Why is it important to debunk the concocted 'Air Crash" theory

Another 18th August will see political figures across all hues posting tribute to Netaji. Channels will debate on air crash and people will be largely remain oblivious or indifferent to the facts of the case. Bhagwanji himself said that debunking the air crash theory should be the most important step, but he had little hope of achieving the same. He was aware of the extent of indifference and ignorance of general public which is leveraged by the politicians. He knew that India's political legacy had no interest in rejuvenating the Netaji issue, neither by allowing to bring his so called ashes, nor by asking the Government to come clean. He knew that Netaji followers are largely an erratic base, revolutionaries who think it is their sacred duty to keep quiet, opportunists who think it is their sacred duty to leverage his name and legacy for selfish gains, and an emotionally charged illogical bunch whom no one takes seriously, who deify Netaji and try to portray him as the God incarnate. The time has come for a logical, clear, level headed analysis and put the facts across. Some of the Netaji researchers are followers are doing a stellar job, but more the merrier.

A caveat though: This piece does something specific: it lays out, as fully and fairly as possible, the case that Anuj Dhar, Chandrachud Ghosh, the late Samar Guha, and independent researchers have built for the proposition that Subhas Chandra Bose did not die at Taihoku on 18 August 1945, as also established in the documentary of Amlan Kusum Ghosh - Blackbox of Indian History. It theorizes that he lived on, as the ascetic known as Gumnami Baba or "Bhagwanji," in Faizabad, until 1985. It draws on the Dissentient Report of Suresh Chandra Bose (1956), the Khosla Commission record (1970), the Justice Mukherjee Commission report (2005), and the secondary literature that has grown around it, including Conundrum and India's Biggest Cover-Up and the book from Jayashree publications, Oi Mahamanab Ase (Bengali). It is important to say plainly what this is and isn't. The claim that Bose died in the crash and the claim that he lived on as Bhagwanji are both, at bottom, historical arguments resting on witness testimony, forensic inference, and documentary gaps and not settled fact in either direction. The Mukherjee Commission itself, while rejecting the plane-crash story, explicitly declined to conclude that Bhagwanji was Netaji, citing insufficient evidence. However, it should also be noted that Justice Mukherjee accepted (without knowing that the caera was on and was recording) that he was 100% sure that the ascetic was Netaji. Yet he failed to walk the last mile, of boldly declaring that fact in his report. The commission created after him to investigate if Gumnami Baba was indeed Netaji was so frivolous in its methods and findings that it is not even worth mentioning.

The government's position, unchanged in its essentials since 1945, is this: Bose died of third-degree burns in a Japanese military hospital in Taihoku (Taipei), roughly a day after his bomber overloaded with luggage crashed on takeoff. He was cremated on 22 August 1945, and his ashes were flown to Tokyo, where they remain at the Renkoji Temple. Nehru accepted this account almost immediately, and in 1956 told Parliament the matter was "settled beyond doubt." But the man he sent to investigate it didn't agree. The Shah Nawaz Committee (1956) produced a majority report affirming the crash. But one of its three members, Bose's own elder brother Suresh Chandra Bose, refused to sign it. His Dissentient Report is the founding document of the skeptics' case. Suresh Bose argued the Committee had never visited Taihoku, never examined the crash site, and had built its conclusion almost entirely on the word of Japanese officers and Habibur Rahman, Bose's aide-de-camp and sole Indian witness to the alleged crash, a testimony Suresh Bose found internally inconsistent on basic facts: the time of the crash, the extent and location of Bose's burns, and what happened to his personal effects. The government suppressed the Dissentient Report for years. When it finally surfaced, it gave the "no crash" theory its first serious institutional foothold.

The Khosla Commission (1970), under a retired Chief Justice, revisited the same testimony and reaffirmed the crash, but even Khosla's own report, on close reading, conceded there was no conclusive documentary proof, only a judgment that survival was "not impossible" but improbable. It is perhaps not insignificant that Khosla was close to Indira Gandhi and Nehru and that he was apparently disparaged by a young Subhas Bose during the ICS days.

Where the first two inquiries were criticized as desk exercises, the Justice M.K. Mukherjee Commission, set up in 1999 after a Calcutta High Court order and after decades of campaigning by Samar Guha and others, did something different. It ran for six years, took testimony from Taiwanese officials, sought Russian and Japanese government cooperation, examined forensic and meteorological evidence, and directly asked the government of Taiwan whether any air crash had been recorded at Taihoku airport in August 1945.

Taiwan's answer, conveyed formally to the Commission, was unambiguous: no such air crash was recorded in that period at that airport. The Commission also flagged what it called serious, irreconcilable discrepancies in Habibur Rahman's own accounts of the crash and Bose's injuries across different tellings over the decades; unresolved questions about the plane's technical capacity to reach the altitude from which it was said to have nosedived; and gaps in the chain of custody around the cremation and the ashes.

On the strength of this, Mukherjee's 2005 report concluded — the first of the three inquiries to do so unequivocally, that Bose did not die in the Taihoku crash, and that the ashes at Renkoji Temple are not his.

This is the fact this piece's framing gets right: of the three official inquiries, Mukherjee is the one built on the widest evidentiary base, and it is the one whose central finding the government has never accepted. In May 2006 the Manmohan Singh cabinet's Action Taken Report rejected the Commission's two central findings, asserting the inquiry was "inconclusive" and "at variance" with the earlier commissions. This despite Mukherjee having had access to material, and cooperation from foreign governments, that neither Shah Nawaz nor Khosla had. There was a floor discussion of the report in the Rajya Sabha in August 2006, so the claim that it went entirely undiscussed in Parliament isn't quite accurate. But the debate produced no revision of the government's rejection, and the underlying files remained classified for another decade.

What Mukherjee did not find, and said so explicitly, was that Bhagwanji/Gumnami Baba was Netaji. It examined the claim and called the evidence insufficient to reach a conclusion either way. Proponents of the theory read this as caution rather than rejection, given how late and how compromised the physical evidence trail was by 1999–2005 (Bhagwanji had died in 1985, and much material was gathered only after his death, by devotees, without chain-of-custody rigor an inquiry would want). Skeptics read the same silence as the Commission finding the identification simply not credible enough to affirm.

Now why it becomes important to debunk the plane crash theory, which the political system of India will never do. No government in their sane mind would try to reignite the already dead ghost, buried safely within the heaps of ashes, neither by acknowledging and bringing back the ashes nor by accepting Mukherjee commission report. Governments excel in maintaining status quo and Netaji issue can be potential volcano for the domestic and international affairs. No government would risk it. They will try to suppress and if possible only classify what can be classified without endangering their cause. The public must understand this. Netaji issue will not come out during peace time, however hard you may try, period.

Netaji issue will only come out in the forefront when the time for truth to come out is ripe, when the nation as a whole wil remember its worthy legacy and will try hard to know the truth. That time is possibly not far. The second post on this topic will reveal why the plane crash theory will be debunked first and what overwhelming evidence proves that Netaji did not die in any plane crash.