The Dead Ghost's Afterlife

We have yet another independence day and still not a trace of willingness to commemorate the great legacy of one of mother India's greatest sons. Netaji’s “afterlife” is therefore real in two senses. He survives in the unfinished political memory of India, and he survives as a "dead ghost" produced by the state’s unwillingness to confront its own uncertainty. The injustice is not merely that his final fate remains unknown. It is that a nation built partly upon the sacrifices of the INA has never given its most controversial freedom fighter a fully open, fair and politically independent examination of the evidence.

If the Republic wishes to address the historical wound, it should establish an independent panel with a narrow evidentiary mandate and full public access. The Government should mandate:

1. A complete reconstruction of the alleged flight from Saigon to Taihoku, using Japanese, Taiwanese, British, American, Soviet, Indian and INA records.

2. An archival audit of every document cited by the Shah Nawaz, Khosla and Mukherjee inquiries.

3. Publication of the complete chain of custody for the Renkoji remains and an assessment of whether scientifically viable DNA testing is possible.

4. Blind forensic examination of the Bhagwanji and Bose handwriting samples by international experts.

5. A systematic review of intelligence reports, including the reports cited as evidence of Bose’s survival in Russia or China.

6. Examination of the “Tashkent Man,” Paris photograph and other visual claims only as investigative leads, not conclusions.

7. A public hearing in Parliament on the Mukherjee Commission report and the Government’s reasons for rejecting it.

8. A definitive catalogue identifying which files are missing, destroyed, withheld or altered, and why.

9. A recognition and preservation of all the possessions of Bhagwanji in a proper museum, freely accessible to all Indian public

The Provisional Government of Azad Hind was proclaimed on 21 October 1943, with Bose as its leader and head of state. The Government of India has commemorated its formation, including official programmes marking the anniversary and the 75th year of its establishment. But there is no official recognition or public acceptance of this date as a key milestone in India's independence such as declaration of independence day. It deserves much more importance than it is currently being given. Although the present government has done more for Netaji's legacy than all the previous governments together, it yet strangely remains silent if there is any attack on Netaji or regarding the debate on the plane crash and his afterlife. There may be several reasons for this strange silence. One of the strongest is, Netaji does not conform to any present day political party's political aims and objectives.

The Justice M. K. Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry, established in 1999, was the most important institutional interruption to the official narrative. After a seven-year investigation involving India and several foreign countries, its report reached three decisive conclusions:

1. Netaji was dead.

2. He did not die in the alleged plane crash.

3. The ashes at Renkoji Temple were not his.

The report was submitted in 2005 and tabled in Parliament in 2006. Its findings were not a declaration that Bose had lived indefinitely, nor did the Commission identify a proven post-1945 location. It expressly stated that, in the absence of clinching evidence, it could not provide a positive answer to the question of what happened thereafter.

In an interview in which accidentally camera was on, Justice Mukherjee testified that he was 100% sure that the unknown hermit of Faizabad/Ayodhya was Netaji. Yet he could not bring himself to state the same in his official report, under what compulsions we would never know. Director Amlan Kusum Ghosh has captured the pivotal moment in his Blackbox of Indian History documentary which is now available in public domain.

That distinction is crucial. The Commission rejected the crash theory without claiming to have solved the entire mystery. A responsible state response would therefore have been to separate the questions:

• Did the reported crash occur?

• Were the Renkoji remains Bose’s?

• Was the crash story a wartime deception?

• Did Bose survive and, if so, where?

• What evidence was withheld, lost or fabricated?

• Who benefited politically or strategically from presenting the crash as fact?

Instead, the Government rejected the report’s principal findings, stating that it did not agree that Bose had not died in the crash or that the Renkoji ashes were not his. The rejection created a remarkable situation: a statutory commission’s conclusions were placed before Parliament, but Parliament was not given a meaningful process for examining the evidentiary dispute.

The official account is familiar. On 18 August 1945, Bose allegedly boarded a Japanese aircraft at Taihoku—modern Taipei—and died after the aircraft crashed shortly after take-off. His body was cremated, and the ashes were eventually placed at Renkoji Temple in Tokyo.

The Shah Nawaz Committee, established in 1956, and the Khosla Commission, constituted in 1970, broadly accepted this account. Yet the earliest major challenge came from within the first inquiry itself. Suresh Chandra Bose, Netaji’s elder brother and a member of the Shah Nawaz Committee, issued a dissenting report in 1956. He argued that the evidence did not justify the conclusion that Netaji had died in the alleged crash and complained of obstruction, withheld evidence and pressure to conform to the government’s prior position. Contemporary accounts of the dissent record his conclusion that the aircraft accident had not been established and that Netaji therefore could not be declared dead on that basis. This was important as it pointed to a fundemental flaw, the commission's fate was decided at the time of its inception when the prime minister himself set its agenda by publicly declaring in parliament that he had no doubt that Netaji was dead. Yet, the very same prime minister contradicted his own statement in response to a letter from Atul Sen, in less than 6 years.

The problem was compounded by the limited scope of later investigations. The Shah Nawaz Committee and the Khosla Commission did not conduct the kind of independent, on-site investigation in Taiwan that would be expected in a disputed aviation death. Justice Mukherjee, by contrast, travelled to Taiwan and examined the documentary record there. Reports of the Commission’s findings stated that Taiwanese authorities found no record of an aircraft crash at the old Matsuyama Airport during the relevant period. Justice Khosla was close to Indira Gandhi, and Khosla's pen was by default Indira's pen. Justice Khosla also had personal score against fellow ICS Subhas Bose.

Vetarn parliamentarian Dr. Samar Guha played a stellar role by fighting every inch for preserving Netaji's legacy. He was ably supported by veteran Netaji supporters such as Hari Vishnu Kamath, Leela Roy, Satyaranjan Bakshi, Sunil Krishna Gupta and several other die hard Bose loyalists. But they were too few, too good to fight the corruption and opportunism engulfing Indian politics and creating a chasm between the idealistic policies of Bose and the opportunistic and self serving policies of the Government and opposition.

Declassified Indian files have shown that British and American intelligence agencies continued to consider the possibility that Bose was alive after 1945. Some records referred to alleged sightings or fears that he might reappear and influence anti-colonial or communist movements in Asia. The Mukherjee Commission reportedly found material discrepancies among the statements of witnesses associated with the alleged crash, including contradictions between testimony given to different investigating bodies. The existence of witness testimony is therefore not equivalent to the existence of reliable testimony. The enormous documentary evidence submitted to Khosla commission are not available in public domain.

The controversy has also been shaped by the state’s long reluctance to release files. India eventually placed large numbers of Netaji-related documents in the public domain: the first 100 files were released in January 2016, followed by further batches. The National Archives records that the release followed a government decision to declassify files and make them accessible to the public. Yet it is claimed that IB files are still not public and some of the more classified records will probably be never declassified.

No formal request has ever been made to Russia, Britain or Vietnam where apparently some evidences of Netaji's post 1945 activities still remain.

Nothing is known about the INA treasure or its fate, what happened to the enornous amount of gold contributed by Indian citizens of SE Asia to the cause of India's freedom, who usurped them and why there was no formal investigation.

Why the state has hesitated

The refusal to reopen the question may have had several motives, none of which requires a single master conspiracy.

First, Bose’s return would have destabilised the post-independence political settlement. He represented a radically different vision of nationalism - disciplined, socialist in economic orientation and willing to sacrifice for the sake of the country's interest, a clear anathema to the political dispensation post independence.

Second, the INA and the Azad Hind Government complicated the simplified independence narrative. The end of British rule cannot be reduced to one party, one leadership style or one constitutional method. The INA trials, military unrest and the psychological impact of Bose’s forces on the colonial state deserve a more central place in public history. The Naval revolt was largely erased from public memory, the battle of Kohima and Imphal that almost decimated the British rule was never discussed in academic concourse or brought to public attention. No Bollywood director ever made a story on INA. Auchinlek's assertion that British was in grave danger from a fresh mutiny like 1857 and did not have means to combat it, was complelely ignored by court historians. Only RC Majumdar stood aside but he was made an outcast.

Third, acknowledging that the crash may have been fabricated would imply that officials, foreign governments and perhaps Indian political actors accepted or propagated an unverified story for decades. States are reluctant to reopen narratives on which previous governments have built diplomatic and commemorative policy.

Fourth, secrecy became self-reinforcing. Once files were classified, later officials could cite the passage of time, missing records and evidentiary uncertainty as reasons not to investigate. But the disappearance of evidence is not evidence that the original conclusion was correct.

Dead ghost is thus bound to remain dead, his legacy erased, he being subjected to derogatory remarks, ridicules and only cursory mentions on 18th August or on 23rd January without any serious attempt to honor his legacy. But a time will come when the nation will be forced to remember him and wish that he were there. A TIME OF RECKONING MUST COME, TRUTH WILL TRIUMPH.

JAI HIND.