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The Netaji cover-up can't go on

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Anuj Dhar
Anuj DharDec 22, 2014 | 18:16

The Netaji cover-up can't go on

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Reproduced from India’s Biggest Cover-up

"PM would like our Ambassador in Moscow to make discreet enquiries at a high level to ascertain, if possible, the existence of such information in Russia; and the possible reaction of the Russian side if we were to request access."

Revealing file notings such as this one from the PV Narasimha Rao era are scrawled across thousands of inaccessible secret documents relating to Subhash Chandra Bose – his fate to be precise. These records have been there for years, having been piled up over the decades. But it is only now that the demand for their disclosure is getting a national amplification.

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Subhash Bose's reported death in a plane crash 70 years ago left in its wake a jittery establishment, not sure if the Raj's Enemy No. 1 was really dead. “I suspect it very much, it is just what should be given out if he meant to go underground,” observed Viceroy Field Marshal Archibald Wavell on the day he heard the Japanese announcement. A few days later, the first spotting of Bose after his death was reported. Not by a gullible native, but an American journalist embedded with the US army. Alfred Wagg, a stringer for The Chicago Tribune, rudely interrupted a press conference of Jawaharlal Nehru to shout that Bose was "alive and seen in Saigon four days ago".

Since Bose's body or a picture of it was not produced to substantiate the suspected Japanese account, intelligence sleuths and military officers mounted investigations. Then they came across intelligence, even from Soviet sources, that Bose might have escaped to Soviet Russia, the only country that could have sheltered him back then.

While the facts on record did not fully support the death story, first the interim Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1946 and then in 1948 Deputy PM Vallabhbhai Patel, who had never gotten along well with Bose, put a stamp of approval on the story that the fiery young leader had died in an air crash in Taiwan. And from that time the government of ours has stuck to this official gospel of sort -- never mind the plethora of evidence going against the air crash theory.  But then we had had enough of the Bose mystery a very long time ago. The nation had different priorities and had to move on. In between, three panels were set up by the government under public pressure. The first two were headed by men whose worldview tallied with that of the government and the third one turned out to be a heretic. Justice MK Mukherjee, a retired Supreme Court judge, was tasked with finding the truth in 1999 following a court order, not some fancy of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. 

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His finding that Bose escaped towards Russia even as his Japanese benefactors planted the story of his death in an air crash was arbitrarily rejected by the Dr Manmohan Singh government. The memorandum of Action Taken Report placed in Parliament was a cruel joke for it assigned no reasons why the report was rejected. As it happened, India was still not ready to discuss what really happened to Bose even as some raised the specter of, God forbid, his elimination in Soviet Russia at the behest of you know who.

This is why in 2006 some Bose admirers, including this writer, got together on an internet chat room and decided to do something. We decided to take a circuitous route. Ok, the people by and large have little interest in Subhash Bose’s fate, but then, what would they have to say about dark secrecy around him? Truth has no need for secrecy, said a wise man when Watergate scandal was raging in America. In America in early 1990s, Oliver Stone’s movie JFK had rekindled the controversy surrounding John F Kennedy’s assassination. It began with this quote: “To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men.”

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America exploded thereafter. The US Congress was compelled to pass the JFK Records Act as a "unique solution to the problem of secrecy" surrounding this matter. The JFK Act established an independent Assassination Records Review Board to smooth out the process of declassification of all assassination-related records. The very first chapter in the board’s final report was titled “The problem of secrecy and the solution of the JFK Act”. It was set off by a quote attributed to a US government official: “Uncage the documents. Let them see light.”

In compliance of the board’s directive, many US departments and agencies released their records. While releasing the CIA files, its then director Robert Gates, US secretary of defence under Bush and Obama, “spoke in a voice breaking with apparent emotion”:“The only thing more horrifying to me than the assassination itself is the insidious, perverse notion that elements of the American government—that my own agency—had some part in it. I am determined personally to make public or to expose to disinterested eyes every relevant scrap of paper in CIA’s possession in the hope of helping to dispel this corrosive suspicion....I believe I owe that to his memory.”

So why can’t our own chiefs of R&AW and IB evoke the same emotion and reason?

India has humungous classified documentation concerning Netaji, his life and fate, the INA treasure and his family, spread across ministries and departments. Last week, the government accepted that the Prime Minister’s Office alone has 60 files on or about the man most of us would like to believe died 70 years ago. At least 20 PMO files are about Bose's fate. The Intelligence Bureau has 77 of them but government wouldn’t even agree to their existence in Parliament. The Ministry of External Affairs has 29, with 7 classified as Top Secret and kept in NGO (Not to Go out of Office) Section. 

Any record containing classified information is given one of the three security markings to commensurate with the damage its unauthorised disclosure will cause to India's interests. When it is determined that the damage could be "exceptionally grave", the file is stamped "Top Secret".

Not to be left behind, the government of West Bengal, Netaji’s home state, has its own cache of 70 odd files. Copies of some files made available in the National Archives in New Delhi demonstrate the misuse of intelligence organisations to spy on people whom they were not supposed to be spy upon, years before Watergate scandal broke in the US. And all was done for a “dead” man, would you believe?

Some of the secret records with our government detail the Indian exchanges with the Russians to find out the truth or otherwise about the nightmarish conspiracy theory just discussed. Yet others show how in 1996 the government, rather the then minister for external affairs, refused to issue a demarche to the Russian for a search in the erstwhile KGB archives for information about Bose.

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Reproduced from India’s Biggest Cover-up

Truth has no reason for secrecy. So why is our government, upholder of the motto “Satyameva Jayate”, keeping all those records secret?

The PMO and MEA have a stock answer: relations with certain friendly foreign nations will be hit. The ministry of home affairs, the nodal agency in the Bose disappearance case, gave some details in 2007 during an RTI proceeding involving the writer and friends. Disclosure of certain Top Secret records "may lead to a serious law and order problem in the country, especially in West Bengal". This is as horrendous as it gets!

The core problem for hard core researchers like me is that as long as our government is sitting on a pile of classified files, it cannot approach the Russians to disclose theirs. Like charity, transparency must begin at home.

Last updated: August 19, 2015 | 11:35
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