NEW DELHI, May 17: India’s government rejected on Wednesday a panel’s findings that the country’s fiery freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose had survived a 1945 plane crash in Taiwan.
The government’s move is likely to spur a fresh debate on a long-running controversy over the mysterious disappearance of the independence leader, popularly known as ‘Netaji’.
A report by a panel released last year had concluded that Bose had not died in the plane accident. The report also said ashes lying in a Japanese temple said to be Bose’s were actually not his.
The panel, headed by retired judge Manoj Mukherjee, did not indicate what it thought his fate had been.
However, in its own report to parliament presented on Wednesday, the government formally rejected those findings.
The government said it ‘has not agreed with the findings that Netaji (Bose) did not die in a plane crash and the ashes in the Renkoji Temple were not of Netaji’.
Two previous probes by government panels had concluded that Bose did indeed die in a plane crash at Taihoku airport in Taiwan on Aug 18, 1945.
According to historical accounts, Bose — who founded the Indian National Army (INA) and allied with Japan and Germany during World War II to fight the British — was put under house arrest by the British in 1940 in Kolkata.
But on Jan 16, 1941, he escaped and fled to Moscow on an Italian passport from where he went to Berlin and raised the INA with the support of Indian prisoners of war, the accounts say.
In 1943, he reached Tokyo before continuing on to Singapore, where he formed an interim Indian independent government and declared war against the British.
He led the INA into northeastern India in 1944 and unfurled the national flag but had to retreat after a British army offensive.
In Aug 1945, it was reported that Bose had been killed in a plane crash in Taiwan.
But Mr Mukherjee said last year that the Taiwan government had shown him documents which said there was no record of a plane crash in Taiwan between Aug 14 and Sept 20, 1945.
Mr Mukherjee and other historians who dispute the plane crash theory have not offered alternatives to the circumstances of Bose’s death.
“We will ask the government why it has rejected the Mukherjee report,” said Nanda Das of the Forward Bloc party, which Bose founded in 1939, and whose three members in the federal parliament support the ruling Congress government.
Supporters of Bose, who is most revered in his home state of West Bengal, claim that their hero was in Soviet captivity after his reported death and allege a cover-up by Indian authorities.
Mr Mukherjee declined to comment on the rejection, saying only that he submitted a report to government ‘after thorough investigations’.
“The government asked me to go into the disappearance of Netaji and I complied with that,” he said.
Krishna Bose, a historian and a distant relative of Bose, dismissed the government’s verdict as irrelevant.
“We should now tell the nation that we must come to terms with the glorious death of a deathless hero,” Bose told reporters.
“I think he went down fighting for his country in the battlefield.
“Why are we trying to deprive him of that. None of our freedom fighters or great leaders have gone down fighting in battle and we should tell that to our younger people,” she said.
The Forward Bloc party, which Bose founded in 1939, said it would request reasons from the government for the verdict.
Bose teamed up with the Japanese and fought in Myanmar at a time when India as a British colony was a large contributor of men and material to the Allied forces in World War II. —AFP
