India's biggest cover-up

by Anuj Dhar

  There were instances of the followers and those who somehow got to write to Bhagwanji linking him to Bose and imploring him to go public. One Abdul Hafiz wrote to “respected secret sadhu” in Hindi that he prayed to the Almighty for fulfilment of Bhagwanji’s desires. “Please take your original form at the earliest!” It is not very common for Hindu holy men to have Muslim followers. Bhagwanji actually had a Muslim attendant at Basti.

  One follower from Kolkata wrote in Bangla that “the present national scene warrants a big change. We are waiting for the right time”. Another letter dated 21 January 1981 read: “In this long wait sometimes I get anxious and at times I get desperate. Sri Sri Sitaram Omkarnath Thakur has hinted that he is in contact with Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.”

  “1008 Sri Sri Sitaramdas Omkarnath” was a highly revered Bengali holy man who had known Bose and many other greats. His followers today are scattered around the world. If you ask me, Omkarnath should be regarded by the Intelligence Bureau as its “patron saint” because he was the guru of BN Mullik. Both guru Omkarnath and disciple Mullik passed away in 1984. Until 2011, Thakur’s commune was headed by his favourite disciple, who had been offered the choice to either serve the country by joining the IB or serve the humanity by becoming a saint. India’s loss was mankind’s gain.

  Yet another letter, this time in broken English, by Gurucharan Singh Bedi read: “People say you are Mother India’s best son Netajee himself.” Bhagwanji himself used the metaphor for himself. “I am a son of the motherland,” he wrote in Hindi in an undelivered letter to Dr Vibhuti Narayan Singh, former Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University and former king of Kashi. Sentence constructions and vocabulary clearly showed that Bhagwanji learnt Hindi late in life.

  The holy man’s utterances were collated and reproduced in a book titled Oi mahamanaba asey. [4] Titled after a famous Rabindranath Tagore song meaning “the great man comes”, the book was first published in the early 1970s and enlarged in subsequent editions. Written in quaint, hard to understand Bangla, it carried several passages in English, mostly Bhagwanji’s quotes. Compiled and commented upon by Bhagwanji’s followers—all of them used the same penname “Charanik” or “Charan”—Oi mahamanaba asey portrayed him as a superhuman being, and, reading between the lines, Subhas Chandra Bose.

  Till now you all knew me as the son of Rai Bahadur, son of so and so etc. Then you knew that he entered politics against his will because of Deshbandhu’s magic wand. A few got to know that he did sadhana secretly. Some also got to know that some tantrik experts met him at certain places in other countries under different situations and advised him. Then he went abroad, became the supreme commander and then died or disappeared. Suddenly you knew he is alive, that he did not die. [Translated from Bangla]

  In another place in the book, the following attributed to Bhagwanji appears in English:

  My most and only beloved mother was a direct disciple of Paramhansa Dev. By every suck of her breast, through every kiss of her, by the channels of her caresses, touches, tender looks and words, the tattwa-shakties of the Divine Mother flowed in and filled me. My father gave unto me thoroughness and strength in service to others and fighting activeness. …I inherited mysticism from Mother, Paramhansa and Vivekananda. Throughout I have been constant. Even during most hectic times, the deepest hours of night afforded a bit of time for that.

  From my childhood I began hearing and perusing scriptures. As I grew up, my mystic hunger also grew. I went through all scriptures and philosophies again and again. In college and university years I used to seek out, hunt the so-called great seers and wise men of our days and questioned, questioned, questioned them on mysticism. None satisfied me. I even left everything once in search of true mystic satguru and searched far and wide in the country and high and low in the Himalayas. None could satisfy me. It was bitter winter. I remembered my own mother, dear darling adored mother, and came back at her lap and feet.

  What Bhagwanji claimed for himself was actually true for Subhas Bose. For instance, one of Bose’s earliest biographers, Durlab Singh, wrote this in 1941:

  In the winter days of 1914 he…ran away into the heart of a jungle amidst the valleys of Himalayas in search of some spiritual teacher…. Scenes of his home return were most dramatic. Everybody was sitting in the drawingroom when he suddenly made his entry into it. He first of all proceeded to his mother and touched the dust of her feet.

  Other than using the word “Subhas” Bhagwanji claimed everything to identify him as such. “Master moshai's influence on my life was the greatest,” he declared. “It was Beni babu who turned my life around. …And if there was a bosom friend, it was Hemanta.”

  The thoughts that are occurring to you now occurred to me as well. Surely it was never a secret that Beni Madhav Das was Subhas Bose’s school teacher and Hemanta Sarkar his childhood friend. Just because someone rhapsodised all that did not mean he was Bose. Anyone could have lifted these details from already published books.

  Actually, Oi mahamanaba asey is full of many imponderables. For example, it quotes Bhagwanji claiming that at one point of time, the British Indian Army almost gave in to the INA's assault. "I had great hopes that Bengal would rise like a single person as soon as I crossed Burma." [Translated from Bangla] Bhagwanji has also been quoted by the book as having said that Dead Man “gave himself to India”before “effacing himself away”.

  A sizeable chunk of the allusions Mahakaal made pertained to his peculiar position as someone whose name had been “crossed out of human register”.

  I am just a will o’ the wisp...It is born, does it work, runs around, stays still for a while, vanishes from one place and then shows up at another place. It manifests itself but cannot be caught. I am just not here. I have no existence. [Translated from Bangla, except the highlighted English word]

  And yet Mahakaal felt that being “dead” actually “saved” him. For

  no more will he have to carry with him what he has done or what he hasn’t done in his old/earlier life. He won’t have to answer. Old relations, old acquaintances will not pester him anymore. Or else he would have had to face questions every moment—‘you said this 20 years ago and now you are saying this, you did that 20 years ago and now you are doing this.’ This faquir has nothing to be afraid of in that regard. Mother Kali has driven him through the correct path. His road is clear. What he did propound 20 years ago has become redundant due to special circumstances. Will you do the same things in winter as in summer? Will you do the same things at 20 years age as you did when you were 10 years old? [Translated from Bangla]

  Bhagwanji repeatedly claimed that he had “undergone complete metamorphosis” and was an altogether different person from what he used to be. And that the attempts to comprehend his present through his past would be futile. “With all your erudition and discernment, you simply cannot comprehend the state of metamorphosis of the Ghost of Mahakaal. How very complete and final!”

  In one letter recovered from Rambhawan, Bhagwanji was found to have written:

  Very strange are you and your government that they constitute ‘loaded dice commissions’ over and again just to know whether he is dead or not! You all are the reason behind this. Populus Vult Decipi - You All People Wish To Be Fooled. [Translated from Bangla, except the emphsised parts]

  Charanik commented that Mahakaal had had “a complete break with the past”. His “new life” was a mix of old and new—a baffling amalgamation of spiritualism, mysticism, militarism and the paranormal. To his endless wonder, Bhagwanji once said:

  As human beings, we are, at all times, radiating energy, which is soaked and stored by items around us. Even our thoughts radiate an electrical field which leaves an imprint on objects in the form of energy. According to eminent [Russian] scientist Genady Sergeyev, every human being leaves an electrical imprint—energetical imprint—as well as an informational imprint, on objects that he touches or is close to. Every object around us has magnetic characteristics of its molecules. It is then
that it becomes a natural magnetic recorder. Even over a brief period, man can record the information of his entire life on a nearby object. By ‘brief’ I mean— in a split of a second.

  Mahakaal described the concept of vishwaprem (love for the world) as “bunkum”. He said he was a yodha-sanyasi (warrior saint) as opposite to his sanyasi-yodha (saint warrior) idol Swami Vivekanand. Theorising that the military strength and power of ideology moulded any nation’s history, he rued that India’s greatest misfortune in the last two thousand years was not being able to produce a “military seer”. This nation does not know what is military thinking, he complained.

  Dead Man revealed himself in a feeling of omnipotence as a behind-the-scene mover and shaker. I don’t know what to make of the mind-stretching claims of the hidden “military seer”. Wishful hallucinations...or the confessions of a spymaster? The three doctors who were quite close to Bhagwanji in his last days—surgeon Dr RP Mishra, homeopath Dr Priyabrat Banerjee and anesthetist Dr BN Rai—insisted to me that not only was he mentally sound, Bhagwanji was something of a “superhuman”.

  This superhuman vaingloriously spoke of his presence in several post-WWII war zones where he couldn’t have been. He got briefings on the issues no holy man could possibly fathom. One of his theories was that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was to preempt an Anglo-American intervention. The British opened a channel with the Khan of Kalat. The “scheme” was that under the garb of talks with the Afghan elites to improve the landlocked country’s lot, a delegation of British ministers and lawmakers would reach Kabul. Two days into the talks, armed intervention from the Pakistani side would start. But the Soviets came to know of this, and even as the plane carrying the British was airborne, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan.

  I don’t know if the declassified records give any hint of any such thing. A follower, who I have come to regard as truthful, told me that a week before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Bhagwanji told him to expect some “major change” in these countries. In Oi mahamanaba asey, Bhagwanji goes on to provide a sarcastic insight into the lawless FATA region of Pakistan at the height of CIA-backed Afghanistan jihad.

  Yes, the book overstretches imagination—in almost every paragraph. A reference is made in it to Mahakaal's secret visit to another country, where he meets the world's "greatest historian" and implores him, in the presence of his wife and their daughter, to record certain facts in his forthcoming book. A follower's understanding is that the allusion is to the legendary Will Durant, his wife Ariel and their daughter Ethel.

  I find that hard to swallow. How’s that possible? The “meeting” couldn’t have taken place in the US, because Bhagwanji never said he visited that country. But he often talked of being in Paris, a place he very much liked. The follower thought that Durant actually made some modifications to what he was writing at that time at Bhagwanji’s request.

  The Durant couple passed away in 1981 and their daughter is no more too; so no chance of getting the account verified. All one knows that when Bhagwanji’s belongings were being inventorised at Rambhawan, many works of Will and Ariel Durant, including the volumes 1 to 10 of their magnum opus The story of civilization, were found among Bhagwanji’s collection. A comment left by Bhagwanji on the margin of a page decried the general trend among Western historians at that time to take a lopsided view of the Orient.

  “Loads of hogwash!” is how I might have characterised the details gone into so far, had the evidence not emerged of not one or two but several old Bose associates of undoubted integrity and commitment carrying the belief that Bhagwanji was no one but Subhas Chandra Bose.

  Foremost among them was Leela Roy, a member of the Constituent Assembly. Her portrait in Parliament House—unveiled in 2008 in the presence of Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh—evidences Roy’s exalted position among the pantheon of freedom fighters. In our fascination for Bose and his INA we tend to overlook that prior to that most remarkable but very brief phase of his life, Subhas Bose had for long been a front-ranking politician. During this period, he had many close associates and followers who remained on his side for decades. One of the reasons we have come to regard Lakshmi Sehgal of INA as Bose’s closest woman aide is that after 1945 she and others from the INA caught public imagination and became living legends.

  Leela Roy (nee Nag), for one, knew Subhas Bose intimately from the time both were in their early twenties. She was one of the earliest women revolutionaries. A historian can tell better, but I am not aware if there ever was anyone else of her status turning to revolutionary ways and actually getting involved in the physical liquidation of the supporters of the Raj. Her father was a wealthy Rai Bahadur and she herself excelled early in life by becoming the first woman to earn a Master’s in English from the Dhaka University. There she met her future husband Anil—a hunk who was lost to die of cancer in the 1950s—and followed him into the revolutionary fraternity. Both formed the group called Sri Sangha. In 1941, Subhas tipped them of what lay ahead.

  What is not known historically is that from 1963 till her death in 1970 Leela Roy secretly believed Bhagwanji to be Bose. She had been led to him by Dr Pabitra Mohan Roy—no relation of hers. How Pabitra, Leela Roy and others met Bhagwanji is a long tale. It is not clear whether or not Bhagwanji contacted anyone in Bengal for a few years after he suddenly surfaced in Lucknow. It was purely by chance that a “contact” was “re-established” in 1962.

  In April that year, Prof Atul Sen, an ex-MLA and an acquaintance of Bose met Bhagwanji in Naimisharanya by chance. Sen conversed with him from the other side of the curtain and on his return to Kolkata sounded off to some of his old friends from the revolutionary fraternity of Anushilan Samity and Dr RC Majumdar that he had ran into “Subhas Bose”. Around 1965 Majumdar wrote in Leela Roy’s magazine Jayasree about his surprise over Prof Sen’s account that the man on the other side of the curtain discussed with him past episodes which could not have been known to anyone else except Bose and him.

  Ignoring Bhagwanji’s caution, Sen on 28 August 1962 wrote the following to Prime Minister Nehru:

  Dear Jawaharlal Ji, I take the liberty of addressing these few lines to you in the matter of the widely prevalent belief that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose is not dead. Mine is not mere belief but actual knowledge that Netaji is alive and is engaged in spiritual practice somewhere in India. Not the sadhu of Shoulmari, Cooch-Behar, in West Bengal about whom some Calcutta politicians are making a fuss at this moment.

  I deliberately make the location a little vague because from the talks I had with him for months together not very long ago I could understand that he is yet regarded as Enemy No 1 of the Allied Powers and that there is a secret protocol that binds the Government of India to deliver him to allied 'justice' if found alive. If you can persuade yourself to assure me that this information is not correct or even if it is correct your Government shall resist any action by any of the said powers against the great patriot I may try to persuade him to return to open life.

  The Prime Minister’s response was somewhat odd. First of all, he should not have reacted kindly to the suggestion that Bose was alive in view of his own long-standing belief that he had died in 1945. Secondly, the bit about a secret protocol was so patently absurd on the face of it that it warranted a contemptuous dismissal. Since Panditji had a marvellous intellectual capacity to personally dictate cogent responses to the numerous letters he received from all over the country each day, it cannot be assumed that he did not apply his mind to what Sen had written.

  However, a reading of his August 31 reply gives one the impression that he was open to the idea of Bose’s remaining alive, though he did emphatically refute the allegation about the protocol.

  On September 5, Sen informed the PM that in view of his answer he was “pursuing the matter as suggested in my letter of August 28”. He couldn’t because Bhagwanji had cut him off the moment he came to know of his intimating the PM about him. Sen never got the opportunity to again get in touch with Bhagwanji. B
ut the news spread by him reached former Anushilan member Pabitra Mohan Roy. Roy met Sen, heard his story and decided to check it out for himself.

  A few days later he managed to reach the old Shiv temple in Naimisharanya where Bhagwanji was staying. The holy man tested Roy’s patience and allowed him inside only after several attempts. Pabitra died in the 1990s, taking his secrets with him. But the contents of dozens of letters found in Rambhawan in 1986, [image of a sample letter follows] admissions of Bhagwanji’s other followers and certain statements of his tightlipped sons leave me in no doubt that he took Bhagwanji to be Subhas Bose. No one knew as much about Bhagwanji as he did and it’s a pity that he left no record or diary with useful details at his home.

  Perhaps it was just as well, for he was Bhagwanji’s eyes and ears. “Wherever I’ve got any type of information, I’ve religiously forwarded it without any delay, bias or fear. This has been your 'standing order',” he wrote in a 1979 Bangla letter.

  In their first meeting, Bhagwanji asked Pabitra to bring the next time a few items, including a powerful transistor, chronometer, telescope, Fowler’s dictionary and cigars. While arranging for them, Pabitra turned for help to didi [common Indian term of endearment for elder sister or suchlike person]. Leela Roy could deal with “Subhas” as an equal. On 7 January 1963 Pabitra told her that he had met “Bose” at Naimisharanya. A stunned Leela Roy made the following entry in her personal diary that evening: