India's biggest cover-up

by Anuj Dhar

  Justice Mukherjee, on the other hand, reasoned why a please-all evidence for the plan was hard to come by:

  It is trite that a stratagem including the matter of its execution ingenuously and meticulously hatched in secret cannot, owing to its very nature, be proved by direct evidence unless one or the other member of the party thereto divulges the secret. It can, therefore, be proved by circumstantial evidence and the individual or detached acts or omissions of the planners including their dialogue…. [12]

  The former Supreme Court judge saw “overwhelming evidence” for Bose’s escape plan. Not factored in by him while drawing this conclusion were pre-independence, legally inadmissible intelligence reports quoting Russian diplomats’ claim that Bose was in the USSR in 1946. Mukherjee was also not shown by the Government of India some important post-Independence official records. Such as Ayer’s secret report revealing that Terauchi had taken the responsibility to send Bose to the Russians.

  Justice Mukerjee’s report, as we know, was dismissed by the Government whose persistent view has been that no such plan was ever on the table. It doesn’t think that Bose could have pulled it off and that the Japanese, who were just using him, would have obliged him. And that is why the Government never ever felt the need to ascertain facts from the Soviets—until their final hour—which would have been the only way to know whether or not Bose it had actually made to the USSR after 18 August 1945.

  Just how grave this passivity on the part of our Government has been would be better understood if we juxtapose the Bose case with the tragedy of Raoul Wallenberg—a young Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis in 1944 before his disappearance from Budapest in January 1945.

  Wallenberg was initially reported dead and then it emerged that he had been abducted by the Red Army. Just as it happened with Subhas Bose, the rumours of Raoul Wallenberg’s presence in the USSR began swirling thereafter. And just as Bose’s kin and admirers strove to get at the truth, Wallenberg’s influential family, admirers and the people he had rescued began making efforts to find out what had become of him. It started with Raoul’s mother Maj Von Dardel taking up the issue with the Swedish government.

  From this point on, the two cases begin looking different. That is because the intentions of the Swedish authorities were not mala fide. The moment it got the leads that Raoul Wallenberg could have been alive in the USSR, the Swedish government wasted no time in contacting the Soviet authorities.

  The Swedes did not enjoy the sort of close relations which the Indians did, but that did not come in the way of their quest for truth. Eight written and five oral official approaches concerning Wallenberg were made in between 1945 and 1947.

  India was effectively in the Soviet bloc in post-Stalin period. There was nothing under the sun we did not discuss with our Soviet friends. Only one issue wasn’t officially touched—not even with a bargepole.

  In March 1945 the Swedish legation in Moscow was instructed “to request information energetically” from the Russians “about conflicting rumours In March 1945 the Swedish legation in Moscow was instructed “to request information energetically” from the Russians “about conflicting rumours concerning the whereabouts of...Wallenberg”. In April the legation was told to request the Russians for “a careful investigation”. [13] Present-day researchers lament that but for the callous Swedish ambassador in Moscow, the saviour of so many people could have been saved through those initial efforts.

  But Ambassador Staffan Söderblom had implicit faith in the Soviets pretending to know nothing about Wallenberg. “Russians are doing everything they can already,” [14] he wrote once. “I am afraid that with the best will in the world the Russians are unable to shed any light on what happened….” His opinion on another occasion was that it is “possible that Raoul Wallenberg has been killed in some kind of car accident”. There was in his mind a veritable reservoir of cynicism. To him, Wallenberg’s mother was “wasting her strength and health on a further search”. [15]

  People here haven’t been talking much differently over Subhas’s fate.

  In June 1946 Söderblom was told to raise the issue with Joseph Stalin himself. He made a mess of the meeting by expressing his “personal opinion” that Wallenberg had died of an accident. “You say his name was Wallenberg?” [16] Stalin asked Söderblom and jotted down the name on his pad.

  Persistent Swedish approaches made the Soviets come out in August 1947 with their first ever high-level formal reply. Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Vyshinsky wrote that an extensive search of the records had shown that “Wallenberg is not in the Soviet Union and is unknown to us”. [17] He also suggested that he “had either been killed in the battle for Budapest or kidnapped and murdered by Nazis or Hungarian Fascists”. [18]

  Such an answer would have ended all further questions from Sweden but there were outcries from the Swedish public and media. Their government stood by them and kept on raising the issue. The Soviets retaliated in 1948 through the semi-official foreign ministry weekly New Times, which decried the “'fables” and “filthy campaign” about Wallenberg’s presence in the USSR.

  Two years earlier, an article in Pravada had in similarly vituperative fashion “denounced as 'a stupid fairy tale' a report that Subhas Chandra Bose…is in Soviet Russia”. This was closest to the first official Soviet reaction on the Bose case. Journalist David Zaslavsky dipped his pen in caustic ink and wrote that the theory was “a fabrication of dishonest newspaper buffoons endowed with an imagination which is as quick as it is dirty”. [19]

  For the Wallenberg case, things began to change in 1955 when many of the Germans and Austrians captured by the Soviets during the war were released. Proactive Swedish authorities traced out some of them and obtained their testimonies concerning Wallenberg. They said they had contacted him in prison through wall tapping. Even this thin evidence infused confidence in the Swedes. The yearning for the truth made them go back to the Soviets. Moscow’s harsh response this time was that “it was impossible to accept the testimony of war criminals whose information was in disagreement with the results of their own thorough investigation”. [20]

  Sweden ignored this aggressive political posturing. When Prime Minister Tage Erlander visited Moscow in 1956, he put the Wallenberg issue high on bilateral agenda despite strong Soviet objections. Erlander handed over to the Russians the “testimony from German and other prisoners of war, making it perfectly clear that Raoul Wallenberg had been in prison in Moscow at least between 1945-1947”. [21] A declassified Soviet record shows Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov noting that “Erlander persistently asked us to find a solution to the situation in order to settle the matter” and that “the Wallenberg issue was such an irritating element in Soviet-Swedish relations that it might have a negative effect on them”. [22]

  Cornered by the Swedes, the Soviets finaly owned up the basic truth: Wallenberg was indeed in the USSR after 1945. In 1957 USSR Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko’s bombshell of a letter referred to Wallenberg’s death following a heart attack a decade earlier in Lubyanka prison at the KGB’s HQ. Supporting this claim was a document, copy of a 17 July 1947 memorandum written by Lt Col A Smoltsov, chief of health services at the prison, stating that Wallenberg had died on that day and his body had been cremated. All that the Soviet had said up to that time about not knowing anything about Wallenberg, thorough investigation, extensive search of records et al, was part of an elaborate, state-sanctioned hoax.

  The Swedes did not give up still. Various accounts available to them showed that Wallenberg had lived beyond 1947, when he was just 34. There was the case of Prof Nanna Svartz of Sweden meeting Russian Prof Aleksander Miashnikov in Moscow in January 1961. Svartz raised the issue “close to the heart of the Swedes” and Miashnikov went on to tell her that he had actually treated Wallenberg at a mental hospital. When she got back home, Svartz narrated the account to Erlander. The Swedish PM acted promptly, and at the highest level. On 25 February 1961 Swedish Ambassad
or Rolf Sohlman met USSR top man Nikita Khrushchev to hand him over a letter from Erlander containing the professor’s account.

  In contrast, the case of Subhas Bose as it was pursued by India would make your heart sink. In spite of the knowledge that Bose could have made it to the USSR, New Delhi never officially utilized even a jot of its diplomatic and political clout with Moscow to find out the facts so long statesmanly Jawaharlal Nehru and his family of “world leaders” were at the helm.

  The 1950s and 1960s were the decades of denial, precluding the possibility of replicating the Svartz episode in India. Humiliation and intimidation was in store for those who tried to sensitise the authorities. An unverifiable account involved globetrotting Dr Satyanarayan Sinha. He claimed that he had implored the Prime Minister at a diplomatic gathering to informally raise the Bose issue with the Soviet ambassador. “But Nehru…dismissed that suggestion as a ‘talk of chandukhana’ (gossip in a den of opium addicts).” [23]

  An on-oath account comes from Ardhendu Sarkar, a post graduate in mechanical engineering from the UK and former chief engineer of the Heavy Engineering Corporation. Sarkar testified before the Mukherjee Commission, and elaborated to me personally, that while on a deputation in Soviet Russia in the early 1960s, he had been told something mind-boggling by his senior at Gorlovka machine building plant, near Donetesk in Ukraine. BA Zerovin had spent some time in a gulag. Zerovin was not his original name. He was a German Jew, who had been brought to the USSR, sent to a Siberian camp for indoctrination, given a new identity and married to a Russian.

  Sarkar got on intimate terms with his senior and in one of their moments of camaraderie Zerovin let it slip to his colleague from Bengal that he had met Subhas Bose in Berlin and “again in 1948” in a gulag somewhere beyond the end of trans-Siberian Railways in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains. According to Zerovin’s account, “Bose” was apparently being treated fine, given a car and was moving around with two guards. In their short exchange, “Bose” told Zerovin that he expected to go back to India soon.

  After letting out his secret, Zerovin realised that he had spoken too much. He cautioned Sarkar to keep it to himself in their mutual interest, so long as he was in the USSR. But Sarkar “naïvely” walked into the Embassy of India in Moscow—if you met him, you would believe that he did—and got it all off his chest before a Secretary. The Secretary was not amused. “Why have you come to this country?” he asked Sarkar and lashed out at him peremptorily. “Does your job involve poking nose in politics?!” Sarkar’s blood ran cold. The Secretary saw fear in his eyes and advised him not to “discuss this with anyone”.

  “Just do your work and forget what you’ve just said,” he rebuffed Sarkar as he sent him off. Sarkar returned home in a state of shock and never opened his mouth till his children had settled down.

  Evidently, there were many others who never ever spoke out for fear of retribution.

  Wrinkles of angst and helplessness formed on former Ministry of External Affairs officer Rai Singh Yadav’s battered face as he thought back to the time when a Russian diplomat in Europe had teased him. “Your Quisling was with us!”

  “Our people did not want to disturb relations. They knew Netaji was in Siberia. He had been left out in the cold!”

  This was a one-time director of pre-R&AW era Information Service of India of the MEA talking.

  What Yadav told me about a friend of his was harrowing. “He sent for me when he was on his death bed. He said, ‘I don't want to go to my funeral pyre with this. Hear this carefully’.”

  I listened with increased interest.

  “Release this information when India is ready to ask questions about Netaji,” [24] were the words of Tibetologist Ram Rahul, whose distinguished friends included a judge of the US Supreme Court and a low-profile former Soviet official. Babajan Gouffrav and Rahul had struck a chord in their first meeting in Tashkent thanks to Rahul’s fluent Uzbeki, Gouffrav’s mother tongue.

  Time was when Gouffrav was a man of influence in Moscow due to his closeness to the Soviet vohzd. “Only Lavrenty Beria and Gouffrav could intrude into Stalin’s privacy,” Rai Singh continued his account. Gouffrav was also associated with the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow.

  “He knew a lot.”

  Singh’s heart thumped as the professor unburdened himself in his last moments, letting out the admission of deceased Gouffrav, who visited India several times. “Netaji had crossed over to the Soviet Union in 1945 via Manchuria.” [25]

  Nearly 45 years after this supposedly happened, the Soviet Union was swept by glasnost and perestroika. Swedish government, public-spirited bodies such as the American Jewish Committee and Wallenberg’s tenacious kin and indebted admirers made the most of the times by renewing their efforts to gain information about Wallenberg.

  In October 1989 Raoul’s sister Nina Lagergren was invited to Moscow and handed over the original copy of Smoltsov memorandum and some of her elder brother’s personal effects the Soviets claimed had been “unexpectedly found when old wooden shelves in the KGB archives were being replaced and the sack carrying these items fell to the floor”. [26] Sweden’s timely activism led to the formation of a Swedish-Russian Working Group in 1991 to look deep into the Wallenberg issue.

  Did anyone in India think of Bose at that time?

  Still classified Ministry of External Affairs records paint a pathetic picture. It had occurred to Samar Guha—certainly not any learned MEA official—that it was worthwhile to raise the Bose issue with the moribund Soviet state, open more than ever to releasing its secrets. Guha lobbied hard with the VP Singh government, writing to the PM on 17 May 1990 and also pressing the points to his foreign minister so that a “high-level investigations into secret documents” on Bose in the USSR and other countries could be undertaken.

  The United Front government acted fast, though the message it sent to the Soviets was somewhat wimpish. On May 21 the Indian embassy appealed to the Soviet foreign ministry to try and “explore the possibility of transferring relevant materials on Bose to the National Archives in New Delhi”. Even this weak message was strong enough to cause a flutter. On 20 June 1990 the New York Times reported that the VP Singh government was considering a new investigation. “There have been recurrent accounts of his being seen in the Soviet Union after that date.” [27]

  In response, the Soviets in August 1990 sent six documents detailing the 1941 deliberations between the Soviet and German embassies in Afghanistan on how to take Bose out. The MEA estimated that these records “did not shed any further light on Netaji’s fate”. In May 1991 another bunch of selected records arrived from Moscow. Acquiescing Ministry of External Affairs in an “I-told-you-so” tone noted that it too “threw no additional light on the fate of Netaji or his possible presence in the Soviet Union after his disappearance in 1945”.

  Some more pressure from Guha and like-minded people would bear down on the ministry before it would make its first unambiguous approach to seek information on Bose’s fate from the Soviets. This was done through a note verbale dated 16 September 1991 sent by the embassy to the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The note was based on a letter from lawmaker and Guha’s compatriot Chitta Basu, suggesting that Bose might have found his way to the Soviet Union after the reported plane crash. Basu’s All India Forward Bloc, the most prominent offshoot of Bose’s original Forward Bloc, had made direct appeals to the Soviet government previously but without any luck. Guha’s letters to Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhael Gorbachev had remained unacknowledged.

  Looking back, the person who had thus far been successful in eliciting a Soviet response was the man who had got on Nehru’s nerves. Dr Satyanarayan Sinha created a sensation before the Khosla Commission charging that Bose had been held captive in a Siberian gulag and Prime Minister Nehru and others winked at this. Khosla was probably right in calling Sinha a “braggart”, but Sinha's allegations—like he was accosted by USSR Delhi embassy officials who threatened to execute his Russian contact—outrag
ed the Soviets. On 3 November 1970 the embassy released the USSR’s first and last statement on Bose’s disappearance. It was tersely stated “with full responsibility” that the Soviet authorities “had absolutely nothing to do with the fate of Subhas Chandra Bose”. [28]

  The 1991 note verbale sought from the Russians “any material available in the archives of Soviet organisations, including security organisations, which could shed light on the fate of Netaji”. It was sent barely a month after the coup d’état attempt in the USSR, when the Indian stock in Moscow was at its lowest thanks to Prime Minister Rao’s statement in favour of the August Putsch. So, if the Government was hoping to get some positive response, this was just not the time. Perhaps the Government did not want any.

  Now, the Soviet/Russian officers who handled the Indian query must have made one snap judgment: The Government of India was not too keen on the issue. Because if it were, the Indian embassy would have elaborated the details available to it, rather than making the case solely on the submissions of a politician relying wholly on publicly available information. To underline the importance it attached to the issue, the Government of India would have declassified its own records—just as the Swedes had done in the Wallenberg case—and then made an approach at a higher level.

  The Indian External Affairs Minister could have written to his counterpart, or spoken on the sidelines of some important meeting. Instead, what the Indians had done was to simply issue an unsigned note verbale, a “Demi-Official” (DO) letter that is. Columnist Jay Bhattacharjee—the Cambridge-educated grandson of Bose’s teacher Beni Madhav Das—taught me the relevant French and diplomatic nuances: