to create it, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said on October 15, 2015, while announcing that Classified files on Netaji would be made public. Of the remaining 39 files still not in public, four are 'Top Secret', 20 'Secret', five 'Classified' and 10 'Unclassifed'.
Subhas Chandra Bose's family homes were kept under surveillance between 1948 and 1968
He tried to get nazi germany's support by meeting hitler and also been sighted in few other photos of the russian collaborations way after his death for which we aren't sure and shall remain a mystery.
According to one popular version of events, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose died in an air crash in Taiwan in 1945. But many of his relatives, friends and followers have disagreed with this narrative, forcing the Indian government to commission three different inquiries into the event between 1956 and 1999.Last year, the Indian government refused to provide information on Netaji's reported death under the Right to Information Act. The possibility of obtaining closure to the mystery was again lost.
Such has been the controversial discourse that the reported death has been called 'India's Biggest Cover-Up' in a recent book.
Here are five things about the controversial reports of Netaji's death that you must know:
What the official Japanese version says about the fatal crash
When Netaji flew out of what's now Taiwan on August 18, 1945, after the defeat of Japan in World War II, the plane crashed while taking off and he was badly burnt. He died a few hours later in a local hospital and his body was cremated within two days. His ashes were taken to Tokyo and handed over to the Renkoji Temple where they remain to this day.
As Netaji's family and friends disagreed with this sequence of events, the British government set up an inquiry, which ultimately corroborated the Japanese account.
The crash: Questions which led to controversies
Even as a multitude of "what if" possibilities have been explored in conspiracy theories, there were a set of critical questions that remained unanswered regarding the supposed plane crash, as journalist Vir Sanghvi pointed out in an analysis.
"Most of Bose's lieutenants who had accompanied him on his travels were not allowed to get on the plane with him. They never saw a body. No photographs were taken of Bose after the crash. There are no photos of the body. And there is no death certificate. So it is possible to argue that the Japanese faked his death to allow him to escape the advancing British army," Sanghvi wrote.
The legend of the sadhu and the USSR connection
A few years after Netaji's disappearance, reports emerged that he had returned to India and lived in the disguise of a sadhu in north India.Some reports even claimed that this sadhu was sighted at Jawaharlal Nehru's funeral, though no such claim could ever be substantiated.
Though the sadhu story was never proved, it resurfaced again when the Mujherjee Commission (1999-2005), led by Supreme Court judge M K Mukherjee, explored the possibility of Netaji living in the guise of a hermit in India. The report brought into light a sadhu named Gumnami Baba or Bhagwanji living in Uttar Pradesh..
Another conspiracy theory which gathered steam was that Netaji went to the USSR post his reported plane crash. In the political climate of the World War II, he thought that Russia could be a safe haven.
What the CIA thought 19 years after the disappearance
In 1964, the CIA still believed that Bose was alive!
According to media reports, declassified documents showed that the Central Intelligence Agency was told in 1964 that Bose survived an air crash of 1945. The documents also showed that the US spy agency was not convinced of the veracity of the official Japanese version.
The reports said that in May 1946, a CIA agent wrote to the US secretary of state saying he had been told that "should (Bose) return to the country, trouble would result which would be extremely difficult to quell".
The CIA document said: "There now exists a strong possibility that Bose is leading a religious group undermining the current Nehru government."
PMO's refusal to share Netaji files
In December last year, the NDA government, in its response to an application under the RTI law by activist Subhash Chandra Agrawal, declined to declassify files related to Netaji's death and claimed such a move would prejudicially affect relations with foreign countries.
The PMO's "top secret" files on Netaji are believed to include documents on the Mukherjee Commission's report, on correspondences with and about Netaji's widow and daughter and the purported transfer of his ashes to India.
Recent research by an Uk journalist.
London-based NRI Sidhartha Satbhai has hired a UK-based company, Spectre Solutions Inc., to investigate into pictures and videos of a man who is seen in pictures during Lal Bahadur Shastri's visit to Tashkent. The face mapping was done by Neil Millar, who is an expert in facial mapping/facial comparison of evidence/height analysis, comparison and identification of people/vehicles etc. According to his research, the Tashkent man indeed has a lot of similarities with Netaji and may well be Netaji himself.
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| in mid 1950s |
Subhas Chandra Bose's family homes were kept under surveillance between 1948 and 1968
Various inquiry commissions have been set up since independence to know about Bose and confirmations of the rumors prevailing.
1. Figgess Report. 1946
As a result of a series of interrogations of individuals named in the following paragraphs it is confirmed as certain that S.C. Bose died in a Taihoku Military Hospital (Nammon Ward) sometime between 1700 hours and 2000 hours local time on the August 18, 1945. The cause of death was heart failure resulting from multiple burns and shock. All the persons named below were interrogated at different times but the several accounts of the event agree both in substance and detail at all points where the knowledge of the subjects could have been deemed to be based on common experience. The possiblity of a pre-arranged fabrication must be excluded since most of the individuals concerned had no opportunity of contact with one another prior to interrogation.
2. Shah Nawaz Committee. 1956
Out of the 181-page repetitious document that constitutes Suresh Bose's report, one main principle for dealing with the evidence emerges: if two or more stories by witnesses have any discrepancies between them, then the whole testimony of the witnesses involved is thereby discredited and assumed to be false. Using this principle, Bose is able to ... find that there was no crash and that his brother lives. There also appears to be one other half-stated assumption: Subhas Bose could not die before India achieved her freedom. Therefore he did not die in the plane crash said to have taken place on August 18, 1945.
3. Khosla Commission. 1970
Justice Khosla suggests the motives of many of the story-purveyors are less than altruistic. Some, he says, have clearly been driven by political goals or simply wanted to call attention to themselves. His patience in listening to some tales is surely remarkable. What could he, or anyone, have thought as he listened to the testimony of P. M. Karapurkar, agent of the Central Bank of India at Sholapur, who '... claimed that he receives direct messages from Bose by tuning his body like a radio receiving apparatus.
4. Mukherjee Commission. 1999-2005
(Most recent and famous of them all !!!)
In 1999, following a court order, the Indian government appointed retired Supreme Court judge M. K. Mukherjee to probe the death of Bose. The commission perused hundreds of files on Bose's death drawn from several countries and also visited Japan, Russia and Taiwan. Though oral accounts were in favor of the plan crash, the commission concluded that those accounts could not be relied upon and that there was a secret plan to ensure Bose's safe passge to Russia with the knowledge of Japanese authorities and Habibur Rahman. The commission also observed that the ashes kept at the Renkoji temple, reported to be Bose's, were of Ichiro Okura, a Japanese soldier who died of cardiac arrest.
The Mukherjee Commission submitted its report to on November 8, 2005. The report was tabled in the Indian Parliament on May 17, 2006. The Indian Government rejected the findings of the commission without assigning any reason.Some members of the Bose family welcomed the government's decision while some opposed it.But Mukherjee stood by his report and said that he was happy with whatever he had done and that the present day Indian government may find it difficult to accept it.
Bose knew that second World War would break the backbone of England's economy, and he believed that if not internally, independence can be achieved with the help of political and diplomatic relations and allies. He probably had an idea that Soviet will be a good friend of India and will always be supporting it.
1. Figgess Report. 1946
As a result of a series of interrogations of individuals named in the following paragraphs it is confirmed as certain that S.C. Bose died in a Taihoku Military Hospital (Nammon Ward) sometime between 1700 hours and 2000 hours local time on the August 18, 1945. The cause of death was heart failure resulting from multiple burns and shock. All the persons named below were interrogated at different times but the several accounts of the event agree both in substance and detail at all points where the knowledge of the subjects could have been deemed to be based on common experience. The possiblity of a pre-arranged fabrication must be excluded since most of the individuals concerned had no opportunity of contact with one another prior to interrogation.
2. Shah Nawaz Committee. 1956
Out of the 181-page repetitious document that constitutes Suresh Bose's report, one main principle for dealing with the evidence emerges: if two or more stories by witnesses have any discrepancies between them, then the whole testimony of the witnesses involved is thereby discredited and assumed to be false. Using this principle, Bose is able to ... find that there was no crash and that his brother lives. There also appears to be one other half-stated assumption: Subhas Bose could not die before India achieved her freedom. Therefore he did not die in the plane crash said to have taken place on August 18, 1945.
3. Khosla Commission. 1970
Justice Khosla suggests the motives of many of the story-purveyors are less than altruistic. Some, he says, have clearly been driven by political goals or simply wanted to call attention to themselves. His patience in listening to some tales is surely remarkable. What could he, or anyone, have thought as he listened to the testimony of P. M. Karapurkar, agent of the Central Bank of India at Sholapur, who '... claimed that he receives direct messages from Bose by tuning his body like a radio receiving apparatus.
4. Mukherjee Commission. 1999-2005
(Most recent and famous of them all !!!)
In 1999, following a court order, the Indian government appointed retired Supreme Court judge M. K. Mukherjee to probe the death of Bose. The commission perused hundreds of files on Bose's death drawn from several countries and also visited Japan, Russia and Taiwan. Though oral accounts were in favor of the plan crash, the commission concluded that those accounts could not be relied upon and that there was a secret plan to ensure Bose's safe passge to Russia with the knowledge of Japanese authorities and Habibur Rahman. The commission also observed that the ashes kept at the Renkoji temple, reported to be Bose's, were of Ichiro Okura, a Japanese soldier who died of cardiac arrest.
The Mukherjee Commission submitted its report to on November 8, 2005. The report was tabled in the Indian Parliament on May 17, 2006. The Indian Government rejected the findings of the commission without assigning any reason.Some members of the Bose family welcomed the government's decision while some opposed it.But Mukherjee stood by his report and said that he was happy with whatever he had done and that the present day Indian government may find it difficult to accept it.
Bose knew that second World War would break the backbone of England's economy, and he believed that if not internally, independence can be achieved with the help of political and diplomatic relations and allies. He probably had an idea that Soviet will be a good friend of India and will always be supporting it.
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| with Hitler |
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| soviet |
He tried to get nazi germany's support by meeting hitler and also been sighted in few other photos of the russian collaborations way after his death for which we aren't sure and shall remain a mystery.
