The Bose Deception: Declassified The Bose Deception: Declassified 
A new book on the fate of Subhas Chandra Bose has called into question the union government’s stand that the freedom fighter died following a plane crash in Taiwan at the end of the second world war. The authors of The Bose Deception: Declassified (Vintage) say their repudiation of the official stand is the result of a first-ever comprehensive study of hundreds of files declassified in India and abroad. “In 2006, then Union cabinet took this stand after rejecting the Mukherjee Commission report to the contrary. This decision was prompted by political considerations rather than facts,” says Anuj Dhar, one of the authors. “Records declassified by the Modi government in particular have been most useful in exposing this deliberate suppression and distortion of facts by the Congress government,” adds author Chandrachur Ghose, who previously wrote a bestselling biography of Netaji titled, Bose: The Untold Story of an Inconvenient Nationalist (Penguin Viking).
Dhar and Ghose have researched the Bose death controversy for two decades. Their efforts as RTI activists led to the declassification of over 1,300 Bose-related files by the Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi governments.
Some of the startling findings by Dhar and Ghose are:Political Suppression of the Mukherjee Commission ReportThe UPA government’s decision in 2006 to reject the Mukherjee Commission’s findings was based on a secret note prepared for the Union Cabinet, which is now available in the declassified files. This Cabinet note was based on another note drafted by an undersecretary who was directed at the behest of then Home Minister Shivraj Patil to study the Commission’s report with a view to finding faults in it. Patil went on to make statements in Parliament on the basis of the two notes and deliberations among the top officials.
The notes and the Home Minister’s statement twisted facts with the pre-determined goal of rejecting the Commission’s report. While the Cabinet was told that two previous probes led by Shah Nawaz Khan in 1956 and Justice GD Khosla from 1970-74 concluded that Bose died in Taiwan, the fact that the Union government itself had opposed Bose’s Taiwan death theory before the Calcutta High Court in 1998 and subsequently before the Mukherjee Commission in 2005, was suppressed.
Evidence of Bose’s Survival Beyond 1945The note for the cabinet made a false claim that the British and American inquiries launched in 1945 reached conclusion that Bose had died in Taiwan, whereas declassified records tell a different story. The authors obtained from the US national archives the relevant US army dossier whose reading belie the claim made in the note for the cabinet. In fact, the Americans continued to receive intelligence about Bose’s survival for several years after his reported death. The British too kept on inquiring for several years. None of them reached a definite conclusion on whether Bose had died in 1945.
The Japanese claim that Bose was on his way to Tokyo at the time of his reported death was busted by India’s Intelligence Bureau, which found out that he was on his way to Soviet Russia. Declassified records reveal that the Russian angle to the Bose mystery is as old as the plane crash story.
The India government’s view took shape in October 1946 when the head of interim government Jawaharlal Nehru announced his acceptance of the Taiwan death theory. A declassified record from that period shows that in contrast, Vallabhbhai Patel, then Home Minister, did not accept the story.
Investigations and Suppressed ReportsThe declassified files, which contain several interrogation reports of Col Habibur Rahman (Bose’s ADC who survived the alleged plane crash) by the American and British investigators, clearly show that they suspected Rahman was not being truthful. Shockingly, although these interrogation reports were shown to Shah Nawaz after getting security clearance from the Military Intelligence Directorate, he was instructed to keep them secret and not to use or to refer to them in his report. Shah Nawaz complied.
A crucial British investigation report in a dossier of Raj-era reports supplied to Khan under the instruction of the then IB director was doctored for the purpose of appearing to support the official stand.
The Nehru government went all out to prevent Shah Nawaz from conducting inquiry in Taipei, where Bose had supposedly died. Declassified records show Prime Minister Nehru and other top officials alleged that Taiwanese wouldn’t cooperate in any such inquiry and create obstacles. However, each time an inquiry was carried out in Taiwan, from the days of Nehru to the time of Manmohan Singh, the Taiwanese were courteous and cooperative.
Justice Mukherjee's EffortsFrom the British times till the time Justice Mukherjee started his inquiry, it was clear that the most crucial piece of evidence which could support or dismiss the Taipei death story put out by the Japanese were the contemporary Japanese records from Taiwan. Justice Mukherjee endeavoured to locate these records, especially the 1945 cremation register, from Japan. The response of the Japanese government was of dilly dallying. Declassified records further show that the Indian government lied to Justice Mukherjee that no such register was available with the Taiwan government. But when Justice Mukherjee visited Taiwan in 2005, the Taiwanese government furnished this very cremation register whose reading disapproved the Japanese claim that Bose and had died in Taipei and was cremated there.
Records from the 1950s show that Indian government was aware that the records in Taiwan did not square up with the claims of eyewitnesses, but did nothing about it. The government also came to know that there was a Japanese approved plan to take Bose to Soviet Russia. This too was kept secret. The records also show that an inquiry by the Taiwanese government conducted at the behest of the British government (which had been requested by the Indian government) failed to prove the Bose death claim. However, the Indian government, which received the Taiwanese report from the British government completely concealed it and not a word about it was spoken in any future deliberations.
The declassified records clearly establish that the Indian government had little interest in the case and was compelled to set up the Khosla Commission under public pressure.
Renkoji Temple ControversyIn 1985, when there was a talk of the “possible visit of PM to the Renkoji Temple where the supposed remains” of Bose are kept, A.P. Venkateswaran, a would-be Foreign Secretary, doubted the remains were of actually of Bose. The visit of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi to the Temple was suddenly called off with no reason given in the declassified records.
Earlier, when the Renkoji temple priest started troubling Indian government, K.R. Narayanan, then heading East Asia division in MEA and future Congress leader and President of India, came up with the idea that the priest should be given money to look after the remains. Beginning that year (1966), the temple was given money on annual basis.
In 1988, a fake death certificate of Bose was put in circulation by a former advisor of Indira Gandhi. He obtained the fake certificate from the Japanese doctor who was said to have treated a dying Bose in Taiwan.
The most prominent votaries of Bose’s death in Taipei—his nephew Sisir Bose and Capt Lakshmi Sehgal of the Rani Jhansi Regiment, did not cooperate with the Mukherjee inquiry. Sehgal committed perjury before the commission. A declassified IB record shows that she had been relieved of her command by Netaji. Congress leader Sisir Bose faced charge from his kin and others that he was toeing official line for pecuniary gains.
Based on official records, Justice Mukherjee established that the body of a Japanese soldier named Ichira Okuro was passed off as that of Bose at a Taipei hospital as the Japanese implemented Bose’s escape towards Russia behind the smokescreen of the news of his death. This body was later cremated as Bose’s and therefore the remains kept in Renkoji temple are of this solider, not of Bose.
DNA Testing and the Netaji MysteryDeclassified records show that Justice Mukherjee could not get a DNA test done on the presumptive remains of Bose because of the erratic behaviour of the Renkoji temple priest. Ambassador Mani Tripathi reported to Foreign Secretary Shashank that since the priest was getting money from India for the upkeep of the remains, he had vested interest in prolonging the controversy.
In a secret mission to Tokyo, Congress leader Sisir Bose’s son Sugata Bose, a reputed historian/politician, located a portion of Bose’s presumptive remains and had a DNA test attempted on them in the US. But the test was unsuccessful given the degraded nature of the remains. A few days after Prof Bose secretly brought these remains to India, the Govt approached CCMB Hyderabad and obtained a confirmation that a DNA test was futile.
Political Manipulation of InvestigationsIn 2006, a question was raised in Parliament about the financial assistance provided to Renkoji Temple for the upkeep of Bose’s presumptive remains. The MHA told the MEA “that the question should not be answered in Parliament as it involves a secret matter”. Thereafter, Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran spoke to the secretary general of Lok Sabha who told him that the question could not be withdrawn as it had already been listed. Eventually in 2007, the government stated in Parliament that the government was "not providing maintenance allowance or other assistance to the Renkoji Temple, Japan". In 2013, the government told Calcutta High Court that it was “not spending any money to maintain the ashes kept in the Renkoji Temple, Tokyo”. In other words, the government deliberately misled both Parliament and the court.
Home Minister Shivraj Patil also misled the Parliament when during his speech on the matter he accused former Prime Minister Morarji Desai of doing politics over Bose’s fate. He stated that Desai had in 1978 rejected the plane crash theory in view of the availability certain "contemporary records". Patil stated that no such records existed, implying thereby that Desai had lied. However, the declassified files reveal these records. They were obtained from the State Department in Washington, DC by the Indian embassy and forwarded to New Delhi. These records contained the US defence department’s assessment that there was no direct evidence of Bose’s death.
Several intelligence reports and accounts claimed that Bose was in Soviet Russia after his reported death. In July 1946, Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Louis Fischer was informed at the behest of Mahatma Gandhi that Bose was in Russia. In November 1950, a highly placed source in India reported to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that Bose was in Siberia.
Justice Mukherjee’s inquiry in Russia failed because he was not given access to classified records and one crucial witness, a Russian diplomat who had seen a Stalin-era record about Bose was evidently prevented from appearing before the commission. Declassified records show that despite repeated requests, India did not get much information from the Russian side “in clear and complete terms”. The Russian foreign office stated that the judge would be given “access to the documents, which are open to public” only. That India did not get information “in clear and complete terms” has not been stated in the answers to numerous questions asked in Parliament till date. Overall, the Indian approaches to the Russians lacked sincerity, more so when compared with a similar case of Swedish diplomat who had disappeared the same year as Bose. Russians denying knowing anything about him but when Sweden applied pressure, they admitted that he had died at the KGB prison.
In 1995, then Minister for External Affairs Pranab Mukherjee tried to bring Bose’s wife Emilie Schenkl around to the official version but she refused to back the Taiwan death story. The Top-Secret record of the meeting recorded by Mukherjee himself made a false representation of what had actually transpired in his meeting with Bose’s wife in Germany. According to family sources, Schenkl received information that Bose was in Siberia years after his reported death.
In a classified note, Foreign Secretary Salman Haidar recorded that Netaji’s daughter Dr. Anita Pfaff was against a DNA test on the presumptive remains of her father. According to a 1998 note by S. Jaishankar, then deputy chief of mission in Tokyo, with regard to the Renkoji remains, “the views expressed by Netaji’s daughter . . . are not very clear from our records”.
A Call for JusticeHaving made their case, the authors of The Bose Deception: Declassified recommend that the Modi government should accept the reportgold fish casino slots, the Mukherjee Commission, as it was unfairly rejected by the previous Manmohan Singh government. Doing so would be in line with a 2017 statement by the MHA (the nodal ministry in the Netaji death case) that the official stand of the Government that Netaji died in Taiwan was based on ‘May 2006 Cabinet decision’ and that “any other credible inputs would be examined”.