Why the case of Raoul Wallenberg is similar to Netaji

The birth anniversary of Raoul Wallenberg has passed without any notice in India. "Wallenberg who?" would be the response of most when asked to reflect about him.

Well, in brief, an honorary citizen of the United States, Canada, Hungary, Australia and Israel, Wallenberg was a young Swedish diplomat, a saviour in the mould of Oskar Schindler, whose heroism was immortalised in the 1993 movie Schindler's List by Steven Spielberg. While serving in the Swedish mission on Budapest during the WWII, Wallenberg saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis.

This was just before he disappeared from Budapest in January 1945.

The tragedy of Raoul Wallenberg bears remarkable similarity with the controversy surrounding the fate of Subhas Chandra Bose, who would too disappear six months later the same year, while fighting for the freedom of India.

Wallenberg was first reported dead in a car crash. And then it emerged that he might have been abducted by the Red Army. Just as it happened with Subhas Bose, the rumours of Raoul Wallenberg's presence in the USSR began swirling thereafter.

And just as Bose's kin and admirers strove to get at the truth, Wallenberg's influential family, admirers and the people he had rescued began making efforts to find out what had become of him.

What the Swedes did thereafter contrasts sharply with Indians would not. A quick survey of events would bring out the difference between a bona fide and a mala fide approach. The moment it got the leads that Raoul Wallenberg could have been alive in the USSR, the Swedish government wasted no time in contacting the Soviet authorities. The Swedes did not enjoy the sort of close relations which the Indians did, but that did not come in the way of their quest for truth. It is another matter that we Indians have successfully convinced the rest of the world that ours is the nation of peace and truth, the core values Mahatma Gandhi stood for.

Eight written and five oral official approaches concerning Wallenberg were made in between 1945-47. In June 1946 the Swedish ambassador in Moscow was directed to raise the issue with Joseph Stalin himself. "You say his name was Wallenberg?" Stalin asked him as he jotted down the name on his pad, pretending to know nothing.

India was effectively in the Soviet bloc in post-Stalin period. There was nothing under the sun we did not discuss with our Soviet friends. Only one issue wasn't officially touched - not even with a bargepole. This was despite availability of several reports suggesting that Bose could have been in Soviet Russia after his reported death.

Persistent Swedish approaches made the Soviets come out in August 1947 with their first ever high-level formal reply. Deputy foreign minister Andrey Vyshinsky wrote that an extensive search of the records had shown that "Wallenberg is not in the Soviet Union and is unknown to us".

Such an emphatic answer would have ended all further questions from Sweden but there were outcries from the Swedish public and media. Their government stood by them and kept on raising the issue. The Soviets retaliated in 1948 through the semi-official foreign ministry weekly New Times, which decried the "fables" and "filthy campaign" about Wallenberg's presence in the USSR.

Two years earlier, an article in Pravada had in similarly vituperative fashion "denounced as 'a stupid fairy tale' a report that Subhas Chandra Bose… is in Soviet Russia".

For the Wallenberg case, things began to change in 1955 when many of those captured by the Soviets during the war were released. Proactive Swedish authorities traced out some of them and obtained their testimonies concerning Wallenberg. They said they had contacted him in prison through wall tapping. Even this thin evidence infused confidence in the Swedes. The yearning for the truth made them go back to the Soviets.

In the meanwhile, New Delhi continued to stonewall demands for an investigation into Bose's fate. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had dug in his heel over the finality of his stand. "I have no doubt in my mind - I did not have it then and I have no doubt today of the fact of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's death," was stern response in Parliament on March 5, 1952. Official files are replete with instances of his putting his foot down.

Situation came to such a pass that questions concerning Bose's fate were disallowed in Parliament.

Around the same time, ignoring aggressive Soviet posturing, Swedish Prime Minister Tage Erlander put the Wallenberg issue high on bilateral agenda during his Moscow visit of 1956. A dossier comprising instances of hearsay coming from the German and other prisoners of war, which would not be admissible as evidence under the Indian Evidence Act, was handed over to the Russians.

A declassified Soviet record shows foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov noting that "Erlander persistently asked us to find a solution to the situation in order to settle the matter" and that "The Wallenberg issue was such an irritating element in Soviet-Swedish relations that it might have a negative effect on them".

Cornered by the Swedes, the Soviets owned up the basic truth: Wallenberg was indeed in the USSR after 1945. In 1957, USSR deputy foreign minister Andrei Gromyko's bombshell of a letter referred to 31-year- old Wallenberg's death following a heart attack a decade earlier in the notorious Lubyanka prison at the KGB's HQ.

In contrast, the case of Subhas Bose as it was pursued by India would make your heart sink. In spite of the knowledge that Bose might have made it to the USSR, New Delhi never officially utilised even a jot of its diplomatic and political clout with Moscow to find out the facts so long statesmanly Jawaharlal Nehru and his family of "world leaders" were at the helm. Rumours do have it though that, unofficially, the matter was raised by India's first two mission heads in Moscow. Vijaylakshmi Pandit (Nehru's sister) and her successor Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. A meteoric rise awaited Radhakrishnan in India after he finished his term as our Ambassador in Soviet Russia.

It was only in the 1990s finally that the New Delhi, prodded by Bose's followers, meekly raised the Netaji issue with Soviets/Russians at the lowest level. The response that came from the other side bore striking similarity to the Soviet formulation over Wallenberg matter - "no information whatsoever is available on the stay of [Bose]".

In 1996, a joint secretary picked holes in the Russian denial and recommended issuance of a demarche to the Russians to make a search for relevant records in the KGB archive. However, the then minister of external affairs shot down the idea. Subsequently, during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee era timid lowest level approaches were made, yielding nothing.

And so, we are yet to see a day, when for humanitarian reasons if nothing else, New Delhi is making a high level intervention in the matter with the Russians concerning the fate of the man the fruits of whose singular struggle for India's freedom, in a twist of fate, were harvested by those who disliked him.

Meanwhile, the Swedish government has continued to cherish Raoul Wallenberg's memory by continuing to do all that it could to account for the complete truth about the heartbreaking fate of a hero for the mankind.