India's biggest cover-up

by Anuj Dhar

  For the former judge, this was perhaps the most productive period of his life. He loved to write, entertain the readers and here he was, working on three or more projects simultaneously. The first was a hagiographic biography of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The second the report of the commission and the third a book based on his report and experiences as chairman of the commission. Its very title would reveal Khosla’s gut feelings as to where he placed Bose in history. Last days of Netaji was clearly paraphrased on Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The last days of Hitler.

  In late 1973 Khosla began dictating his report in his chamber in New Delhi’s Shastri Bhawan. He broke the rules to spice it up. By June 1974 the report was ready. To Home Minister Uma Shankar Dikshit’s delight, it had listed out 25 findings favourable to the ruling class. Yes, there was an air crash. Indeed Bose had died and…

  * There is not the slightest evidence of any attempt by Nehru to suppress the truth about Bose at any stage.

  * There is no evidence of any attempt by the present government to withhold evidence or place impediments in the way of this commission.

  * The Japanese looked upon Bose not as an equal ally, but as a person whom they could use for their own ends.

  * The numerous stories about encounters with Bose at various times and various places after 1945 are completely false and unacceptable. [17]

  The main report, a much lengthier document than Shah Nawaz’s report, contained many more seemingly persuasive findings and brainy observations:

  * When the war had ended and when conditions in the Japanese army were so chaotic, there could be no question of the Japanese agreeing to secrecy, subterfuge of dissimulation for the person who was as far as they were concerned, an alien, who had been useful to them up to a point but whose efforts had failed to achieve anything in the war.

  * The evidence shows that the flight was arranged in order to carry General Shidei and other Japanese officers.... So in the very nature of things, Bose and Habibur Rahman were a sudden and unanticipated addition to an almost full compliment.

  * Indeed, in the earlier inquiry carried out by the personnel of the British intelligence the finding was that Habibur Rahman’s story was true and that Bose had, in fact, died.

  * Mahatma Gandhi's expression amounts to nothing more than wishful thinking or a symbolic tribute to Bose.

  * Most of the Japanese witnesses who gave evidence impressed me by their frank and honest demeanour.

  * Suresh Bose had prepared a written statement to which he constantly referred during the course of his statement, although he was asked to give his testimony from memory and not from a document prepared at home.

  * Suresh Chandra Bose was willing to be used as a tool by persons, who for reasons of their own, wanted to proclaim their disbelief of the crash story, and who continued to assert that Netaji was alive and constituted a challenge and a hazard to Nehru's political position in the country.

  There is nothing to indicate that there was anything fraudulent or stage-managed about the report from the time the Shah Nawaz Committee was appointed till the time the majority report was laid before Parliament. [18]

  The Government approved Khosla’s findings and tabled his report in Parliament in September 1974. The Opposition MPs were furious. Samar Guha tore the copy given to him. He couldn’t take its conclusion, and he couldn’t stand its portrayal of Bose as an impractical hothead whose “entering India with Japanese assistance could only mean one thing, viz. India would become a colony or a suzerainty of Japan”. [19]

  With this take on the dynamics of the relations between the Japanese and Bose, Khosla virtually turned back the hands of time. It was a throwback to the Raj-era, when the Japanese were painted as the enemies of India just because they were at war with the British. Having made the past “perfect” again, Khosla bridged the gaps in the air crash story lying open ever since the Shah Nawaz Committee had failed to explain them. The modus operandi in 1956 was to take out selective passages from the witnesses’ contradicting testimonies and weave them into one flowing account. But even that could not straighten out many instances.

  Apparently, no particular interest was taken by the local army command as to what happened to Netaji’s body. A comparatively junior officer, a major (Nagatomo), was detailed, and thereafter no further interest was apparently taken. ...It is true that there was a certain amount of disorganisation following the Japanese surrender on 15th of August 1945, but even taking this into account, there remains a residual impression that all that could have been done, was not done. [20]

  Khosla’s one-stop explanation for all such grey areas was that in the “chaotic conditions” prevailing after their surrender, the Japanese could not be expected to be particularly nice to a man who “could be discarded and ignored, when deemed no longer useful”. Because

  from the beginning they had wanted him as their tool, a pawn in their hands, who could be made to move in compliance with their plans and wishes. They had treated Rash Behari Bose and Mohan Singh in the same manner. [21]

  Rash Behari’s nonagenarian half-Japanese daughter Tosiko Higuchi wouldn’t agree. She has never visited India, which never accorded her father the respect he deserved. Wasn’t Subhas Bose’s case much the same? Then how come GD Khosla deduced that the Japanese were treacherous in their dealings with him? Well, it was largely on the basis of a book of Shah Nawaz’s, with a foreword by Nehru! Khosla projected some of its passages demonising the Japanese as a whole.

  From the day that we first came in contact with the Japanese, most of us developed a great dislike of Japanese methods of dealing with people whose cause they professed to champion. This dislike intensified when we saw with our own eyes the organised looting and raping indiscriminately indulged in by Japanese soldiers. We often asked ourselves: “Is the same thing going to happen in India when we take the Japanese with us?” [22]

  Khosla’s own thinking was that “the Japanese were interested in the INA not in order to help India free itself from British bondage but to make use of the INA in their campaign against the Allies in Southeast Asia”.

  They had realised that Bose commanded a great deal of respect and following amongst a vast number of Indians in Southeast Asia and that he was in a position to draw upon the wealth of the richer Indians for a patriotic cause. [23]

  In alleging so, Khosla completely overlooked that not one of the Japanese witnesses who appeared before him and the 1956 committee had spoken of anything but their highest regard for Bose. Even among the Indian witnesses, with the exception of Deb Nath Das, who had come to suspect that the Japanese had killed Bose and turncoat AM Sahay, all vouched for cordial relations between the Japanese and Bose. Early in the course of the inquiry, Khosla asked Bose’s military secretary Colonel Mahboob Ahmed, then a senior MEA official, about his “assessment of the relations between Netaji and the Japanese Army on the other”. And this was the reply he got:

  There was a great deal of respect for Netaji for his personality, for his person, amongst the Japanese that we came across and his relation with the Japanese government was that of the two interests at that stage coinciding. That is to get the British out of India. [24]

  Lt Gen Fujiwara, co-founder of the INA, told the commission that “Netaji was highly respected by Japanese people”. [25] His words were echoed by the experience Shah Nawaz had as chairman of the Netaji Inquiry Committee. Following the committee’s visit to Tokyo in May 1956, he had to acknowledge in his report that “Netaji’s name was still a household word in Japan, and a great deal of interest was taken about him both by the public and the Press.” [26] There was another account which he and Khosla would have heard as well. When Bose’s name was mentioned during the Tokyo war crimes trial, Hideki Tojo and other top brass facing death sentences, stood up and bowed down in deference to their former ally’s memory. Decades thereafter many of the former “war criminals” continued to recall their association with Bose with considerable pride.

  The Indian leader was never a f
air-weather friend. At the close of the war, a Japanese government communication to Bose referred to their “spiritual” ties and said,

  Nippon Government pays deep respect with its whole heart to Your Excellency’s cooperation with Nippon on the moral strength to the utmost in order to attain Indian independence without resorting in the least to the opportunism. [27]

  All this and much more was before Khosla and a lot has come to light recently. Were the Japanese trying to make India a colony of theirs? In a paper on Bose, eminent historian TR Sareen—a believer in the air crash theory—observed after studying the British records that it was just a myth propagated by the colonial British to enlist support of the Indian political parties during the war. Interrogation of Japanese high officials confirmed that they had never contemplated the conquest of India.

  Was Bose a Japanese stooge? The National Archive in Melbourne, Australia, has a file on Bose made up of formerly secret German-Japanese diplomatic communication intercepted by the Australian Navy. On 30 July 1943, Japanese Ambassador Hiroshi Oshima sent this account of his telling Adolf Hitler about Bose:

  The Japanese Government too, has absolute faith in him and is giving him carte blanche where India is concerned.” [28]

  In Tokyo’s Yasukini Shrine for Japan’s war dead appears an inscription based on a letter written in 1998 by Captain SS Yadav, general secretary of now defunct INA veterans’ association: “We the members of the Indian National Army pay our highest and most revered tributes to our comrades-in-arms members of the Japanese Imperial Army who laid down their lives on the battlefields of Imphal and Kohima for the liberation of India. The Indian nation will ever remain grateful to valiant martyrs of Japan and we pray for eternal peace of their soul.” Red Fort Trial hero and Shah Nawaz’s friend for life Col GS Dhillon wrote in his 1998 memoires that he remained “under a debt of gratitude to them forever”. [29]

  Japan had a terrible record with the Koreans, the Chinese and others during the World War II, but not with the Indians. Many Japanese war veterans thought of their association with the INA as a bright spot. Even the Ministry of External Affairs later came to hold the view that “India as the country of origin of Buddhism and Netaji and INA’s association with Japan during the war also invoke friendly feelings among a section of the Japanese society”.

  Like his retrogressive view of Bose’s relations with the Japanese, many of Khosla’s other observations were based on twisted logic. His freely playing up the Shaulmari episode and inane cases of “Bose sightings” in his report may have looked all right to underline the absurdities going around in the name of mystery, but it was at the cost of several sensible testimonies.

  For example, on page 107 of his report Khosla devoted more than 1,500 words to describe a "palpably false and fantastic story" which, according to him, "could only have been imagined by a diseased mind". But he could not spare even one word to dwell on the deposition of an eminent lawmaker. The following is excerpted from the testimony of Mulka Govinda Reddy before the commission on 30 May 1972. Recalling his 1966 visit to Taiwan, Reddy—who is in his mid-90s and lives in Bangalore—said that official Dr Lin told him “and other members of the delegation that on 18th of August, no air crash appears to have occurred”. “Not on 18th August?” a lawyer double checked with Reddy.

  “Not on 18th August and in no air crash Netaji appears to have died.”

  “But he told you that he had collected some material?”

  “Yes, he told us he had collected very valuable material in this connection. He also told us there was one Mayor of Taipei at that time, who is still alive. He appears to have told him that no such air crash occurred on that day and that at no time Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose appears to have been involved in any air crash in Taipei.”

  “Had you any occasion to meet the Vice Foreign Minister of Formosa?”

  “Yes, we were his guests for a dinner party and he also confirmed what Dr Lin said and he assured us that the Government of Formosa will be ever ready to cooperate with the Government of India if a commission or an officer is appointed to go into this question.” [30]

  Another member of the same delegation, former MP Prakash Vir Shastri, testified that the MPs also met Taiwanese Premier Chiang Kai-shek who “said if Government of India made an inquiry, his Government would give all necessary help”. [31]

  Again, not a word from Shastri’s deposition was deemed fit by Khosla for incorporation in his report.

  For a man who had boasted that he was “not only an inquirer but also an investigator”, Khosla played a most partisan role when it came to classified records. Evidence has now emerged that he helped the Government in obstructing justice. Incriminating records were either completely hushed up, or not shared with the non-government lawyers till it was too late and doctored documents were exhibited to uphold the official stand.

  Habibur Rahman saved the day for Khosla so far as his contradictory statements about the events in August 1945 were concerned. On 9 March 1971 Pakistan foreign ministry informed the High Commission of India in Islamabad that Rahman had “nothing to add to what he had already said in his evidence before the Shah Nawaz Committee” and was “of the opinion that no purpose would be served by his going to New Delhi or by the visit of the inquiry commission to Pakistan”. One doesn’t know if the worsening Indo-Pak relations at that time had anything to do with this decision.

  Anyhow, now everything that Rahman had said earlier could be kept out of consideration by Khosla under provisions of the Indian Evidence Act. But the judge did get a chance to examine a few of the surviving Japanese witnesses. He visited Japan in March-April 1971 with two independent lawyers. Balraj Trikha, whose client was a fringe group waiting for Bose to return, and ailing Amar Prasad Chakrovarty of the Forward Bloc. None of the other outstanding lawyers associated with the inquiry could accompany the commission to Japan. For example, irrepressible Gobinda Mukhoty, standing for “national committee” of Samar Guha and other prominent citizens, and ND Mazumdar, who represented Suresh Bose. TR Bhasin, the commission’s counsel, was yet to be appointed.

  By this time the events under inquiry were 25 years behind for the mostly middle-aged Japanese witnesses. Since eyewitness accounts of a complex occurrence are bound to differ in minor details, the Japanese couldn’t be faulted if they could not agree whether the plane took off at 2pm or 2.30pm or whether it carried 10 people or 13. But then, once in a lifetime happenings are hard to expunge from one’s memory. Especially if they are tragedies and one is asked to repeat them over and again. No one who was misfortunate enogh to have witnessed the carnage in Delhi in November 1984 could ever forget those grisly scenes. It would be hard for most of us to ever forget where we were when the hijacked airplane rammed into one of the towers in New York on 9 September 2001. At least I won’t, though I saw it all on TV.

  In fact, I just recall that I still remember, quite vividly, a scene of accident I watched from afar as a child. More than thirty years have passed, and I am sure I can make no mistake in recollecting whether the body was lying under a truck or a bus; whether it was on this side of the road or the other and what was the exact location of the scene of mishap.

  Thanks to the Right to Information, a copy of reams of pages constituting the record of the Japanese witnesses’ deposition which the Khosla Commission created is in front of me. I am not a lawyer, but I can hardly miss that the amnesia suffered by the witnesses in Japan was akin to the one that had gripped the intelligence officers in India. They tripped up over major details. They contradicted not only each other, but even their own statements. When some war-hardened former army officers who saw a famous man getting burnt alive right in front of their eyes start fumbling on basic details, you know something is wrong.

  Mind you, this was not the first recollection for these people. Many had been repeatedly questioned by the Japanese and other governments, the media and the Shah Nawaz Committee over the years. And yet the following unfolded.

  Lt Gen (Retd) Sab
uro Isoda, the link between the Japanese government and Bose, was examined on 16 April 1971 in Tokyo. It did not take GD Khosla himself long to catch the general contradicting the statements he had made before the Shah Nawaz Committee.

  Commission: If I put to you that you did not receive any official information regarding the air crash which took place at Taihoku, will it be correct or not?

  Shri Isoda: That is wrong. I think I received an official information about the aircrash.

  Commission: You made a statement before the Shah Nawaz Committee earlier?

  Shri Isoda: Yes, I did. I met them at the Imperial Hotel for three days.

  Commission: In that statement, you had stated: “I do not remember if I received any official information about the accident.” Did you state so?

  Shri Isoda: I do not remember what I stated before.

  Commission: But I have read it to you. Do you think that statement is correct or incorrect?