Page 1 of 2 BOOK
REVIEW India's holy
grail Back from Dead by
Anuj Dhar
Reviewed by Sreeram
Chaulia
Second to none in the annals of
India's freedom struggle, Subhas Chandra Bose (aka
Netaji, or "respected leader") has a special place
in the nation's history for intrepidly challenging
British colonialism.
His very name
triggers visceral emotions of inspiration, admiration
and
reverence among the people of India. It also wells
up uncertainty and agony in most Indians because
of the abnormal manner in which he permanently
disappeared in 1945 and the subsequent guessing
game about his fate.
Journalist Anuj
Dhar's riveting investigation into Bose's
vanishing act is a landmark publication for
objectively exposing successive Indian
governments' cover-ups of the mystery.
In
Back from Dead, Dhar presents compelling
evidence against the official version that Bose
was killed in a plane crash in Taipei on August
18, 1945. Using information foraged from the
Taiwanese government, Dhar disproves the official
version of the crash. It also provides proof that
Bose's alleged "ashes", currently enshrined in
Tokyo, were actually received by the late Indian
prime minister
Jawaharlal Nehru from the Japanese government in
1954. Despite public demands, New Delhi has never
permitted scientific tests of Bose's "remains" in
Tokyo.
Doubts surfaced in India and
Britain as soon as Bose was declared dead by his
Japanese allies in 1945. Mahatma Gandhi told
Congress workers, "I believe Subhas is still alive
and biding his time somewhere." Initially, Nehru
shared this feeling. The hush-hush and evasive
"funeral" of Bose conducted by the Japanese at
Renkoji Temple added fuel to the controversy. When
Bose's Indian National Army (INA) officers held a
memorial service after news of his death was
circulated, puzzlingly, not a single Japanese
officer turned up or offered wreaths to a man they
held in utmost honor.
The British viceroy
of India, Archibald Wavell, suspected that Bose, a
renowned master of deception, had faked the air
crash to "go underground". Before British
intelligence agents could reach Southeast Asia for
verification, the Germans and the Japanese burned
all their archives on Bose. Only one file was
recovered in Bangkok, but it was suspected to have
been deliberately left there as part of Bose's
trickery, with Japanese cooperation. Habibur
Rahman, the sole credible witness of the alleged
plane crash, often admitted in private that he was
bound by Bose's gag order from revealing the
truth.
After thorough probes, Allied
intelligence services deduced that the Japanese
had misled them about Bose and that there was no
plane crash in Taipei on the day of his "death".
Interrogations of INA officers led them to
understand that, in August 1945, Bose was headed
for Manchuria, not Tokyo, to find his way into
Russia. Five days before his "death", Bose
informed confidants that "contact had already been
established with Russia and we shall try to move
towards that direction". The plan was to persuade
the Soviets "to accept us [Indians] as their
friends and not enemies" (p 68).
Since
1938, Bose had approached the USSR to boost
India's independence movement. In July 1945, with
the Axis defeat written on the wall, he asked the
Japanese foreign minister to arrange passage for
him to Russia via Manchuria. In 1946, the British
director of India's Intelligence Bureau mentioned
"information to the effect that Subhas Bose was
alive in Russia" (p 58). Russian diplomats of that
time in Kabul and Tehran corroborated this
assessment.
In August 1946, the Soviet
Politburo discussed "whether Bose should be
allowed to stay" (p 212). Babajan Gouffrav, Josef
Stalin's influential aide, was heard mentioning
that Bose was dispatched to a Siberian gulag as a
"bargaining chip in future dealings with India" (p
218). After 1991, the Russian government was
generously willing to share old records on Bose,
but New Delhi refused to make any formal requests
and adopted its usual obstructionist tactics.
In the 1950s, correspondence at the
highest level in the Indian government
contradicted its public conviction about the the
crash theory. A top-secret report commissioned by
prime minister Nehru revealed that Japanese Field
Marshal Hisaichi Terauchi decided on the eve of
the "crash" to help Bose reach Russian-held
territory. The INA secret service's S C Sengupta
divulged that "the plan had been approved by
Stalin and his foreign minister [Vyacheslav]
Molotov through Jacob Malik, the Soviet ambassador
in Tokyo" (p 197).
In 1955, Nehru set up
the Netaji Inquiry Committee in response to public
angst. It was ironically chaired by Shah Nawaz
Khan, an INA officer who was accused of betraying
Bose by spying for the British. Even though Taipei
was gladly willing to assist the inquest, the
Indian government cited diplomatic difficulties
and prevented the committee from visiting Taiwan.
The committee began with the presumption that Bose
died in the crash and submitted a whitewashed
report that played down credible contrary
evidence.
Bowing to nationwide demands,
the Indian government set up a one-man commission
in 1970 to survey the Bose riddle again. The
chairman, justice G D Khosla, was a close family
friend of the Nehrus with a personal grudge
against Bose from his college days. Khosla judged
reliable witnesses and deponents disputing the
crash theory as "liars" and sidestepped classified
government data asserting that Bose was in the
USSR after August 1945 and that both Gandhi and
Nehru were aware of it. B N Mullick, the doyen of
Nehru-era Indian intelligence, lied to the
commission that his detectives never worked on the
Bose mystery.
Khosla did not take the
Indira Gandhi government to task for reporting 30
classified papers on Bose as missing or destroyed.
One of these explicitly averred that Bose "is
alive and is hiding
Head
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prime minister
Jawaharlal Nehru from the Japanese government in
1954. Despite public demands, New Delhi has never
permitted scientific tests of Bose's "remains" in
Tokyo. 
