Most of Netaji's family believes he was in Soviet Russia after 1945

Social media is abuzz with the “news” in a leading daily that Subhas Chandra Bose came close to be conferred Bharat Ratna along with Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Madan Mohan Malaviya, but his family’s insistence came in the way. The “news” would have you to believe that the family still believes that Netaji is alive.

The plain fact of the matter is that almost 99 per cent of the living and deceased Bose family members believed that Netaji was in Soviet Russia after 1945, when his death was announced by his Japanese friends. Hence, most of them today, as ever, want a closure on the poignant issue of his fate before anything else. For them, the time to confer Bharat Ratna on him now went by decades ago.

The misplaced idea that the family is equally divided in believers and non-believers ranks is largely due to the works of some well-known, media savvy members of Netaji's family. Foremost among them are Lok Sabha MP from TMC and former Harvard historian Professor Sugata Bose, his mother Krishna Bose and his late father Dr Sisir Kumar Bose, a nephew of Netaji’s. Supporting them to an extent is Netaji's daughter Dr Anita Pfaff, who has lived in Germany all her life.

On the other hand, Subhas' wife and siblings never believed that he died in the reported air crash. It included the person who was closest to him – elder brother Sarat Bose, one of whose eight children was late Dr Sisir Bose. All of Sarat’s children went with the family view that Bose had not died. Sisir was one of them till something happened. People either do not know or fail to appreciate the fact that Dr Sisir Bose was the only nephew of Netaji to have joined the Congress party, which had expelled both his father and uncle Subhas. Dr Sisir Bose's wife Krishna was a Congress party MP before she joined Trinamool. The Sisir Bose family runs Netaji Research Bureau of Kolkata which receives grants from the government of India. For example, the amount sanctioned towards the corpus fund of the bureau during 1996-97 was Rs 3,00,00,000.

In 2010, professor Sugata Bose came out with his book in which he supported the government-backed air crash theory, hailing the reports of Nehru loyalist Shah Nawaz Khan and GD Khosla - Indira Gandhi's biographer and Nehru’s friend who insulted Netaji in his report approved by the authorities during the Emergency days. I cannot imagine how a grandnephew of Netaji can possibly praise this scandalous man. Others in the family see the in anger if you mention Khosla's name to them.

Most reviewers of professor Bose's book were mighty impressed by his credentials as a Harvard University don and relative of Netaji. Interviewers rejoiced when he told them that the Bose mystery was "exploited by a few fringe groups" not knowing or caring for the other view. Little did they know that not too long ago Sugata's mother's famous uncle, writer Nirad C Chaudhury, said that Netaji had become "a good business proposition" for a section of his family. "The likes of Sisir Bose cannot shed new light on Netaji's life. All that can do is encash on their Rangakaka (uncle Subhas) and claim that they have been an inseparable part of his struggle."

Shown below is a portion from a still top secret record detailing the machination of our government to use Sisir Bose to change the views of Anita and her mother Emilie Schenkl.

While they worked with Anita, these tricks failed miserably with Emilie. In September 1995, Sisir's friend and the then minister of external affairs (our current president) personally tried to bring her around the government view. But even towards the end of her life, Netaji's wife denied our government the opportunity to bury the truth. She refused to concur with the official theory that Bose had been killed in an air crash in Taiwan and that the ashes in Renkoji temple in Japan were of Netaji’s. Pranab Mukherjee’s mission to bring these ashes to India and fob them on Indians as Netaji’s ashes failed.

Emilie died in early 1996 thinking that Subhas had been eliminated in the Soviet Russia. Right or wrong, but this is the view the majority of Bose family members hold today.

(We reached out to Sugata Bose for his comment but he did not respond despite being given more than a day to do so.)