West Bengal government has already said that 64 files on Bose will be made public on September 18, 2015 in Kolkata museum. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee also said that the government will undertake the process of digitization of all files from 1937 to 1947.
Mangaluru: A special report was aired last night (14 September 2015) on CNN-IBN news channel and Team Mangalorean captured some stills from the show- the news channel stated that the secret files related to freedom fighter Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose reveal that there is no official proof about his alleged death in Taipei plane crash in 1945. In a letter to Netaji’s family in 1949, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry had said that he could still be alive and the Indian intelligence agencies also knew about this.
According to the files accessed by CNN-IBN, British and American intelligence agencies did not believe that Bose died in a plane crash in 1945. The news was originally transmitted to the British Foreign Office from the British Embassy in Turkey and is reported to have been confirmed since from Anglo-American secret agents in the East. Even four years after his reported death in a plane crash, British and American intelligence agencies thought that Bose was behind every communist uprising in South East Asia.
These agencies held that Bose was undergoing training in Russia to emerge as another former Yugoslavia president Josip Broz Tito, Bulgarian communist leader Georgi Mikhaylovich Dimitrov or the founding father of People’s Republic of China Mao Tse-tung also known as Mao Zedong, when the Marxist hour struck India. The best brains of the Anglo-American security services reportedly failed to provide slightest evidence in confirmation of the story of Bose’s death in a plane crash and his subsequent cremation with full military honours in Tokyo.
The British government was rumoured to be very much perturbed over confidential information that came into its possession that Netaji, was alive and awaiting the right opportunity to return to his homeland. The story of Netaji’s death was based exclusively on a somewhat confusing statement made by chief of Netaji’s personal staff General Habib-ur-Rahman. He claimed that he was with Bose when the plane crashed. The report claimed that after giving various contradictory stories about the crash, Rahman, who later joined Pakistani raiders in Kashmir post independence, finally gave expression to his belief that Netaji was alive and would return.
West Bengal government has already said that 64 files on Bose will be made public on September 18 in Kolkata museum. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee also said that the government will undertake the process of digitization of all files from 1937 to 1947.
The latest discoveries from the secret files which are soon to be declassified only intensify the conspiracy theory that Netaji may have lived beyond August 18, 1945. It also throws up the uncomfortable question as to why the Indian government, despite propagating the official story of the crash, never made any efforts to bring back Netaji’s alleged remains from Tokyo and honour one of the bravest sons of this soil.
After the explosive revelation that relatives of freedom fighter Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose were spied on for two decades, his family has said it was always aware of the surveillance and saw it as a sign that the leader was alive long after he was presumed dead.
Netaji’s nephew Ardhendu Bose, a former model and businessman, has said that his father believed the phones at their home in Mumbai were tapped.
He said this was taken as proof that the iconic leader didn’t actually die in a plane crash in 1945. “My father never believed Netaji died in the plane crash,” Ardhendu Bose had told one news channel :
Files declassified recently revealed that the Intelligence Bureau kept relatives of Netaji under close surveillance for two decades, mostly during the rule of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. Bose said his family believed the only leader to be a “threat” to Jawaharlal Nehru was Subhas Chandra Bose. “If Netaji were really dead and perished in the air crash then why all this? Obviously there was some element of fact that Bose was alive, lurking around somewhere and would make an appearance,” he said.
The declassified files have revealed that Netaji’s close relatives, including his two nephews Sisir Kumar Bose and Amiya Nath Bose – sons of his brother Sarat Chandra Bose – were spied upon for 20 years between 1948 and 1968. Mr Nehru was Prime Minister for 16 of these 20 years. Intelligence Bureau officials allegedly intercepted and copied letters written by the Bose family and even trailed them on foreign tours.
Netaji quit the Congress before Independence over differences with Mr Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi and launched an organised military resistance against the British after raising the Indian National Army. But he was said to have died on August 18, 1945, two years before India won freedom. Netaji’s death has been one of the most enduring mysteries in India’s history and has been debated for decades. Ardhendu Bose said, “The conjecture is Subhas Bose was made to disappear in Siberia under the powers that be in India at that time.”
Against the backdrop of the snooping controversy, Netaji’s grandnephew Surya Kumar Bose met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Germany and demanded declassification of all secret files related to the freedom fighter. “Subhas Bose did not belong just to his direct family. He had himself said that the whole country is his family. I do not think it’s just the duty of the family to raise this issue (of declassification of Netaji files),” Surya Kumar Bose, the president of the Indo-German Association in Hamburg, had said.
