Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Read online

  Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose

  Feared Even in Captivity

  Netaji Subhash

  Chandra Bose

  Feared Even in Captivity

  Santanu Banerjee

  First published in India 2018

  © 2018 by Santanu Banerjee

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  To

  My father late Gangadhar Banerjee

  my mother late Labannya Banerjee

  my wife Krishna

  A self-imposed

  thirty-two-year journey into prologue for a book

  T

  he political trouble, which had started in 1975 following the imposition of Emergency with Morarji Desai’s ouster and the final collapse of the Janata Party government, began melting for the Congress in the last phase of 1979. Mrs Gandhi rode back to power in 1980.

  Once again, the issue of mystery shrouding Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose became a dead issue which threatened to snowball to an unmanageable proportion for the Congress during 1977-1978.

  The political verdict of both the Shahnawaz Committee and the Khosla Commission that Bose died in the Taihoku aircrash began to hold sway once again.

  The Congress ritual of Goebbelsian proportion not unmixed with Stalinist tactics to prove the untruth as truth was complete, and regained acceptability among the historians and scholars, like A JP Taylor said in his Second Thoughts in The Origins of The Second World War: ‘Historians often dislike what happened or wish that it happened differently.’

  But it was also true that such historians try to blind people, including intelligentsia, with success!

  And the millions of people who disbelieved Bose’s official death story as a myth, had to reconcile to much the collapse of the Janata Party’s non-Congress political experiment in India.

  The mystery regarding Bose also entered a cold phase again with his most ardent follower Samar Guha slipping into political oblivion following his very expensive political mistake that he was trapped into by Congress and a section of Communist plotters by their agent saboteur.

  Yes, Bose ceased to be an issue once again both among the people who did not believe in the myth which the Congress allowed to grow, and among the fading tribe of Indian politicians who would have protested the Indian government’s relentless efforts in alliance with Great Britain, Russia, and America to cover up the biggest post-war political crime.

  In such quiet hours, however, the British government chose to play a quiet mischief with the Congress, or rather the ‘great Indian dynasty’ it handed over power to in 1947.

  They chose this relatively tranquil time to publish the Transfer of Power (ToP) in six volumes which contained some very significant official correspondences and documents during the crucial days and months culminating to the so-called transfer of power in 1947.

  The volumes contained a letter, which, for the first time, had confirmed that the British government knew, as early as 23 August 1945, that Bose had successfully crossed over to Russia.

  This was a stunning disclosure despite both Indian, British, and American writers ignoring it and continuing to use the same old story for more than six decades now to opiate the opinion of a large section of the people, both in India and abroad.

  What was more stunning was that the British confirmation of Bose’s escape to Russia (which exploded the myth of the aircrash) was ignored both by the Indian print media and the Indian government under Mrs Gandhi’s regime!

  They chose not to react, like the wise pack of post-war British bureaucrats in Delhi who advised 10 Downing Street: ‘Leave him (Bose) where he is and do not ask for his release.’

  For me, it ended my months and years of vacillation after I had watched how Prof. Samar Guha, a Janata Party MP, a few years back was cleverly manipulated into a terrible mistake by the nervous and embarrassed Congress and a section of conniving veteran Communist leaders.

  For, like the Nehru family, the stakes of a section of Communist leaders, were also very high.

  Everybody knew that like the dynasty, a section of Communists also enjoyed the patronage of London via Communist Party of Great Britain and Moscow and both actually worked to misguide and diffuse Left movements in British colonies, especially in India, and produced a non-radical group of Left leaders.

  Surprisingly, even Prof. Guha, who was always concentrating on the mischief played by the Nehru family, was never quite aware of his gradually antagonising a section of Communists - a faction of which - CPI (M) joined Janata Party - and another, CPI, remained outside Morarji Government, supporting Mrs Gandhi’s notorious Emergency.

  With those documents in hand, I thought, it was the right time to bring the British revelations to the media’s attention. I immediately began my research on the Transfer of Power and an article was ready within a week.

  After some thought, I sent it to The Illustrated Weekly of India. However, days, weeks, and months rolled by, neither was the piece published, nor did I receive any regret intimation from the editor’s office.

  While I gave up any hope to see my article in print. At the same time, I realised that my mistake of writing in detail not only about various options examined by the post-war British bureaucrats - how to try Bose in India or in some of the South East Asian countries, including banishing him in an African Island and an in-camera trail - all of which they considered impossible considering his pan-Asian stature and popularity. More, I also chose to write in detail how they assessed Bose’s walking into Russian hand could be ‘dangerous’ for him.’’

  Writing about the British assessment of the Russian danger for Bose was my undoing, for the Russian connection to Bose’s disappearance began to evaporate with the collapse of the Janata Party government. I could also understand how deep the roots of intrigue ran.

  Depressed and morbid for having missed the target, after months, again I thought I must rewrite my piece. And this time, I deleted the part which dealt with the Br
itish bureaucrat’s assessment of the danger that Bose invited without even realising it and by walking into Stalin’s hand.

  Still I was not sure, if the piece would be accepted in some of the big newspapers. Hesitant and nervous, I chose not to send it to any editor immediately.

  After almost four years, I had gathered enough mental strength and approached a senior editor in The Times of India. When I told him about the content, he gave me no word, but told me that he would try to consider it.

  I was surprised when on 23 January 1989, a very senior neighbour of mine knocked at my door in the morning and showed me the lead op-ed piece,‘Why British feared Bose so much’. I also saw my byline below!

  Though my piece was severed of the Russian detail, I had succeeded in managing to keep the mischievous British bureaucrat’s suggestion to his boss, both in London and Delhi: ‘Leave him (Bose) where he is and don’t ask for his release.’

  More than flattered, though it took me more than four years to see it through with such a splendid display, and in as big a newspaper as The Times of India, I expected the Government, the Netaji experts, or Indian historians to react. My expectation was great as I thought it would set off a fresh debate.

  However, days wore off, and my piece could stir up no heat and dust either in the Government or from the scholars and historians.

  Instead, when I met an American professor, Leonard A Gordon much later, he had no idea about Bose’s Russian connection.

  Incidentally, he authored Brothers against the Raj (American biographer of Bose and his elder brother, Sarat Chandra Bose he had no idea about ToP disclosures either).

  To a question if he checked with Russian archives, irritated he had no hesitation in telling me: “It’s a pure imagination as Russians were not interested in Bose.’’

  Ironically, when Gordon’s interview was going for print as a Sunday special in the Patriot where I worked as a sub-editor, a famous Russian scholar came to Delhi and in a press conference he announced that the Russian archives have a lot of material on Bose. I got the report regarding the Russian scholar’s press conference inserted in Gordon’s interview, which came out as the lead in Patriot’s Sunday article in the editorial page.

  Yet, Gordon’s and Indian scholars’ and historians’ indifference taught me another lesson and forced me to recollect what happened to the people who sought to expose the Allies’ post-Second-World-War global plot in alliance with the Indian dynasty, for a sound cover-up which the ToP letter said ‘amounted to the judicial murder of Bose’.

  Just eighteen-year-old, I had no idea when I met Prof. Samar Guha at his 14, Talkatora MP Bungalow in New Delhi some time in 1978, that though a bit inconsistently, but my meeting him steadfastly inspired me into a quest to know the truth about Bose’s last destination – that is, his last stop and odyssey whence he would never come back again to lead his people he loved so well and not wisely like many of his peers!

  After several discussions I had with the Socialist Party leader, during which he shared some secrets with me about Bose’s last destination, pointed decisively to Russia under Stalin’s leadership and leading to my opinion getting firmed up.

  I began to shed doubts on two issues. First, Bose’s camouflage accident was used to the hilt both by his Indian political rivals to buttress his Russian friends-turned-captors to carry on with twentieth century’s biggest lie with America, Great Britain that they knew nothing about Bose’s end.

  But Kremlin kept planting stories, Bose was in China, he came back to India turned a saint with their Indian collaborators.

  Secondly, despite decades of Cold War between the America-led West and the Soviet Union, it did not lead to any basic change or a thaw in Kremlin’s attitude towards Bose.

  Rather all joined in to ruthlessly cover up, sealing the fate of one of the world’s greatest non-Communist Left leaders for all time to come.

  My views were also firming up for another reason. Politically, for the time being, the rule of Mrs Gandhi had eclipsed after the Emergency, and the Janata Party government began to respond positively to the issue of Bose’s mystery.

  And soon enough, Prime Minister Morarji Desai had rejected the findings of both the Shahnawaz Committee and the Khosla Commission reports (which concluded that Bose had died in a plane crash) on the floor of the Parliament, saying: ‘This government could not accept the findings of these two official attempts by the Congress governments in view of new and fresh facts regarding Netaji coming to light and the discrepancies in their findings. This Government had not only found these reports by these inquiry bodies inadequate but also unacceptable (date? Even Mukherjee Commission was denied the date and the original copy of Prime Minister Morarji Desai’s speech in the Parliament).

  Spurred by Prof. Samar Guha, H V Kamath, and NG Goray, Morarji’s utterance was a very brave attempt to hint that the new government would want a fresh assessment as to what had happened to Bose.

  However, it not only caused great political nervousness in the Congress but also with the pro-Congress elements within the Janata Party.

  Most importantly, when Prof. Samar Guha’s book, Netaji Dead or Alive, was released shortly by the then President of India, Neelam Sanjiva Reddy in the Parliament Annexe (I attended the function as Prof. Guha invited me), the professor was assured by Reddy that ‘if Netaji was interned in Russia, I would immediately start a dialogue with Kremlin in my capacity as President of India and would make them a formal request to help divulge the truth… After all, Soviet Union is our friend.’

  Next day, to my shock I saw that all newspapers worth the name had ignored Reddy’s assurance to Prof. Guha. As a then student of second-year BA, I could sense a desperate Congress behind the scene, and its high-level manoeuvre to get the news spiked.

  However, initially, like the professor, I had no clue as to why the news was ignored. Not only the Indian print media, but Kremlin, the top leaders of the Communist Party of India, as well as the Congress chose not to react.

  But as I watched, I also realised how firm had been the grip of intrigue!

  A little later, I also came to watch rather helplessly, how these activities led to a far bigger conspiracy to politically finish off Prof. Guha.

  It was a different time – just thirty-seven to forty-five years back – when a few politicians, Right or Left, belonged to the lost tribe of educated and ideologically-committed politicians in India. Thanks to rapid cultural changes which spiked off nationalism and pride and gripped not only the educated middle-class but also politicians who often act as agents of technology and multinationals thus performing the last rites of nationalism without realising that culture, nationalism need not get tied down to technology and multinational culture of profiteering.

  This was also a reason why it became far more easier for the then agent-saboteurs within the Congress to finish off a genuine professor in the name of Bose.

  Highly disappointed with the turn of events, I met Prof. Guha one day at his residence to register my complaint with him against the Janata Party.

  When I met him, I saw him in an even more optimistic mood, though he agreed with me that ‘not enough has been done to expose the truth as differences began to surface within the Janata Party on the issue.’

  Incidentally, a few days before this, Morarji Desai had urged Guha in the Parliament to withdraw a motion demanding another inquiry into Bose’s disappearance and on grounds that Guha had claimed that Netaji was alive, in Parliament!

  A smiling and indulgent (as always was) Prof. Guha placed before me a picture which he claimed as Bose’s after his escape from Russia to his motherland. I saw it with excitement, but suddenly I found it was difficult to believe.

  Finding me hesitant, he told me to cool down, and said, ‘I am sure about it.’

  However, as an instant after thought, I sensed the plot hatched against Guha and realized that he was getting trapped into it. But I could not tell him for he would not have believed me.

  I disbelieve
d it, because as a second-year BA student of political science and economics, whatever little I had read about a Stalinist Russia, I entertained no illusion that Bose could be allowed to escape Kremlin’s iron curtains.

  Within the next few days, Guha lost both his political career and face as a Netaji follower, as it was later detected that the photo was not real but fabricated.

  I stood correct in my assessment: a desperate Congress finding it difficult to stop Prof. Guha, claimed its victim by planting an agent-saboteur within his innermost men to deceive him into believing a fake as real!

  That was my last meeting with that great man and Indian socialist, and never again did I have the guts to meet him.

  As a political fallout, while Desai’s foreign minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee maintained silence, an angry Morarji Desai told Blitz editor Russi Karanjia, ‘Go and ask the Nehru family (about) what happened to Netaji; only they know the truth.’

  Guha’s fall led to a great disappointment for me as I had no person to turn to, and a period of vacillation set in. Though I realised by then that by even after making Guha a victim, what Mrs Gandhi could not however kill was the exposé of grim truth that her family knew that Bose’s death came painfully in Moscow in a massive bungalow on eighteen acres of land without any permission to meet local people, in captivity, like post-war British bureaucrat pointed to.

  Meanwhile, I began collecting rare books on Bose or by Bose from as far as Lahore. Another important aspect within the Janata Party, I keenly observed, was while Morarji spoke on Bose without any inhibition, one of the Janata Party founders, Jayaprakash Narayan, maintained an almost stoic silence even as controversy touched a feverish pitch, much like his unsigned letter to Bose a little before his great escape.

  There was nothing much to do in the frustrating and chaotic turn of events, but as I began to study writings on and by Bose, I slowly began to realise that the odds were rather too huge. Perhaps, I can never even solve it with my limited resources and reach.