by Anuj Dhar
Takahashi version to the Shah Nawaz Committee was that he saw Bose “trying to take off his coat”, which Rahman insisted Bose was not wearing. Rahman told the committee that on the way to Taipei he felt cold but Bose did not and therefore Bose did not put on warm clothes. Ever heard of a young Kashmiri feeling cold while a middle-aged Bengali is not?
Anyhow, Takahashi then “went up to Netaji and made him roll on the ground and managed to put out the fire from his clothes”.
He says that Col Habibur Rahman was there, but assigns him a passive role. …While the other witnesses have said that Netaji had to take off his clothes and was naked, Major Takahashi says that Netaji had his clothes on. [24]
The committee’s report also touched upon ground engineer Nakamura’s claim that it was he who had actually “rescued the passengers from the burning plane, and specially Netaji”. The Dissentient report gave enough space to this rescue act:
He [Nakamura] at once jumped on to the shidosha waiting near him and rushed to the place of crash and was followed by three of his men.... They rescued the passengers through a normal door of the plane…. Mr Bose was the last person to come out and he did so by walking out of the plane. The engineer continued that...then saw that Mr Bose was within the reach of the flames and as his clothes had been splashed with petrol, they caught fire. Mr Bose then lay on the ground, where the engineer and three of his men took off his coat and stripped him of all his clothing. [25]
Kono, described by the committee report as an “alert and observant” eyewitness said he saw Bose standing near the plane, completely naked and with no “fire on his body”. And while Kono could feel “the heat of the flames 30 metres away, Netaji was standing a couple of metres away from them seemed to be oblivious of the heat. His face did not show any sign of pain. Then Col Habibur Rahman moved him away from the burning plane”. [26]
The Shah Nawaz Committee report deduced somehow that “the version given by Colonel Habibur Rahman and supported by the two more observant witnesses, namely Lt Col Nonogaki and Major Kono, appear more credible than the version of Major Takahashi”. [27] If the committee had been provided with the July 1946 report of Col Figges, who also testified before it in Tokyo, it would have been compelled to revise its opinion about Nonogaki as well. Before Figges, Nonogaki had narrated an altogether different story. He said he saw Bose “lying on the ground in flames” and then
Habibur Rahman and Nonogaki between them succeeded in beating out the flames and Bose was removed immediately to a nearby emergency dressing station where the burnt clothing was cut away from his body. He was then taken…to the nearest army hospital…. [28]
But as a Khosla Commission witness, Nonogaki had no such memory. He merely watched Rahman trying to save Bose and he did not help him take off his clothes.
The Shah Nawaz Committee report also recorded that “when the crash took place, it was dealt with in a somewhat casual manner. No officer of any standing came to the spot”. [29]
2.44pm: General Shidei dies in the plane
Very little was heard of Shidei after the plane hit the ground. The witnesses provided sketchy, discrepant details. Kono said that moment the plane impacted the ground, a petrol tank fell on the general and he died on the spot. Nakamura said that along with the pilots, the general too perished in the flames. But Arai insisted Shidei was taken to hospital, where he expired. No one knew when, how, by whom and in which condition the general's body was extricated from the wreck.
In the hospital no one saw his body or even heard about it. Since the body was not available, no death certificate was issued. There was no cremation permit either. No one knew for sure when and where Shidei was cremated because no one attended his cremation. Nakamura claimed that he buried Shidei's entrails and put his ashes in a box. A box said to be containing Shidei's ashes was found placed at the same crematorium where Bose was allegedly cremated, but neither his name nor that of the general appeared in medical or cremation records.
Although Major Nagatomo claimed before the Shah Nawaz Committee that General Ando had visited the hospital to see Netaji and attended his funeral ceremony, “General Isayama, chief of the general staff, who should know what the Army commander was doing”, clarified to the committee that “neither he nor Gen Ando went either to the hospital to pay respects to Netaji’s body, nor attended any funeral ceremony”. His excuse was that they did not do so because they did not want “to give prominence to the fact that an important person like Netaji was fleeing to Tokyo”. [30]
The committee report dismissed this explanation as unconvincing. All the more unconvincing was the circumstance that the general should have remained clueless about his Manchuria-bound batchmate. Isayama never saw Shidei’s body either at the hospital or elsewhere and never did attend his cremation and funeral. A pot said to be containing Shidei’s ashes was later delivered to his family in Kyoto along with some of his belongings.
The Japanese did not seem interested in conducting even a cursory inquiry to find out the reason for the crash. “One would have at least expected a formal inquiry into the air crash, which is more or less a routine matter,” Shah Nawaz complained. “More so, as the plane carried distinguished persons like Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Lt Gen Shidei.” And when Shah Nawaz sought a clarification from General Isamaya, he received two contradictory versions.
On being questioned, General Isayama first denied that Formosan Army had any responsibility to inquire into the accident of an aircraft that did not belong to them—the plane in question belonged to the Third Air Army at Singapore. [But] later on he admitted that the local army command was expected to hold an inquiry, and went on to say that a report about this particular plane crash was submitted through him, by Lt Col Shibuya, to the Imperial General Headquarters. [31]
Colonel Shibuya flatly denied that any such report was ever sent and passed the buck on “the Air Division concerned”. The final word came from the Japanese Foreign Office on 4 June 1956: “As a result of investigation…it has been revealed that no official inquiry commission to determine the cause of the accident was held so far.” [32]
III: Views of Subhas Bose’s family on his fate
The Bose family members that I have known often tell me that “Netaji belongs to the nation” and that’s why they do not want their views on Subhas’s fate to be given any more importance than those of the other Indians and his admirers worldwide. Much as I respect their feelings, I cannot desist myself from reacting to the instigator of a book titled His Majesty’s opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s struggle against Empire. With all of its 388 pages, this is not exactly a tome, and if you check out the back jacket, you will find a hyperbolic claim: “Finally, an authoritative account of his untimely death in a plane crash will put to rest rumours about the fate of this ‘deathless hero’.”
“Finally” and “authoritative” are much too flashy an adverb and an adjective for an outdated account that’s around 8,000 words long, even after adding lengthy footnotes and a long discourse on Netaji’s legacy. “A life immortal”, the final chapter in writer Prof Sugata Bose’s book, is roughly half the size of this appendix. It is not even an honest summary of a nearly seven-decade-old controversy raging in a country whose people are not known for their sense of history. If the utter lack of details isn’t bothersome, the hackneyed content surely is.
His Majesty’s opponent has spawned many rave reviews and inspired stories, almost all of which are taking pot shots at the subject matter of my book. That it is myth, a conspiracy theory, and all that. I wish someone had fired a cannon ball; it would have been worthwhile in that case to start pounding back. Well, there is no big bang happening because Prof Bose’s much-hyped book is a fizzle so far as the controversy surrounding Netaji’s death is concerned. I am no one to raise a finger so far as Prof Bose’s command of the English language is concerned. I quite admire the way he writes and delivers speeches. But his book is of no consequence in taking the case forward.
I
do not blame the reviewers for getting swayed away by the professor’s persona. My case would have been the same had I not known a thing or two which one can’t find either in the book or shimmering anywhere on the bubble of hype around it.
Prof Sugata Bose does come across as a highly credible individual because he is a Harvard university don, a grandnephew of Subhas Bose and is effectively heading the Netaji Research Bureau (NRB) of Kolkata. But no one is telling us that Prof Sugata Bose’s parents were once loyal members of a particular political party chiefly responsible for downgrading Netaji’s legacy. No one is telling us that on the whole the Bose family disapproves of whatever the professor has to say about Netaji’s death. No one is also telling us that the professor’s sister, another mouthpiece for the official version, has propounded one of the most revolting conspiracy theories of our times. And, there is no one to tell us about the openly flung charges of NRB benefitting from the largesse of the Government of India (GoI) engaged in covering up the truth about Bose’s fate.
These are not below the belt barbs but well-entrenched factors in appreciating the case the professor has made out for Bose’s death in Taiwan. The following elucidation will demonstrate that the writer of His Majesty’s opponent is by default “On Government of India Service” for he toes the official line so zealously that he ends up glorifying those who betrayed Netaji and those who tried to degrade him. And he doesn’t realize the mistake he has made by throwing stones at others, thinking that only his targets are living in glass houses.
Subhas Chandra Bose’s family is not just about Sugata Bose’s immediate family. His father Dr Sisir Kumar Bose was one among the eight children of Sarat Chandra Bose, the closest person to his younger brother. Sarat and Subhas had 12 more siblings. Elder to Subhas and younger to Sarat was Suresh Bose, whose maternal grandson Bengal Finance Minister Dr Amit Mitra, who taught in the US previously, is perhaps the most outstanding Bose kin today. Of Sarat and Bivabati’s eight children—Ashoke, Amiya, Mira, Sisir, Gita, Roma, Chitra and Subrata—the first three brothers have died. Mira Ray, Gita Biswas, Roma Ray, Chitra Ghosh and their younger brother Subrata Bose live in Kolkata. Subrata, the uncle of Sugata, was a member of the last Lok Sabha. He and his cousins Pradip, Suresh Bose’s son who passed away in November 2011 and Supriyo, son of Dwijendra Nath Bose, took keen interest in the Mukherjee Commission's inquiry as deponents.
In all, there are something like 50 close relatives of Subhas Bose scattered across the world today. Everyone knows that Dr Anita Pfaff lives in Germany. Anita’s mother Emilie passed away in 1996. The youngest brother of Subhas, Shailesh Chandra Bose, who was his lookalike, died in the late 80s. Shailesh’s son Ardhendu used to be a Bombay Dyeing model in the 1970s. As of this writing, the oldest surviving member of the family is over 100-year-old Lalita Bose, widow of Dr Sunil Bose, the second eldest brother of Subhas and India’s first cardiologist.
If I can put it in percentage, 98 per cent of all of Netaji’s dead and living kin put together rejected the air crash theory. Prof Sugata Bose has edited the facts about his family in his book to give the wrong impression as if his immediate family has been the core of the Bose family close to Subhas. And that the family has agreed with the Groverment of India.
This is when even the Government of India files from the 1950s onwards are littered with evidence that Subhas Bose’s family never accepted his death and that’s why the Renkoji ashes could not be brought to India. Two documents will suffice to underline this point. The first one is a letter from Bengal Chief Minister BC Roy telling his friend Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1952 that Bose family doesn’t want the Renkoji ashes in India.
The second document is a 1990 note prepared by then PMO Director Meera Shankar, India’s Ambassador to the United States until recently. Here she refers to a letter by Ashis Ray, a first cousin of Prof Sugata Bose and the Times of India correspondent in London at present, stating that Emilie did not want the ashes in India. Ray for his own reasons subsequently became a believer in the official version.
A few months before her death in 1996, Emilie had shown then External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee the door after he tried to coax her into signing a paper which said Subhas’s ashes were enshrined in Renkoji temple. The entire episode from Emilie’s perspective was narrated in an affidavit handed over to the Consulate General of India in Hamburg by Sugata’s first cousin Surya Kumar Bose, the eldest son of Sisir’s elder brother Amiya Nath Bose, for relay to the Mukherjee Commission.
This moving account of a normally quiet Emilie Schenkl losing her temper when Pranab Mukherjee raised the issue of the ashes is confirmed by the other family members. It is astonishing that Harvard historian Sugata Bose, who was quite close to his grandaunt, should have censored it in his “authoritative account” of his granduncle’s death in his book. He opens “A life immortal” by dramatising Emilie’s obvious reaction to the 1945 radio announcement of Subhas’s death. Later he quotes from another letter to insinuate that she believed in the air crash.
I can hazard a guess as to what could possibly be the motive behind erasing the all the more dramatic happening of 1996 and misrepresenting Emilie’s real views. Maybe the professor doesn’t want to embarrass his late father’s good friend Pranab Mukherjee, and the Government which is known to fund NRB. According to the government figures, the amount sanctioned towards the corpus fund of NRB during 1996-1997 only was Rs 3,00,00,000.
I cannot imagine a grandson of Sarat Bose’s having the temerity to overlook his publicly spelt out views, and present them in a way that is tantamount to distortion. He writes that his grandfather accepted “with grief and fortitude” the news of his brother’s death when he first heard it in prison. How in the world Prof Bose can possibly leave out what a wizened Sarat told openly to media afterwards is beyond me:
When the story of (of the air crash) came out, I [Sarat Bose] was in prison. I shall confess that as long as I was in detention, I felt upset. I had not had any materials then to enable me to judge whether the aircrash story was true or not. [1]
Out of prison, Sarat Bose made his own enquiries, in the course of which he received inputs from European and American journalists:
I met a lady journalist, Dr Miss Lily Abegg, representative of the widely-circulated journal, Weltwoch of Switzerland. She came to meet me in an interview at Glyon. In course of her conversation, I gathered that she was in Japan at the time of Japan’s collapse in the last world war. She had contacted important and informed British and American sources and that none of them believed in the air crash story or that Netaji was dead. [2]
Prof Sugata Bose spins the excuse that his grandfather died in February 1950, before convincing evidence was collected. To me, this is a case of falsifying facts. Sarat Bose did not need to browse through the edited testimonies of crash survivors years later. Prof Bose himself speaks in the language of Government of India regarding the discrepancies which the passage of time can bring about. Sarat heard it all from the horse’s mouth there and then. Sugata Bose is a famous historian; Sarat Bose was an ace lawyer. Just as we can’t teach our grandmothers how to suck eggs, Sugata Bose can not claim to have a better understanding of the event than his grandfather. Sarat Bose personally examined the most important witness to Subhas’s “death”—Habibur Rahman—and continued to make his assessment public as late as October 1949. I am not aware if some Harvard scientist has devised a technique enabling people to change their mind after they are dead.
After I came out of the prison in 1945, I had the opportunity of talking to Colonel Habibur Rahman of the INA. ...the impression left in my mind that he (Habibur Rahman) had orders from his chief (Netaji) to come out with that story. As a man and officer of the INA, Colonel Habibur...was sterling gold and...the only conclusion I could come to was that he had orders from his chief to keep his whereabouts a closely guarded secret. [3]
All these quotations appear in big fine print in Sarat Bose’s own newspaper the Nation. He was so dead sure that his broth
er was alive, and in China, that he had it splashed on the page one after briefing an American journalist.
Sugata Bose provides a quotation in “A life immortal” from a letter by Sisir Bose to his mother Bivabati consoling her on Subhas’s “death”. For a long time Subhas had lived with Sarat Bose, so obviously the views of his affectionate sister-in-law, who outlived her husband, have a bearing on the issue. The effect that this quote creates is far from the reality. I don’t know whether Sugata ever saw his grandmother or not, but his uncle Subrata Bose surely knows what his mother thought. He told me that at the time of her death one of his mother’s last wish was to see Subhas. I am sure Bivabati’s daughters will vouch for it, for all of them have the same views as Subrata and their late brothers—except Sisir.
Prof Bose has given his late pediatrician father Dr Sisir Kumar Bose a larger-than-life image. That is quite natural for a son to do, but it is very conceited of him to project Sisir Bose’s pro-air crash views as if they were some sort of last word on the issue. The professor writes that after Sarat Bose’s death, Sisir studied all evidence, carried out what he calls “investigations” in Japan and Taiwan and reached a conclusion. To that I can add what Sisir stated in his last interview to the Times of India: “All evidence indicates that he died in the air crash. Anything to the contrary is not based on evidence.” [4]
The narrative in the professor’s book precludes any references to Sisir’s other brothers, especially Amiya Nath Bose but for whose seminal work there would be no Netaji Research Bureau today. You see him with Subhas and Emilie in the following picture taken in Badgastein in December 1937.