by Anuj Dhar
Contrasting Khosla’s “competence” with Mukherjee’s sense of “confusion”, Minister Patil said: “A person [Khosla] who has the acumen to evaluate the evidence produced before him, oral as well as documentary, a person who is trained to judge, is saying this, ‘I, therefore, find it proved beyond all reasonable doubt that Bose...[died in Taiwan]’.”
The question before us is: Why a report of this nature should be discarded in favour of a report which is of inconclusive nature? There was no reason for the Khosla Commission to arrive at a wrong conclusion. [38]
A proper answer awaits you in subsequent chapters, but for now, just answer the following simple question, and you’ll know the subtext of Patil’s statement. Which one of the following do you think would be best suited to inquire into Subhas Bose’s reported death?
A. A Congress MP.
B. A friend of Jawaharlal Nehru, and a biographer of Indira Gandhi to boot.
C. A former Supreme Court of India judge.
The credibility—as it were—of GD Khosla was in his being in tune with the powers that be, those who were hostile towards Bose’s legacy. Khosla was a good writer, but a dishonest investigator. His complicity in treading the official line and that of the Government which accepted his fraudulent 1974 report became clearer as Information Commissioner Tiwari overcame his initial reluctance to back the case my friends and I had mounted under the Right to Information Act.
This is how it unfolded: Barely a month after Shivraj Patil’s upholding the Khosla’s and Congress MP Shah Nawaz’s inquiries, Sayantan Dasgupta, Chandrachur Ghose & I filed an application under the RTI Act. Mission Netaji, our group, sought from Patil’s Ministry of Home Affairs the “authenticated copies of documents used as exhibits by the Shah Nawaz Khan and GD Khosla panels”. The idea behind this simple request was to better the understanding about the much-touted conclusions drawn by them. However, the Special Officer on Duty handling our RTI request evidently freaked out. He wasted no time in telling us that it could not be “acceded to” for reasons covered by section 8(1) of the RTI Act. This was the section empowering the Government to not to part with security classified information. Classified? In 2006? What on earth for?!
The confidence with which the dapper Home Minister had run down the dissenting MPs hardly exuded from his ministry’s response.
After receiving this point-blank refusal we complained to the Central Information Commission (CIC). Information Commissioner AN Tiwari was the adjudicator.
In the first hearing, the ministry officials said they did not know of any such exhibits; because unlike the Mukherjee report the previous two had not appended any such lists. Obviously Shah Nawaz and GD Khosla were not on the same page as MK Mukherjee over transparency as well. Be that as it may, round one went to the MHA officials. Noting that “the matter was quite old and the institutional memory was quite blurred”, Tiwari directed us to seek specific documents. It was a tough task, considering that no details of the exhibits were available anywhere in any archive or library. But before the next hearing we were able to give the ministry a memory booster. A copy of a classified record listing out 202 documents used as exhibits by the Khosla Commission was furnished along with a revised application seeking release of all these documents.
“Where did you get this from?” the officials protested in the next hearing. It was of no use; the tables had been turned on them. Tiwari directed the ministry to release the 202 records specified by us. He wondered why was the Government keeping thousands of Bose records secret. “Why don’t you send them to the National Archives?” he asked. He got the answer by the year end.
A “Secret” letter from the Home Secretary, a friend of his, stated that the “matter had been considered carefully at the highest level in the ministry”. The records were determined to be “sensitive in nature” and disclosure of many “may lead to a serious law and order problem in the country, especially in West Bengal”. This was too much for Tiwari to bear. He noted that
the matter was of a serious national importance...[and] in spite of that, the Ministry of Home Affairs had been taking a somewhat perfunctory position. They were seen to be unwilling or unprepared to take a considered view regarding which parts of the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s papers should be kept secret and for what reason. [39]
Tiwari transferred the matter to be heard by the full Bench of the commission in an extraordinary session. On 5 June 2007 the full Bench of the CIC comprising Chief Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah and Information Commissioners Padma Balasubramanian, Dr OP Kejariwal, Prof MM Ansari and AN Tiwari—who succeeded Habibullah as the chief—hammered home that the matter was of “wide public concern and therefore of national importance”.
Government officials agreed because there was no running away from it. They bared fangs when I charged the Government with the destruction of records on Bose. Sayantan and Vishal Sharma, our youngest colleague, further contested their claim. Chandrachur retaliated that “the intention of the ministry is to hide and not disclose” and its “responsibility does not end just by saying that certain documents are missing or cannot be located”.
The officials repeated before the Bench that some of the documents sought by us were “top secret in nature and may lead to chaos in the country if disclosed”. The CIC did not agree that we were some kind of agents of chaos in the making and backed us. Rejecting the Home Ministry’s “considered view” not to supply us the documents, it said in its landmark order that
earlier, a public authority could bar any information from disclosure under the Official Secrets Act, simply by classifying the information as secret or top secret. That option has been effectively excluded by the RTI Act. …The decision to bar an information from disclosure can no more be arbitrary…. The commission has noted that the MHA has expressed its resolve before us to examine these records of undoubted national importance and send them to the National Archives.… The commission recommends that this resolve be translated into action as early as possible as by doing so, the MHA would not only be discharging its legal duties and rendering an essential service to a public cause, it may finally help resolve an unsolved mystery of independent India. [40]
As conceded by the MHA officials before the Bench that “the decision concerning disclosure has to be taken at the highest level”, in late September-November 2007, Home Minister Shivraj Patil took issue of the 202 records to the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs. The CCPA decided in favour of release because it was felt “the worst that the Congress-led coalition government may have to face was a controversy that would die a natural death”. [41]
Despite this so-called “highest-level” decision, out of 202 only 91 exhibits were eventually released by the MHA to us. One paper—a note by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru—remained classified. There was no word about the rest 110—including Home, Foreign ministry records/files; letters from Home Minister, High Commissioner, Taiwan government and Intelligence Bureau Director; a report on the INA treasure said to have been lost along with Bose and a memo from Director of Military Intelligence over Mahatma Gandhi’s view on the matter. These papers were simply “unavailable”. The difficulty in accepting this skewed explanation was that many of the “unavailable” records contained information against the air crash theory.
For instance, not to be found among the released papers was a 1952 “Top Secret” correspondence between then Commissioner for India in Port of Spain and the Foreign Secretary in Delhi. This commissioner was AM Sahay, Subhas Bose’s wartime diplomatic pointman. Now a Nehru loyalist, Sahay was making revelations that should have made the Government fidgety about Bose’s death. He characterized the air crash story as a “show” and revealed that he had come to know of Bose’s “death” probably before it had taken place.
There is one thing extraordinary in the whole show which needs some explanation from the Japanese. So far as my information goes, Netaji was removed to a hospital after the accident and he died there. How is it that the
crash took place on the 18th and the announcement regarding his death was made on the same day, or was it that the plane crashed on the previous day?
Sahay also provided a fairly good circumstantial detail that Bose had been planning to move to Soviet Russia in the last months of the war. Was this the reason why this record went missing? Because you see the Government of India, from the days of Nehru to the present, doesn’t even want to accept that there is a Russian angle to the Bose mystery. Wishing it away in Parliament on 24 August 2006 was Shivraj Patil.
Now, you know Japan had fought against Russia or the Soviet Union. Germany had fought a war against the Soviet Union. …And even after this do you think he would have gone to Russia?
If his ministry had provided us the Khosla Commission exhibit Nos 43/C and 43/D, it might have given one reason why. Sahay had himself received a communication from Bose on August 16 for a rendezvous in Manchuria—the gateway to the USSR—and the same was conveyed to the Foreign Secretary in his now “unavailable” report.
[Bose] informed me [in January 1945] that the Japanese would no more be able to lend much support to our (INA’s) fight in future. Japan was being attacked by American air force regularly, inflicting heavy losses on the Japanese, making it impossible for them to send their air support to our army in Burma or Manipur. Netaji said that he could see the end of the war in course of months and he wanted me to try to persuade the Japanese to allow us to establish direct contact with the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo. I was in Tokyo in the beginning of February 1945. I met General Tojo and the Chief of the General Staff and discussed the matter at length. I told them that if we could deal with the Soviets directly, we might be able to help in improving the Russo-Japanese relation that was necessary to strengthen Japan’s position.
The plan was to proceed to Manchuria and be there when the end of war comes, so that we may be within Soviet sphere after the surrender of the Japanese. War came to an end on 15th August. A special messenger from Netaji came to see me on 16th from Bangkok with a letter from him asking me to get ready to secure transport from the Japanese and to leave for Manchuria, and to meet him there. He suggested that although the Soviets had declared war against the Japanese, it would be desirable to be arrested by the Soviet authorities in Manchuria because we could later negotiate with them and might persuade them to accept us as their friends and not enemies.
Could the Government really have lost such “Top Secret” record of historical importance? A source confirmed to me that it had been taken out of the relevant file and only a trace of it was found in other secret records referring to it.
I did not worry too much about the missing Sahay correspondence because the list of unavailable records was rather long. A secret Intelligence Bureau report not given to us encapsulated details not conforming to the Home Minister’s worldview. The report was based on the inputs provided by a source who had heard Bose and the Japanese general overseeing his “last flight” say this: “They were talking about the ways of letting lose Mr Bose… His destination was already understood to be Soviet Russia.”
According to yet another unavailable report of 17 October 1945, the Director of Military Intelligence (DMI) in China reported about interception of a secret Japanese message advising Bose “to be separated from his fellow travellers at the time of his journey from Burma in an aircraft”.
“DMI’s supposition is that though Bose’s family were in that plane that crashed, Bose was not there and he subsequently escaped....”
Also untraceable was a record which directly relayed to Prime Minister Nehru in June 1951 the confirmation that the Japanese had secretly committed themselves to sending their ally Bose to the USSR.
In a nutshell, there it was; the latest in the several government successes in riding out the storm of the Bose mystery. But unlike previous occasions when the controversy was contained with the charge that it was a mere conspiracy theory, the year 2006 marked a turnaround. For the first time, unimpeachable evidence of an official cover-up emerged. And because it related to a six-decades-old controversy spawning mind-boggling subplots, taking a bewildering array of high-profile personalities in its fold and leaving a stockpile of classified records in its wake—it had to be India’s biggest cover-up.
1. Bose mystery begins
Much before it gained currency, the nomenclature “Bose mystery” was being used by a British colonel operating out of India’s intelligence hub in a cloistered corner of Delhi’s Red Fort. GD Anderson was in charge of one of the many entities pursuing the leads on Subhas Bose’s reported death and possible escape. For many months after the Japanese announcement, several British, Indian and even American officers, working in a somewhat grid-like formation, analysed, shared, questioned and re-questioned the gathered intelligence on an issue many smart-talking analysts on TV in India today would brush off as unintelligent stuff meant for the consumption of semi-literate conspiracy theorists.
The focus of the intelligence community in India, circa 1946, had been fixed on a 6-foot sturdy Kashmiri. His eyes reflected an imperious streak, which could have been due to his aristocratic lineage or a show of plain defiance. As a captain in British Indian Army, Raja Habibur Rahman Khan had witnessed its humiliating capitulation to the Japanese in Burma in 1942. He regarded it British rather than Indian loss and was consequently invited by Major Mohan Singh and Major Iwaichi Fujiwara to join the newly-formed Indian National Army.
Rahman became the commandant of Officers’ Training School, set up to reorient the INA officers so that they could turn their guns against their former masters. When Subhas Bose arrived in Japan, he noticed the spark in Rahman’s eyes. He rose to be INA’s Deputy Chief of Staff and ADC to Bose, the head of Azad Hind (Free India) Government. Lt Col Habibur Rahman’s loyalty to Bose was well-known. In INA compatriot Shah Nawaz Khan’s estimate, Rahman would have carried out his any order “even at the cost of his life”. Bose’s military secretary Col Mahboob Ahmed would elaborate that Rahman could keep secrets “all his life, unless countermanded by Netaji himself”. This sort of devotion, Mehboob recalled in the 1970s, could not have been understood unless one was in the INA. “We fought for India, but India was something very vague. Netaji was the symbol for which we fought.” [1]
In 1946, Habibur Rahman held the key to unlocking the mystery of Bose’s fate.
The endgame of Subhas Bose’s chequered life—as recounted by Rahman—began with the ominous ringing of a phone. This was on 11 August 1945 in a sleepy guesthouse in Seremban, some 100 miles from Singapore. Bose had been staying here for a fortnight along with some of close aides, grappling with a series of setbacks. The latest one was sounded over the phone by Maj Gen Mohammad Zaman Kiani. Soviet Russia had launched a surprise attack on already down and out Japan, Bose’s only benefactor.
Bose reached Singapore on August 13 and took stock of the hopeless situation. Brought to its knees by the nuclear strikes, the Japanese resistance to the Red Army in Manchuria was not expected to last long. His smiling sang-froid couldn’t mask the worrying fact that his struggle had reached a dead-end and the enemy was closing in.
On August 14 Bose called a meeting at his seashore bungalow, just after receiving the details of the Japanese surrender to be announced the next day. In attendance were SA Ayer, Dr MK Lakshmyya, AN Sarkar, MZ Kiani, Maj Gen Alagappan, Col GR Nagar and Habibur Rahman. A view emerged that Bose should remain in Singapore “because at that stage he could not look for protection or help from any country”. [2] The other one was that he “should not surrender at Singapore as the British would be very vindictive”. [3]
“No,” said Bose. He was resigned to his fate. “The worst they can do is to put me against the wall and shoot me and I am prepared for it.” Then he gave his men a final pep talk. “The tremendous sacrifices made by the soldiers of the Azad Hind Fauj and civilian population will not go in vain. …Your efforts should be to see that all we had done in the Far East should be known to our countrymen.” [4] In a prescient reading of the
situation, Bose told them to expect “a tremendous effect on the freedom struggle” once the Indians knew of what they had done for them.
The meeting broke with the decision that the INA would surrender as a separate entity and that it be conveyed to the Japanese general headquarters in Singapore.
At about 8 on the morning of August 15 all of them had to reassemble because “the Japanese commander in Singapore could not give an assurance for a separate surrender by Azad Hind Government and Army as he said that he had no such instructions and it would not be practicable for him to get in touch with Tokyo; even wireless communications having been disrupted”. [5] Now the consensus emerged that Bose should himself visit Tokyo and finalise the modalities of surrender. For that he should move to Bangkok, then the seat of Azad Hind Government, with Ayer, Rahman and Lt Col Pritam Singh accompanying him from Singapore, and Major NG Swami, N Raghavan, John Thivy and Maj Gen AC Chatterji joining them from elsewhere.
At 9.30am on August 16 Bose and others took off for Bangkok. Once there, Bose, Kiani, Rahman, Pritam, Ayer and INA Chief of Staff Maj Gen JK Bhonsle, headed to confabulate with Hachiya Teruo, Minister-designate to Azad Hind Government and Lt Gen Saburo Isoda & Colonel Kagawa of Hikari Kikan, the Japanese military unit liaising with Bose’s government.
They held a conference at which Hachiya spoke in English. They discussed the INA and Japanese surrender. Hachiya and Isoda informed Bose that no orders had been received from the Japanese government regarding the INA surrender, and, therefore, they were not in a position to advise them on the proposal of a separate surrender by the INA. [6]