India Post News Service
NEW DELHI: Mission Netaji, an organization seeking truth behind Subhas Chandra Bose’ death and resurrection mystery has finally extracted a landmark judgement. The Cental Information Commission (CIC) has recommended the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to unveil secret and controversial documents related to Bose’s reported death. Sayantan Gupta of Mission Netaji had requested the MHA for copies of all the documents exhibited before Shah Nawaz Committee (1956) and GD Khosla Commission(1970-74)- the first two official panels that probed Subhas’s death. Both the commissions had concluded that Netaji died in a plane crash in August 1945.
A conclusion trashed by the latest report by Justice M.K. Khosla Commission (2005). Anuj Dhar, the author of Back from Death: Inside the Subhas Bose Mystery explains that it was for the sake of transparency that Mission Netaji sought the exhibits under RTI, which the panels preceding Justice Mukherjee, refused to provide.
The documents were kept away from the public eye for about four decades. Until July this year when, Mission Netaji had them released under the Right to Information. The MHA’s argument was: "The documents sought under the RTI Act are voluminous (70,000 pages) and top secret in nature and may lead to chaos in the country if disclosed." Ultimately a CIC decision has altered the assessment.
Officials said that the Shivraj Patil led Home Ministry had come around the view that there was no fear of law and order problem if the secret papers are revealed. Earlier there were concerns that people may read parts of the communication out of context, which could result in a controversy with political overtones. Interestingly, Anuj has all along questioned the official plane crash version, which he says is untrue. "I had obtained information from the Taiwan Government in 2003 that no plane carrying Netaji had ever crashed there," informs the author.
"We wanted to better our understanding about the conclusion drawn by these panels since the Government held their findings true even after receiving the latest report of Justice MK Mukherjee, a top criminal law expert and former judge of the Supreme Court of India," affirms Dhar. Talking about behind the scene, Anuj says that Shah Nawaz Khan, one time INA man, was a Congress party MP when Prime Minister Nehru appointed him the chairman of Netaji Inquiry Committee in 1956. He was made a minister after he gave the report.
High Court judge GD Khosla, a friend of Nehru’s, authored a eulogistic book on Prime Minister Indira Gandhi while he disposed off the Bose death probe in 1970s. It was alleged that both these panels worked along a premeditated, government-backed line that Subhas Bose had died in a plane crash in Taipei in 1945 and was cremated there as well. It is not shocking that the Nehru and Indira governments readily accepted the reports of Shah Nawaz Khan and GD Khosla, ruling out the charges of foul play leveled against them.
However the Manmohan government arbitrarily dismissed the Mukherjee Commission which was set up after a scathing court order and not due to any whim of the NDA government. This one mentioned that the plane crash was a camouflage created by the Japanese military to help Subhas Bose escape to the Soviet Russia.
The case was put forward to the CIC on 29 July 2006 and thereafter three hearings were held. In the first hearing, Information Commissioner AN Tiwari was not able to understand the matter and asked us to seek specific documents as MHA officials denied knowledge of any exhibits used by previous panels. After about one year and loads of coaxing, on March 26, the MHA officials turned up with a secret letter from the Home Secretary that the papers cannot be declassified because it will cause trouble in the country, specially in Bengal (a joke considering that most Bengalis are communists, who hated Bose ).
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