Subhas Chandra Bose: The Afterlife of India’s Fascist Leader

December 7, 2011 by laxman.duggiral...

On September 16th, 1985, in a dilapidated house in Faizabad, formerly
the capital of Oudh province in India, a reclusive holy man known as
Bhagwanji or Gumnami Baba (‘the saint with no name’) breathed his last.
Locals had long suspected that he was none other than Subhas Chandra
Bose (1897-1945), the Indian quasi-Fascist leader who in the 1930s had
advocated a violent revolution against the British Empire to gain total
independence for India.The Second World War had enabled him to practise
what he preached and his Indian National Army had fought with the
Japanese in Burma attempting to drive the British out of the
subcontinent.

Although Netaji (Great Leader) Bose was reported
killed in an air crash in August 1945, while trying to escape to the
Soviet Union, many believed then and continue to believe now that,
helped by his Japanese allies, he faked his death, reached Russia and
returned to India many years later to lead the secret life of a hermit.
Surprisingly for a poor sadhu (mystic) the ‘saint with no name’
left behind many trunks of possessions and in 1986, realising that
these might solve the mystery once and for all, Bose’s niece Lalita
obtained a high court order for an inventory to be made of their
contents. Among the 2,673 items indexed, Lalita claimed she saw letters
in her uncle’s handwriting and family photographs. Gumnami Baba’s
belongings were re-packed in 23 boxes and sent to the District Treasury.

This
was the latest but by no means the last of the dramas attending the
fate of Bose. During the previous 40 years the Indian government had
been forced to set up two inquiries into his death (the Nawaz Khan
Committee in 1956 and the G.D. Khosla Commission 1970-74) and, although
both confirmed the reported story that he died in an air crash, the
rumours persisted. In 1999, reluctantly, but under pressure from Bose’s
home state of Bengal in particular, the Indian government appointed
Justice M.K. Mukherjee to ‘launch a vigorous inquiry ... to end the
controversy ... over the reported death of [Bose] in 1945’.

On
November 26th, 2001, Mukherjee drove up to the District Treasury in his
official white Ambassador car. A large crowd had gathered to watch the
boxes being opened. They included the Hindustan Times
journalist Anuj Dhar who described to me what happened: out came a pair
of German binoculars, a Corona typewriter, a pipe (taken away for DNA
but without result), a Rolex watch – ‘Netaji’s watch,’ gasped a
spectator in awe – a box of five teeth (also taken away but found not to
belong to Bose) and a pair of silver, round-rimmed spectacles. Clearly,
Gumnami Baba had been an extraordinary man. It was his collection of
books that was most thought-provoking. Bear in mind that Bose had
received an English education (finishing at Cambridge University) and,
in the eyes of the British, had committed war crimes against them
possibly escaping to the Soviet Union; then appreciate, for example, Gulliver’s Travels, P.G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves, the scarcely available International Military Tribunal for the Far East, The History of the Freedom Movement in India, The Last Days of the Raj, Moscow’s Shadow Over West Bengal and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.
This could not be the bedtime reading of a typical sadhu. Either he had
been an obsessive collector of Bose memorabilia, or someone had added
to his possessions posthumously as a hoax, or he really was Bose. Some
of the books had writing in the margins that Anuj Dhar submitted to an
expert. He issued a certificate that the handwriting belonged to Bose,
but the Indian government promptly appointed an expert of its own who
disagreed.

In his inquiry report, completed in 2006, Justice
Mukherjee was categoric. He concluded: ‘Netaji Bose is dead [a safe bet
as he would have been 109]. He did not die in the plane crash as alleged
and the ashes in the Japanese temple in Tokyo [maintained by the Indian
government since 1945] are not of Netaji.’ He was more narrowly
legalistic about the Faizabad connection:

In the
absence of any clinching evidence to prove that Bhagwanji/Gumnami Baba
was Netaji the question whether he died in Faizabad on September
16th,1985, as testified by some of the witnesses, need not be answered.

Nevertheless,
caught off guard in a TV interview in January 2010, Mukherjee can
clearly be heard saying that he thinks Bhagwanji and Bose may well be
the same person. This probably did not impress the Indian government
which had already dismissed the Mukherjee Report as unreliable. Why have
these rumours persisted for so long? Why do they continue to divide
well-educated Indians, including Bose’s own extended family? And why for
many less educated Bengalis has Bose assumed the semi-divine status of a
sadhu? There are several reasons.

In the first place, Bengal
needs Netaji now more than ever. Bose, twice Mayor of Calcutta (Kolkata)
in the 1930s, was the one great Bengali national and international
politician of the last 75 years. A recent opinion poll of Indian
students ranked him second only to Gandhi and above Nehru as the
greatest Indian statesman of the 20th century. He has become a legendary
figure. Taxi drivers in Kolkata discussing the appalling roads or
flooded pavements of their town will say, ‘If only Netaji was still
alive!’ A play staged there last year was based on the premise that Bose
returned to India after Independence. Forward Bloc, the political party
he founded in 1939 after he was forced to resign the presidency of the
Indian National Congress for advocating violent revolution, still exists
under his name, campaigning for a form of national socialism.
Associations with Bose distract from the diminished status of Kolkata
today: no longer the political or economic capital of India but the
centre of a partitioned state.

The afterlife notion also persists
because Netaji’s real life encourages conspiracy theorists. When the
story of Bose’s death in 1945 reached Viceroy Wavell he said: ‘I suspect
it very much. It is just what should be given out if he meant to go
“underground”.’ In 1946 Gandhi claimed that ‘inner voices’ were telling
him ‘Subhas is still alive and biding his time somewhere’. Bose
certainly had form as an escaper. He spent his life moving easily,
sometimes secretly, from country to country. In 1941 he escaped from
British house arrest in Calcutta and reached Afghanistan from where,
aided by the Italian ambassador and disguised as an Italian businessman
‘Orlando Mazzota’, he travelled up through central Asia to Moscow and
from there to Berlin. Soon Britons and Indians could hear his propaganda
broadcasts stirring up revolt against the British Empire and boasting
about his Indian Legion, a body of soldiers trained by and intended to
fight alongside the German Wehrmacht. In 1943, discouraged by Hitler’s
lacklustre support for Indian independence and aware that the theatre of
war where he needed to pit his troops was now the Far East, he
travelled half-way round the world under water by first German and then
Japanese submarine to Japan. Admired there, he received official support
and set up his 50,000-strong Azad Hind Fauj or Indian National Army
(INA), recruited largely from Indian soldiers of the British Empire Army
who had been captured by the Japanese in their successful offensive of
1942.

If Netaji became a mystic in his afterlife then this too
had a precedent in his former life. Always ascetic and distant from
personal relationships (although in 1937 he probably married his
Austrian secretary with whom he had a child, Anita, in 1942), he was a
student of Ramakrishna, the 19th-century Bengali mystic whose followers
believe was an incarnation of God. As a student Bose left home in search
of the religious life. In his unfinished autobiography Indian Pilgrim
he wrote of this time: ‘The desire to find a guru grew stronger and
stronger within me ... We looked up as many sadhus as we could and I
returned home a wiser man.’

The enduring mystery of the death of
Bose arises above all from the circumstances of his disappearance. The
facts are these. In May 1945 Slim’s 14th Army pushed the Japanese 33rd
Army, supported by the INA, out of Burma. For the INA (referred to
dismissively by the British as ‘JIFS’ – Japanese Infiltrated Soldiers)
it was an ignominious rout, exposing Bose’s hopeless idealism as a war
leader. On August 10th a Russian army began its offensive through
Manchuria. From the seas and skies the American navy and air force
pounded Japan, culminating with the atomic bombs on August 6th and 9th.
On August 14th Japan surrendered.

Bose, whose political acumen
was a lot sharper than his military knowledge, realised that the Cold
War was the new world war and that Russia could be India’s one remaining
ally in its fight for freedom. He had already made contact with the
Soviet embassy in Tokyo (in November 1944) and on August 16th at a
meeting in Bangkok, Major General Isoda Saburo, head of the Hikari
Kikan, or Japanese liaison with the INA, agreed to try to get Bose into
Manchuria as the first step to reaching Moscow. The last photo of Netaji
alive or dead shows him at Saigon airport on August 17th, 1945. Five
days later, on August 23rd, the Japanese News Agency announced the death
of Bose:

He was seriously injured when his plane
crashed at Taihoku airfield [Taipei, then in Formosa, now in Taiwan] at
14.00 hours on August 18th. He was given treatment in a hospital in
Japan [sic] where he died at midnight.

On September
7th Colonel Habibur Rahman, Bose’s sole INA travelling companion who
said he had survived the plane crash and described how Netaji had died,
arrived in Tokyo carrying an urn of ashes. They were placed in Renkoji
temple and an announcement was made: ‘Netaji chale gaye’
(Netaji has gone). But in the absence of a body the controversy began.
It intensified the following year when an Indian journalist, Harin Shah,
visited Taipei and obtained, so he thought, the medical and police
reports on the death of Netaji and the certificate issued permitting
cremation. When these were translated into English all these documents
referred to one Okara Ichiro who had died of heart failure on August
19th and had been cremated. When Harin Shah pointed this out, according
to the Mukherjee report:

The Formosan clerks ... said
the Japanese officer accompanying the dead body, under whose
instruction they acted, told them that for state reasons, the
particulars of the person had to be kept confidential.

Was
the death of Netaji faked so that he could escape possible execution by
the British as a traitor and take his fight for Indian independence
unimpeded to Russia? There was a precedent. Subhas’ nephew Pradip Bose, a
well-known writer in Delhi, recalls meeting Dr Ba Maw, President of
Burma, in Rangoon in 1962: ‘He told me that the Japanese had announced
his “death” in an air crash [in early 1945], while he was actually
hiding in Japan [to escape the British].’

It was to resolve the
question of a possible hoax and to quell rumours of reported sightings
of Bose in India and elsewhere that the first two inquiries were
launched in 1956 and 1970. What is convincing about their conclusions is
that the several Japanese eye-witnesses of the air crash and death of
Bose who gave evidence at both inquiries agreed about what they saw and
stuck to their version of events over nearly 20 years. As Justice Khosla
said in his summing up:

I am not prepared to accept
the contention that the entire military organisation of Japan had
entered into a  conspiracy to put forward a false story in order to
cover up Bose’s escape, still less 11 [and now 25] years later when the
trial of war criminals was over, when nothing could be gained by telling
lies. Such a hypothesis just does not make sense.

Conspicuous
among the eyewitnesses was Dr Taneyoshi Yoshimi, first interviewed in
Stanley Gaol, in Hong Kong in 1946 by British Intelligence (the document
is in the British Library), who claimed that he treated Bose and signed
his death certificate, giving the cause of death as ‘burns of the third
degree’. However the death certificate, if it ever existed, has
disappeared. That is the trouble with long-held conspiracies; one fact
begets a counter fact. Justice Mukherjee reports that he was shown a
death certificate for Chandra Bose signed by Dr Yoshimi, but it was
dated 1988, clearly a photocopy, and the aged Dr Yoshimi said he did not
have a good memory of it.

What is equally convincing about
Justice Mukherjee’s report is that, taking a rigorous approach that
approves of primary documents and abhors circumstantial evidence, he
finds that there is absolutely nothing to go on. There is no pictorial
or written evidence of the crash in the Taipei airfield log, or in the
local newspapers or held by the Taiwan government; there are no death
certificates or cremation certificates for Bose and several others who
are supposed to have died with him. Attempts by Mukherjee’s team to
remove some of the ashes from Renkoji temple for DNA testing were
unsuccessful, though it is doubtful whether such tests would have worked
anyway. Mukherjee concluded:

a) There is no
satisfactory evidence of the plane crash; on the contrary, the story
given out in that respect is rather improbable.
b) In the absence of
any contemporaneous record in the hospital, the Bureau and/or the
crematorium, the oral account of the witnesses of Netaji’s death and
cremation cannot be relied on to arrive at a definitive finding; and
c)
A secret plan was contrived to ensure Netaji’s safe passage, to which
Japanese military authority and Habibur Rahman were parties.

When
the Congress Party has been in power it has always refused requests to
return the ashes to India. In fact Bose’s admirers believe the Congress
Party will never allow the truth about their hero to be known because it
is the party of the Nehru family and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) and
Subhas Bose were bitter rivals. Some go further and believe that Prime
Minister Nehru conspired with the Russians to prevent Bose returning to
India after Independence because he felt threatened by him; hence the
cover-up.

One thing is certain – if Bose did die in the air
crash then he succeeded posthumously in his fight for India’s
independence. Immediately after the war the British put on trial for
treason in the Red Fort of Delhi three leaders of the INA, symbolically a
Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh. This caused uproar, not least among
soldiers of the British Indian Army who only a short time before had
been fighting their fellow Indians in the Burmese jungle. The war was
over; it was India’s time for freedom now. Netaji was hailed as a
martyr. To avoid further martyrs the British virtually acquitted the
defendants, letting them off with the lightest sentences, and concluded
that the time had come for the British to quit India too. On August
15th, 1947, almost two years after Bose’s reported death, India and
Pakistan became free nations.

Over the next few years rumours
were rife that Bose had reached Russia. An India Office document marked
‘Secret’ of May 2nd, 1946 includes this report from a Miss Hanchet:

The
D.I.B. [Director of Intelligence Bureau in India] mentioned the receipt
from various places in India of information that Subhas Bose was alive
in Russia. In some cases circumstantial details have been added.
Consequently he is not more than 90 per cent sure that Subhas is dead.

A
stenographer, Sham Lal Jain, deposed before the Khosla Commission that
‘Pandit Nehru asked him to make typed copies of a hand-written note that
said Bose had reached Russia via Dairen [Manchuria]’. He also alleged
that Nehru asked him to type a letter to British Prime Minister Attlee
that ‘Bose, your war criminal, has been allowed to enter Russian
territory by Stalin’. According to the Hindustan Times of March
4th, 2001, Justice Mukherjee asked for this correspondence (when on a
visit to London) but was told that the British Government will
declassify Bose documents ‘only after 2021 if the Indian Government so
desires’.

Netaji watchers report further circumstantial evidence
that Bose was sent to the Gulag. In 2000, an Indian engineer, Ardhendu
Sarkar, said he had worked in the Ukraine in the 1960s for a German
engineer, Zerovin, who had known Bose in Berlin and had come across him
again in 1948 after being sent to a camp in Siberia ‘for
indoctrination’. Sarkar reported the meeting between Zerovin and Bose to
the Indian Embassy in Moscow, after which he was suddenly recalled to
India. Others reported to the Khosla Commission that the Indian
ambassador to the USSR in the early 1950s, Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan,
had seen Bose in Siberia.

The most persistent voice of the ‘Bose
in Russia’ group belongs to a Professor of International Affairs at
Kolkata’s Jadhavpur University, Dr Purabi Roy who specialises in
Indo-Russian relations. She is convinced that Bose arrived in Russia and
possibly died there because she dismisses any sadhu–in–Faizabad
connection. She also related to me word-of-mouth ‘evidence’, the most
plausible of which came from her colleague in the Russian Institute of
Oriental Studies, former USSR General Alexander Kolesnikov. He told her
that he had seen a file that noted the minutes of a Politburo meeting of
August 1946 when Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Molotov and others discussed
whether Bose should be allowed to stay in the Soviet Union. Dr Roy’s
attempts to see this file ended in failure, however. At her urging, the
Mukherjee Commission went to the Russian Federation, visited six
archives and interviewed four witnesses though not Kolesnikov who was
ordered abroad on the eve of his appearance.  The archives drew a blank
and the witnesses refuted what Dr Roy claimed they had told her. Not
surprisingly, Justice Mukherjee concluded that ‘the assertion of Dr Roy
regarding Netaji’s presence in Russia cannot be acted upon’. However,
she claims a book to be published this winter, will vindicate her
position.

During the 1950s and 60s other stories about Netaji
contended that he never left India but remained in hiding disguised as a
peripatetic sadhu. We are in a position to judge the truth of these not
only because of the evidence of the first inquiries but also because of
the research of Bose’s biographer Leonard Gordon. He traced the
supposed wanderings of Bose round India between 1948 and 1959 through
the publications of the Subhasbadi Janata, a propaganda
organisation under Major Satya Gupta, a former political ally of Netaji.
According to this, Netaji attended Gandhi’s cremation in 1948 after
which he roamed India three times doing tapasa, or penance, to save
mankind. Gordon has exposed some of this account as fraudulent and
believes the rest is myth. He is convinced Bose died on August 18th,
1945. He has no time for the Mukherjee report, though his biography was
written some time before it came out, and he also believes that
Professor Roy should put up her evidence or shut up.

The mystery
of what happened to Netaji Bose will remain until the Indian Government
opens some 100 classified files on the subject; and allows files in
Russia and Britain to be opened also. Anuj Dhar and the Hindustan Times,
convinced of a government cover-up, have been campaigning for this
through their website www. MissionNetaji.org. The response of the Indian
Government is revealing:

The disclosure of the
nature and contents of these documents would hurt the sentiments of the
people at large and may evoke widespread reactions. Diplomatic relations
with friendly countries may also be adversely affected if the said
documents are disclosed.

Justice Mukherjee
complained at length in his Report (itself hard to obtain) about the
lack of government disclosure and the many obstructions of officials he
encountered when he was conducting his inquiry. Pradip Bose agrees that
the only way to solve the Bose mystery is for the government censorship
to end and the files to be opened. He asks why, if his uncle did die in
the air crash, the government does not allow his ashes to be brought
back from Japan ‘with the great national honour that he fully deserves’?

Meanwhile,
in Bengal a cult called the Santan Dal is still waiting for Netaji ‘to
appear again’. Its members rioted outside a cinema in Kolkata in 2005
when a biopic of Netaji The Forgotten Hero showed, accurately,
that Bose had a sexual relationship with a western woman. There is no
doubt that to many Bengalis, at least, Bose has assumed a semi-divine
persona. One of many letters discovered in the Faizabad trunks said:

Crores
[many millions] of Indians have put their eyes upon you. One day the
Lord will himself salvage the sorrow of the people, the evil will be
destroyed and God will prevail. You are our God in human form.

Bose
saw his struggle as a moral crusade. The British Empire was evil and he
was fighting for the good, in epic terms that Indians love –‘Give me
your blood and I will give you freedom,’ was his cry. In a country where
the lines between mortality, sainthood and the divine are finely drawn,
why not bring back the epic hero, Netaji, as a symbolic figure to
achieve a Divine Age on earth?