India's biggest cover-up

by Anuj Dhar

  Bhagwanji did not approve of Bhimani’s claims. “He has lied”, he wrote. He described as “false” Bhimani’s claim that he had helped Sarat Bose until his death in 1950. He crossed out both points 3 and 4 and wrote: “You don’t know facts. Mejda helped him. Everyone knows this except you fool.”

  Mejda [elder brother] was what Subhas used to call Sarat. Of course any “imposter” could have written something like that. You might think that—in spite of the foregoing account—it is actually quite foolish to think that Netaji remained hidden in his own country like that.

  My dilemma as a researcher is that I cannot brush something under the carpet just because it looks implausible. Even though I know that it makes a lot of “political sense” to “end” the Bose mystery with the Russian trail, I am helpless because there is a considerable body of evidence telling me that there is something about the Faizabad angle. And when I speak of evidence, it includes of the variety which is admissible in courts all over the world

  There is only but one direct evidence that Bose was alive after 1945. “You don’t know facts. Mejda helped him” wouldn’t have blown my mind if a topmost handwriting expert of India hadn’t opined that these words were written by Subhas Chandra Bose.

  10. Why ‘Dead Man’ tale can’t be wished away

  If the Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry hadn’t revisited it, the legend of Bhagwanji would have morphed into an urban myth centred around Faizabad. But it so happened that when the commission was formed, some believers rushed to the commission with their claims. Of these, Dr Alokesh Bagchi stood out for he had cared to supply the commission an authenticated copy of the inventory prepared following the High Court’s 1986 order on Lalita Bose’s petition.

  By having the holy man’s belongings secured Lalita Bose had met with partial success only. After the inventory had been prepared, all the items located from Bhagwanji’s room in Rambhawan were sent to the district treasury and stored in sealed iron containers. The court case lingered on for years and in the meanwhile Lalita and others lost steam. The last she was heard making a public pitch for resolving the issue was in October 1989. Addressing media in New Delhi, she “demanded to know why the Government was not serious to find out whether ‘Gumnami Baba’ of Faizabad was Netaji as a section of the Press had suggested”. Hindustan Times reported:

  Ms Bose said he was of the same age, size and colour of Netaji. He did not meet people except from behind a curtain. His accent was Bengali. His notes on books in English and Bangla looked like the writing of Netaji. After the death of the Baba, Ms Bose made a claim for his property as his niece as she did not want such important material to be destroyed because it was “unclaimed”. [1]

  Despite his own precarious financial condition, co-petitioner Vishwa Bandhav Tewari picked up the threads. Mohammad Haleem had passed away. Tewari, since deceased, wrote to the Prime Minister, Home Minister, Speaker, UP Governor, Chief Minister and the Forward Bloc in Kolkata, but all in vain. In 1997 he was told that the file of Lalita Bose’s 1986 petition was untraceable in the court records. At that juncture, Dr Bagchi, a surgeon from Gorakhpur, came to his resuce. Bagchi felt attached to Bose because his grandfather had hosted him once. Sincere but credulous, the surgeon was also under some fanciful notion about a holy man, then camping at a secluded place near Sitapur.

  Tewari’s efforts led to yet another judicial injunction in May 1998. Judge Brijesh Kumar of the UP High Court ordered for the recreation of the file. Bagchi found that in the court record someone had fraudulently entered “case resolved” against Lalita Bose’s petition.

  The state government eventually filed its counter-affidavit in January 1999, when the central government was under pressure to initiate a new judicial inquiry. The state government, however, dismissed Lalita Bose’s case. She was no longer alive to respond to the government contention that for the “want of knowledge” it could not be believed that she was Bose’s niece. The NIP reports were trashed. “No reliance can be placed on any news published in the newspaper without verifying the authenticity of the same.”

  I find that statement amusing. While checking the Gumanami baba files at the DM’s office, I noticed that several newspaper reports making empty claims delinking Bhagwanji from Bose had found pride of place in the official documentation. Evidently, the state government in the 1980s followed the central government’s policy of dismissing all media reports which went against the official version about Bose’s fate and, at the same time, preserving those which favoured it. The Prime Minister himself saw to it that such media reports were brought on record. See this noting for example:

  The press clipping referred to was this:

  So, I fail to understand how could the UP government not attach importance to media reports linking Bhagwanji to Bose. The affidavit gave one reason. The local police had concluded that Bhagwanji was not Bose.

  Soon after the Mukherjee Commission was set up, Bagchi filed an affidavit and appended a copy of the bulky inventory he had obtained from the High Court. I am sure that a reading of it must have made the commission officials realise that there was more than what met the eye in the la affaire Gumnami Baba. At least that’s what happened to me despite my having a completely closed mind on the issue at that time. I could not believe that Bose could have remained in hiding like that and so the very idea was as preposterous as it could get.

  I was then working with Hindustan Times online. Shali Ittaman, my colleague, came up with the idea of conducting a probe into the matter and in consultation with CEO Sanjay Trehan and editor Shailesh Shekhar assigned me some research and writing task. The whole idea would not have materialised if HT editor Vir Sanghvi was not supportive of it. Under the lead of Bose biographer and senior journalist Sitanshu Das, the one of its kind HT probe concluded in 2001 that “on present evidence it would seem improbable that Bose died on August 18, 1945”.

  No reputed daily had ever dared to take such a decisive stand on this issue. The HT probe was pathbreaking and a runaway hit on the web. The bulk of hits came not from India, but from the US, home to a large number of exapats and people of Indian origin.

  After we were done, I met Bagchi during a hearing of the Mukherjee Commission in New Delhi. He gave me a copy of the inventory and that was the start of the phase 2 of the HT probe. Halfway through my research, I cross-checked with Sitanshu Das and Suresh Bose's son Pradip the antecedents of some of the people whose names had figured in the Faizabad issue. Without being judgmental about Bhagwanji, Pradip Bose made one thing quite clear: Leela Roy was a class apart. “It was impossible for her to have mistaken someone else for Netaji.”

  All the research for the phase 2 of the HT probe was done by me. My reports, overseen and rewritten by my seniors, were lapped up by the readers. Going forward from where long forgotten Ashok Tandon and the NIP team of Nirmal Nibedon, Vishwambhar Nath Arora and Sayed Kauser Hussain had left, I traced Bhagwanji’s Bengali followers in Kolkata and managed to get his handwriting tested by one of the best experts in India.

  B Lal Kapoor, a former Additional Director of the National Institute of Criminology and Forensic Sciences, Ministry of Home Affairs, studied Bose’s handwritten notes I had obtained from the National Archives and compared them with poor but a large number of the 1985 vintage photocopies of Bhagwanji’s notes. Lal gave his opinion in his March 2002 report to Hindustan Times that “there are characteristic similarities in general and individual writing habits, strongly suggesting common authorship of relevant questioned writings and admitted writings (of Shri Subhas Chandra Bose)”. The concluding editorial for the HT Bose mystery probe said:

  We do not fear the inference that the hermit may be Netaji Subhas Bose, but we do gasp at the conclusion that will be drawn from the writings and letters that have survived this man. Taken on their face value, they have the potential to change Indian history the way we know it.

  The commission followed its own procedure. First retired session judge NK Panja visited Faizabad on the instru
ctions of Justice MK Mukherjee and took evidence from Bhagwanji’s local followers. It was only after that Justice Mukherjee himself visited Faizabad, the District Magistrate’s office to be precise, in November 2001. [The picture you see now shows him on right. Dr Alokesh Bagchi is on the left and I am behind the two. Bijan Ghosh, the lawyer who had filed the Bharat Ratna PIL, was behind the camera.]

  In the presence of several mediapersons, including myself, the sealed belongings of Bhagwanji were inspected by him. Some 700 items, mostly letters and books were selected to be taken to the commission’s office in Kolkata. Most important among them, from the forensic point of view, were specimen of Bhagwanji’s writings and a matchbox containing a few teeth assumed to be his. The commission decided to get these handwriting samples and the teeth examined by the government experts. After Hindustan Times carried my story on B Lal’s opinion on page 1, the commission hired his services as well. All handwriting and DNA reports were received by the commission in sealed covers and opened by Justice Mukherjee in a public hearing in 2004.

  The result was that whereas Lal had given a positive report, the government reports were negative. One DNA report was negative and the other inconclusive. The commission’s verdict on the Bhagwanji angle, as stated in its final report made public in May 2006, was that

  there is no reason for not acting or relying upon the evidence of the last two categories of witnesses particularly of the category who had seen Netaji before 1945 and also met Bhagwanji/Gumnami Baba face to face on a number of occasions, more so when their evidence regarding the frequent visits of some freedom fighters, eminent politicians and former members of INA on January 23 and during the Durga Puja festival is supported by the fact that letters written by some of them including Prof Samar Guha, Dr Pabitra Mohan Roy and Ms Leela Roy were found in "Rambhawan". [2]

  But still there are other formidable facts and circumstances on record which stand in the way of this commission in arriving at a conclusive finding that Bhagwanji/Gumnami Baba was none other than Netaji. [3]

  The report summarised the negative findings of the government forensic experts and determined that “in absence of any clinching evidence to prove that Bhagwanji/Gumnami Baba was Netaji the question whether he (Netaji) died in Faizabad on September 16, 1985, as testified by some of the witnesses, need not be answered”. [4] Most journalists afterwards read in the commission report a complete dismissal of the Bhagwanji angle. “Absence of any clinching evidence” meant that there was evidence but it was not incontestably final—which is my position even today.

  Another chapter was added to the Bhagwanji saga in 2010 when Justice Mukherjee's off-the-record comments were surreptitiously recorded by independent filmmaker Amlan Ghosh for his documentary "Black box of history". Wholeheartedly backing B Lal's meticulous report, Mukherjee reacted derisively about other government reports. His comments confirmed the suspicions of forensic fraud about which the sources had tipped me off earlier. More importantly, the former Supreme Court judge said that he was "100 per cent" sure that Bhagwanji was Netaji and regretted that he could not prove that in his report due to non-cooperative attitude of the Government, and even the Bose family.

  Even with such an intriguing backdrop, no proper discourse has taken place in India till date over the Bhagwanji episode. Most of our historians and intellectuals—whose job it is to explain complex issues to the public—have zero interest in the Subhas Bose matter. When they display some, they refuse to come out of the rut of the Taipei “air crash” theory. The recent big hype over a slim book written by a grandnephew of Bose’s has further reinforced the impression among a large number of unsuspecting people that the air crash theory is the only explanation of Bose’s fate. On the other side, a sizeable number of people continue to believe that Bose was liquidated in Russia under some hideous international conspiracy. And so they think that Bhagwanji must have been an impostor. On the whole, the Bhagwanji legend is pooh-poohed because of its incredibility quotient. The negative findings of the DNA and handwriting experts are cited to summarily dismiss any link between Bose and Bhagwanji.

  There are also those who accept in private that there is some definite link but do not publicly air their views for fear of negatively impacting Bose’s image. “The Netaji we knew was a fearless fighter—a death-defier. Nothing would have stopped him from coming out in the open if he was in India for so long!”

  My take is that all these assumptions must not be allowed to overshadow facts. A grandnephew of Bose quoting from the Shah Nawaz Committee report and asserting that this is “historical evidence” is simply making a motivated statement. [See Appendix III. Views of Subhas Bose’s family on his fate] To say that “I went to Russia and some scholar told me that Netaji died there only” is also not a piece of evidence but unsubstantiated hearsay. The opinion of a handwriting expert before a commission of inquiry, like it or not, constitutes direct evidence. If Lalita Bose had lived on beyond 1998 and had told the Mukherjee Commission on oath that same thing she told the media about the Faizabad handwritings having been of her uncle’s, it would have tiltled the scales.

  Who was Bhagwanji is still a moot question. Agreed that the available evidence does not incontestably prove that this man was Bose; but does it establish otherwise? Certainly not. The disbelievers should find an explanation as to why for so many years, so many outstanding patriots of integrity with no ulterior motive held Bhagwanji to be Bose. How could he “fool” so many people for so many years and for what purpose? If he was an imposter, who were behind him and what could have been their motive? How come more than one impartial and intense media enquiries upheld the Bhagwanji angle? How come both Khosla and Mukherjee commissions were formed largely due to the efforts made by his followers? Why would a former upright Supreme Court judge charged with finding the truth about Bose come to hold the belief that Bhagwanji was indeed Bose?

  If I have been successful in evoking some counter-questions in your mind, I think I’ve your attention. Now, allow me to guess some of these posers and furnish relevant details so that you can take an informed stand.

  I open with the rider that my current understanding about the Faizabad holy man is not what I would like it to be. I have been able to access only a fraction of the information. Most of the stuff that Bhagwanji left behind is rotting away in the Faizabad district treasury. So there are going to be gaps in the details to follow. To fill them will require further research and efforts which would not be possible without public support. I think a fraction of the abounding interest the general public has in cricket matches would be enough to crack the entire Bose mystery.

  In the last one year I have often been asked: “How can Justice Mukherjee now say that Bhagwanji was Bose when his report doesn’t say that?” See, sometimes you know something is true, but still can’t prove it. If you remember, a few years ago a judge let off the culprit in the murder of a young woman in Delhi, saying, “Though I know he is the man who committed the crime, I acquit him….” [6] The father of the accused, a middle-level IPS officer, had used his influence and, therefore, the judge did not find right evidence laid out in front of him. Later the verdict was overturned and the killer got convicted by the higher court. It proves that when public pressure comes, no one can get away with wrongdoings.

  Anyone, of course, would be at a liberty to say for whatever reasons that he or she does not share Manoj Mukherjee’s belief. All I would say to that is that please bear in mind that Mukherjee is a former Supreme Court judge who investigated Netaji’s fate. If he can be 100 per cent sure of something, we can try and be 25 per cent sure that there must be some good reason for him to hold that sort of belief.

  But how do we reconcile with hurdles in the way of lending credence to the Bhagwanji angle? The matter was probed by the police at the very outset and they said this man was not Bose. Didn’t they?

  In pre-Mukherjee Commission days if you asked the central government who Bhagwanji really was, your question would have been passed to the UP go
vernment for an answer. The state government would have checked up the police inquiry report available in Faizabad DM’s office and reverted with the statement that this man was not Bose. The word for it in today’s language is “spindoctoring”. The police report about Bhagwanji’s identity doesn’t precisely conclude that he was not Bose. This is despite it being a whitewash. The report contains just three pages with another one carrying the single-sentence conclusion drawn by then SSP of Faizabad. While brevity is the soul of wit, this is hardly amusing. This is not my understanding of how an inquiry should be.

  An example of inquiry—leaving aside its political overtones—is the recent Sohrabuddin encounter case. We all know what the CBI did to ascertain circumstances leading to the gangster’s extra-judicial killing. The investigative agency caught hold of existing and retired senior cops, extracted information from them and filed a chargesheet running into thousands of pages before the Supreme Court. The CBI also told the court for whatever reasons that it would like the case to be moved “out of Gujarat as a fair trial wasn’t possible in a hostile atmosphere”. [7] In the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case, the Gujarat High Court on 1 December 2011 directed that the investigation be handed over to the CBI “because it could not trust either the special investigation team or the state police to do a credible job”. [8]

  While I am not terribly keen to know how a criminal and a terror suspect were bumped off, so far as “politically sensitive” cases go, this is the right model of inquiry. It is up to us which one we would like to uphold as a fair one. A three-page, “talk to one guy here and one guy there” sort of report would be good enough for a rookie journalist to churn out a story, but would hardly do justice to a serious matter under investigation.