MN SPECIALS
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MN SPECIALS
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THE RUSSIAN CONNECTIONBy Dr Purabi Roy (Reproduced with the permission of the daily Pioneer, which carried this piece titled as "Netaji: The enigma endures" on January 22, 2006) The story of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's post-August 18, 1945 life - and eventual death - is probably locked up in some archive in Russia or any of the other former republics that made up the Soviet Union. After the disintegration of the USSR, only a handful of the thousands of archives have been thrown open to scholars. These store the files of the KGB, the Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) and its satellites in the provinces and republics, the Army and other defence establishments and countless think tanks aligned to the Communist party. The Communists, it must be noted, were compulsive recorders and stashed away the proceedings of meetings of any significance - or, as it turned out, insignificance - for later reference. In the post-1991 era, quite a few indications have emerged from the writings of Russian archivists and historians pointing to a definite link between the CPSU's pre-World War II interest in Netaji and the big enigma surrounding his disappearance. It is up to Indian scholars working on Russia to get to the bottom of this mystery because the Russians themselves are not likely to plumb the archives in pursuance of a story, which is not central to their own needs. Besides, under the economic conditions prevailing in Russia, scholars find funding for academic research quite hard to come by. What exacerbates the tragedy is that there are few Indians to pursue Indo-Russian history, particularly with a focus on the Soviet era, and the root cause for that, again, is paucity of scholarships and fellowships. Even the few, like me, who are keen to get to the truth, are stonewalled by bureaucratic opposition. All that a scholar needs to access the once-forbidden archives these days is a letter of recommendation from the Ministry of External Affairs. Professor Bondorevski, a noted India expert with good relations with the Kremlin, once urged me to meet a senior MEA official called Mr Shukla. He said that Mr Shukla was his friend and would cooperate. But subsequently, the official told me in quite a candid way that the Government of India was not keen. A good question often making the rounds these days is: What did the Justice MK Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry find in Russia during its fortnight-long sojourn in September 2005? While hesitating to speculate on the contents of his report, I can only say that a judicial inquiry is hardly the appropriate vehicle for navigating through the veritable ocean of facts, often camouflaged with suggestive passages whose implications are spiked with intrigue. One hint carried in a solitary manuscript found in one corner of Russia may require follow-up from a Japanese end, or the trail could possibly resurface in Romania. Another aspect to think of is the enduring Russian tradition of secrecy. Even Justice Mukherjee discovered that to his chagrin. Now that we are sure that there was no air crash at Taihoku airport in Formosa (Taiwan) - and, therefore, no definitive evidence that Netaji died on August 18, 1945 - all indicators point to a Russian role behind his vanishing from the scene. Half a century has passed since, marked by the collapse of Communism in Russia, but a closure to the mystery eludes us. We have to ponder first on what could possibly have been the reason behind Joseph Stalin's allergy towards Jawaharlal Nehru. He did not give audience to Nehru's sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, the first Ambassador of India to Moscow. Besides, he refused to invite the Prime Minister to his country, despite a lot of back-channel requests. In 1951, Stalin told a visiting Indian Communist delegation comprising, among others, Aruna Asaf Ali, through the two interlocutors in the India Section of the CPSU that "Indian Communists should distance themselves from Nehru". It was only under Glasnost that we witnessed a shift in interest, principally on the part of Soviet scholars, to this subject. In 1989, E Devyatkina, an India expert, wrote a book, Social and Political Thought of Subhas Chandra Bose. This can be counted as the first post-Stalinist inquiry into Netaji's life. On his death, however, there is precious little. But Devyatkina, who had access to a lot of records in what was still a close society, wrote: "There is reason to doubt the theory that he died in 1945." Bookmark/Search this post with: »
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