The search for Netaji

The 1998–2004 National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in India, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was a multi-party coalition with a slender majority in the Lok Sabha, India’s directly elected house of parliament. So, to hold sway in the legislature, the BJP was constantly involved in a give-and-take with partners within the alliance, as well as with parties outside its fold.

One such quid pro quo was the appointment of an arguably unnecessary and wasteful (for it was tax-payers’ money that was being squandered) probe into the ‘alleged disappearance’ of Subhas Chandra Bose. Two previous official Indian government examinations of the issue – in 1956 and 1974 – had both conclusively established beyond doubt that he died as a result of a plane crash at Taihoku on 18 August 1945. Yet, Vajpayee succumbed to pressures from the Trinamool Congress, a regional party with its stronghold in the Bose family’s backyard of West Bengal – which was a constituent of the government – the opposition left-wing Forward Bloc to keep them in good humour and a section of his own party colleagues to delve into the matter once more.

To justify its decision, the government cited an order of the Calcutta High Court asking the centre to carry out ‘a vigorous inquiry’ for ‘the purpose of giving an end to this controversy’ – which could at the very least have been challenged at the Indian Supreme Court – and a motion adopted by the West Bengal state assembly on 24 December 1998, wherein a demand was made for a fresh inquiry ‘into the matter to remove the mystery regarding the whereabouts of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’ – which could have been rejected outright for bizarrely seeking the whereabouts of a man who would then have been nearly 102 years old. Instead, in 1999, Justice Manoj Mukherjee, a retired judge of the Calcutta High Court, was entrusted with the task of inquiring into the subject.

When he handed in his report, he decreed ‘Netaji Subhas Chandra is dead’ but added, ‘He did not die in the plane crash, as alleged’ and that ‘The ashes in the Japanese temple (where they have been preserved since 1945) are not of Netaji.’ The last two rulings were astounding inferences.

The Vajpayee government further justified its notification of 14 May 1999 setting up the Mukherjee Commission by saying ‘there is a widespread feeling among the public that the issue of finding the truth about Netaji’s death still remains.’ Nothing could have been farther from the truth. Not even in West Bengal did people materially demand this, let alone the rest of India. Only a section of Bose’s extended family and his more imprudent supporters were interested in reigniting the dying embers. The commission was asked to submit its report in six months; but eventually, it took six years.

It could be argued the judge was hamstrung in his endeavour by not being able to utilise the first-hand, eyewitness depositions under oath given to the 1956 and 1974 inquiries. Perhaps he was handicapped by the fact that those who experienced the accident with Bose, treated him in hospital, were by his bedside when he breathed his last or were present at his cremation were – after nearly sixty years – no longer alive to give evidence or too old to be coherent. He complained about ‘limitations and constraints’ in his report: ‘Owing to long passage of time a considerable number of witnesses whose evidence might have been helpful to this inquiry were found to be either dead or untraceable or too old and infirm to depose…’ The judge could have invited relatives of survivors or victims of the crash to appear before the commission, or insisted he be granted access to classified Japanese government records. Instead, he chose to dismiss the fact of the accident. Kazunori Kunizuka, who worked as an interpreter to Bose between 1943 and 1945 and who was very much alive and in reasonably good health at the time of Mukherjee’s visit to Japan, was never approached for evidence. His diary records in graphic detail the last days of Bose and his death consequent to the dreadful accident. He was a resident of Kobe and only passed away in October 2015.

Mukherjee did not bother to consider the abnormal circumstances of Formosa when the tragedy occurred and its relationship with India thereafter, which posed a hurdle in the path of obtaining information from there. He sweepingly stated no plane crash took place at Taihoku on the date of the disaster, without taking cognizance of testimonies provided in the past or pursuing further proof, such as local newspaper reports. For some reason, he preferred to bark up a route of attempting a DNA match between Bose and a sadhu or an ascetic in the town of Faizabad in the upper Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, who called himself Gumnami Baba, because some deponents had spun yarns before him to the effect he was Bose in disguise. Indeed, the judge gave an inkling he was inclined to believe this. Though the Baba died in 1985, material for DNA extraction apparently remained where he used to live. Needless to mention, the result of the test was emphatically negative.

The pronouncements of the Mukherjee Commission were such that the cabinet of the central government in India, at the time headed by the scholarly Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, had no choice other than to categorically reject them. This forceful reaffirmation of the truth was declassified in March 2016 by the BJP government of Narendra Modi. Significantly, it has not contradicted the view of the Singh administration.

Extracts taken with permission from Roli Books