India's biggest cover-up

by Anuj Dhar

  Shri Chakravarti: You have said that burns were of serious nature. Why did you not send him to the big hospital for treatment?

  Dr Yoshimi: The patient was so serious that he could not bear any transfer to other hospital and the patient himself wanted not to be moved. He said, “I would not like to move.”

  Shri Chakravarti: Did the patient say it to you?

  Dr Yoshimi: I got this through his interpreter.

  Shri Chakravarti: Who was the interpreter through whom Mr Bose intimated this?

  Dr Yoshimi: Mr Nakamura.

  Interpreter Juichi Nakamura’s lengthy statement to the Shah Nawaz Committee, available to GD Khosla, contained everything “Bose” had stated in his last hours to Nakamura. The interpreter never heard Bose saying that he did not want to be shifted to the main hospital.

  More from Chakravarti’s cross-examination:

  Shri Chakravarti: You have already told that he was seriously burnt. Was his heart also burnt?

  Dr Yoshimi: His heart was not burnt.

  Shri Chakravarti: What were the places burnt seriously?

  Dr Yoshimi: He was burnt all over the body. So it cannot be said which part was more serious.

  Shri Chakravarti: But, doctor, if heart is burnt can a patient survive?

  Dr Yoshimi: He cannot survive.

  Shri Chakravarti: But when Mr Bose was brought into the hospital, he was fully conscious and he had a talk with you through an interpreter?

  Dr Yoshimi: Yes.

  Shri Chakravarti: So the statement you gave before the Shah Nawaz Committee was mistaken. You have stated: “I found that he was severely burnt all over his body and all of it had taken on a grayish colour like ash. Even his heart had burnt.”

  Dr Yoshimi: It should be chest and not heart. That is a mistake.

  …

  Shri Chakravarti: How much blood you extracted from the body of Mr Bose?

  Dr Yoshimi: I did not take [out] any blood.

  Shri Chakravarti: When a patient is burnt, his blood becomes thicker?

  Dr Yoshimi: Yes.

  Shri Chakravarti: Unless the blood is let out, new blood cannot be transfused. Is it so?

  Dr Yoshimi: Blood transfusion can be made without extracting blood.

  Shri Chakravarti: Mr Bose's burns were of the third degree?

  Dr Yoshimi: The general burning all over his body was of the third degree.

  Shri Chakravarti: So, what you deposed before the Shah Nawaz Committee is not correct: You have stated: “In case of severe burns of the third degree, the blood gets thicker and there is high pressure of the heart. In order to relieve this pressure, usually blood is let out and new blood is given in its place. In the case of Mr. Bose, I let out approximately 200 cc of his blood and transfused 400 cc of blood into him.”

  But today you have said that no blood was let out and blood can be transfused without extracting blood even in the case of third degree burns.

  Dr Yoshimi: As I said before, blood transfusion was not done by me.

  Shri Chakravarti: Then this statement is wrong?

  Dr Yoshimi: If it is said so, that is wrong. [50]

  [Khosla proceeding record shows Dr Yoshimi contradicting himself on the time of Bose’s death.]

  It was quite strange that previous statements of the witnesses should have been wrongly recorded because as per Khosla’s admission “a perusal of the file of the previous committee shows that almost all statements were…sent to the respective witnesses, who studied them at leisure, made corrections, signed them and then returned them to the committee”. [51]

  One witness who pleased both GD Khosla and the lawyers with his “entirely disinterested” demeanour and straight talk was Morio Takakura. “There is no reason why reliance should not be placed on his testimony,” Khosla wrote of him in his report and yet failed to fully appreciate his statements.

  In 1945, Takakura was a colonel posted at political affairs section of the Imperial Japanese Army HQ in Tokyo and was as such in the know of things. Trikha examined him on the point why Bose was “going with Lt Gen Shidei”:

  A: Because Lt Gen Shidei was on transfer to Quantung Army, as assistant chief of staff of the Quantung Army. That is why Mr Chandra Bose went with him.

  Q: Where he was bound for?

  A: Perhaps it was for Diren.

  Q: Was he an expert in Russian language?

  A: Yes, he was.

  Q: Is it true that he knew the Manchurian border very well,

  A: He was on transfer knowing fully well of the situation on the border.

  Q: Will it be correct to say that the HQ at Tokyo accepted the plan of Netaji for his going to Russia via Diren and the HQ selected Lt Gen Shidei to accompany Netaji?

  A: Yes, it is so. The HQ was aware. [52]

  This evidence on record did not square with Khosla’s assertion in his report about Bose and Rahman being a “sudden and unanticipated addition” to a flight “arranged in order to carry General Shidei and other Japanese officers”. More so, because even Taro Kono recalled having been told by General Shidei himself that Bose was going to the Soviet Union and Shidei “was to go with him and look after him”.

  What General Shidei told me was that after Japan’s surrender if he went to Japan, the Allied forces will confront him and he will be in danger and therefore he was being taken to the Soviet Union. [53]

  And could the Japanese have taken Bose towards Soviet Russia without resorting to some sort of subterfuge? Takakura admitted that there was some inexplicable secrecy surrounding Bose’s flight.

  Q: You have stated earlier that you received intimation about the alleged plane crash at Taiwan?

  A: That is because there was a telegraphic message to us. There was an intimation about the transfer of Lt Gen Shidei and that some important person was being accompanied by Lt Gen Shidei.

  Q: Was the word “important person” used to camouflage the name of Chandra Bose from the American enemy?

  A: Yes.

  Q: The HQ at Tokyo did not have any intimation by which plane Netaji went?

  A: Perhaps nobody knew by what plane he was coming.

  Q: That was also made to create a camouflage in the way Chandra Bose was moving?

  A: I think so.

  Q: You have earlier stated that you had received some news about air crash. What steps have been taken by the Tokyo HQ?

  A: I do not think we had then any steps in Tokyo. There was no alternative, but to leave it to the discretion of the army headquarters in Taiwan. [54]

  The headquarters at Taiwan did nothing. Because, according to Col Shibuya, the army headquarters had ordered “not to touch this case”. “There was a decision that no official contact was to be made in this case.”

  All this confusion created by disparate claims of the witnesses to the Taipei air crash boiled down to this: Unless a clinching evidence of Bose’s—as well as Shidei’s—death in Taiwan was forthcoming, it could not be ruled out Bose actually went to Russia as planned. That clinching evidence in the absence of any photographs of their bodies could only be the hospital and cremation records. These were the records that CSDIC’s GD Anderson had been wanting to lay his hands on in 1946. The Government of India had tried to access the same in 1956 from the authorities in Taiwan.

  On 10 May 1972 the Government informed Khosla that it would not allow him to visit Taipei because India did not have diplomatic relations with Taiwan. This made Samar Guha and other lawmakers intervene. A joint letter to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi signed by 26 of them, with Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s name on top, demanded that the commission “should be given facilities to visit Taiwan”. It was pointed out that “many Indian government officials visit Formosa every year even though India has no diplomatic relations with the island”. [55] When the Government still did not concede to their demand, Guha had to play hardball. In a private meeting with the PM, he held out a threat that he would go public with India’s intelligence links with Taiwan:

  I told Indira Gandhi t
hat during the 1965 Indo-Pak war, the Indian government procured weapons and intelligence from Israel through the Taiwan government, and India also has trade relations with Taiwan through the Hong Kong route. I was able to collect this secret information from a representative of the Taiwan government. [56]

  Pressure tactics worked and on 11 July 1973 GD Khosla landed at the Taipei Songshan Airport, which had come up on the site of much smaller Matsuyama aerodrome. Waiting for Khosla here were Samar Guha and Sunil Krishna Gupta, Amar Prasad Chakravarty’s deputy. According to Guha’s account, he implored Khosla to contact the Taiwanese authorities only to be informed that the Ministry of External Affairs had advised the judge against it. “Why have you come over here, then? Why did you not tell us this in Delhi?” Guha protested. “Why have you come to Taipei after 27 years?” people asked Guha as he went around the Taipei city making enquiries about the reported air crash. The word spread and soon Taiwan government knew of a foreign judge on their territory, carrying out an inquiry without any notification. Had Guha-Gupta not invervened, Khosla would have been shunted out of Taiwan. [57]

  The duo did most of the ground work, helped by Pritam Singh, a former INA man who had made Taiwan his home. They obtained permission to inspect the out of bound, unused old airstrip where the Sally bomber had reportedly crashed. But more difficult was to persuade Khosla to undertake a field trip. Near the airfield, Khosla behaved rudely. He wouldn’t listen as Guha tried to impress on him that the pictures of a plane wreck furnished by the Japanese on August 19 were apparently of the debris of more than one air crash in the same area. Khosla was treating them as “inadmissible in evidence” because Habibur Rahman had not appeared before him to testify as “to what they [really] depict”.

  [Sunil Gupta, left; Samar Guha, in specs and GD Khosla, right, in a picture from Samar Guha's collection]

  Accmapined by Guha and Gupta, Khosla also visited the crematorium where Bose’s body had allegedly been consigned to the flames. There it emerged that nurse Tsan Pi Sha was not the only fictional character in Harin Shah’s story. Khosla wrote in his report that “when I went to the crematorium at Taipei and interviewed the son of the original caretaker, I showed him a photograph appearing at page 99 of Harin Shah's book and asked him if the man represented there was his father. The young man denied that the photograph was that of his father”. [58]

  During its tour of Taiwan, the Khosla Commission examined seven individuals. Khosla referred to two of them in his report as corroborating witnesses. They had heard of an air crash and seen a coffin, which according to their Japanese superiors carried Bose’s body. Guha charged Khosla with misinterpreting and fudging the evidence. He cited the case of YR Tseng, the last witness to appear before the commission on July 17. Tseng, an engineer, said that “during war time we only knew two leaders of India, Mahatma Gandhi and Chandra Bose” and the latter often made news in Japanese newspapers. Commission’s counsel asked Tseng if he knew anything about the plane crash. Tseng—a 16-year-old school boy in 1945—said he knew of only one air crash at the alleged site of Bose’s crash, but it took place in 1944. [59]

  Responding to questions put by Bhasin and Guha, Tseng said no one was rescued from the crashed plane and he never heard of any air crash taking place three-four days after the Japanese surrender. “There was no air crash after Japan’s surrender,” he said emphatically. [60] Later he heard about Bose’s death and said the other plane crash of 1944 at the very site “was not even mentioned in the papers”.

  Guha’s version of the cross-examination has it that Khosla haggled with Tseng over the year and month of the crash. This got on the Taiwanese’s nerves and he walked out saying he would bring in the next day a dozen of his former schoolmates, all of whom had helped clear the wreckage. Guha begged Khosla that one day’s wait was worthwhile to hear out the Taiwanese. He sensed some truth in Dr Satyanarayan Sinha’s claim before the commission earlier “that this was not the photograph of the crash which they [Japanese] are saying” and that “he saw [in a newspaper] a photo of plane crash of October 1944, which was exactly similar to the photo published in the committee report”. [61] However, Khosla turned down his request. According to Guha, the judge spent the next day shopping around for a present for Indira Gandhi, whose biography he was writing at that time.

  On return to India, Guha visited the Prime Minister in New Delhi to complain about Khosla’s conduct. Sunil Gupta quietly slipped away to somewhere in Uttar Pradesh to brief a holy man. This holy man, who did not appear before anyone, was keeping an eye on the commission’s work through Gupta, his secret informer whom he would hereafter codename as “Sukrit”. He told Gupta that Khosla's inquiry was a "command performance".

  Nothing came out of Guha’s protests before the PM. “I don't know why they have done so,” she responded to Guha’s charges about the MEA’s missive to Khosla. Guha then blasted the ministry in the Lok Sabha, accusing it of sabotaging the inquiry in Taiwan.

  At the lengthy argument session of the Khosla Commission, commencing on 10 September 1973 and concluding on 14 March 1974, the lawyers dissected the evidence on record. “What to speak of your Lordship, even a fool will not believe in these stories,” Gobinda Mukhoty said of the Japanese eyewitnesses’ statements. “Why Your Lordship was not allowed to correspond freely with the Formosan government?” [62]

  Mukhoty specifically raised the point that if indeed Bose had died and was cremated, some documentary evidence “in the form of a history sheet or bed-head ticket containing details of Bose ailment, the treatment administered to him and the progress observed”, and a death certificate signed by the doctor attending on him “should have been forthcoming from the hospital and municipal records at Taipei”. [63] But all that had come on record pertained to the death and cremation of Japanese soldier Ichiro Okura. Khosla’s cunning counter to this was:

  Mr Mukhoty, while arguing his case, assumed, in the first place, that these documents related to Bose and were respectively his death certificate and an application for permission to cremate his dead body. But, because the details of the deceased mentioned in these two documents did not correspond to Bose, he went on to demolish his preliminary hypothesis by saying that the documents did not relate to Bose and, therefore, Bose did not die and his dead body was not cremated. ...The argument is in the nature of a non sequitur, for what does not relate to an event, cannot be used to disapprove it. It is tantamount to raising a phantom and then destroying it. [64]

  Khosla thus concluded that the Okura records had “no evidentiary value at all” for they do not “prove or disapprove anything”. “They relate to totally different persons and not Bose at all.” [65]

  The hole in this argument was that the documents did relate to “Bose” because the Japanese government itself had vouched for them. When requested to furnish records proving Bose’s death and cremation, the Gaimusho’s Asian Affairs Bureau on 24 July 1956 informed the Embassy of India in Tokyo that they had traced the cremation permit—but it was not in name of Subhas Bose. The Japanese government’s explanation for this was that

  since the death of Mr Subhas Chandra Bose was kept strictly confidential at that time, it is believed that this cremation permit on Ichiro Okura must correspond to the case for late Mr Subhas Chandra Bose. [Emphasis mine]

  This communication, seen by Khosla, established that it were the Japanese who had raised a phantom. Why would they do that sort of thing? And how did it dovetail with Khosla’s grand idea that in post-surrender period “there could be no question of the Japanese agreeing to secrecy” over Bose and “there was absolutely no necessity of inventing and advertising an alibi” for him? Khosla did not think too much of the Japanese government view in this case, but he was all game when the same government produced a 1947 record indirectly referring to Shidei’s death and, lo, it became “a clear corroboration of the story of the crash and of General Shidei’s death in it”. [66]

  To ensure that the lawyers representing non-official parties do not ge
t the complete picture, Khosla saw to it that they did not get access to all relevant official records. Thus the report obtained by the Government of India through the British High Commission in 1956 never came to anyone’s knowledge. The lawyers also never saw the most important pre-1947 secret intelligence reports. Khosla went to the extent of exhibiting censored records, leaving out their originals containing information not conforming to the air crash theory. A case in point was of “Exhibit 29 BB” [next image] of the commission which looked like a routine primeministerial minute by Nehru after he met SA Ayer, who briefed him about his visit to Japan in 1951 and left a bundle of papers.

  But not only was this record a copy of the original, it was devoid of the Foreign Secretary’s observations after he had studied the papers on PM’s directive. The excised portion was very much there in the original record placed in a classified file made available to Khosla.

  In the portion culled out of the copy, the Foreign Secretary had made an observation similar to Mukhoty’s after he saw the cremation record for Okura given to Ayer by Harin Shah. He pointed out

  that whereas according to Habibur Rahman the dead body was cremated on the 20 th August 1945, according to the municipal certificate the cremation took place at 6pm on the 22 nd August 1945. One could understand a fictitious name being used in the death certificate and in the cremation certificate, but there was no necessity of using a fictitious date of cremation. Either Habibur Rahman’s memory must have played him false or there is something wrong with the cremation certificate.