Bose Died in 1945. Get Used to It.
Written by Dr. Seshadri Kumar, 04
June, 2016
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© Dr. Seshadri Kumar. All Rights
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*********************************
The recent
violence in the town of Mathura in Uttar Pradesh, where a cult has stockpiled
arms and encroached on 268 acres of public land, provoking an armed
confrontation with the UP police that has resulted in the deaths of 24 people, is
the latest consequence of a persistent myth that has carried on for 71 years:
that Netaji Subhas
Chandra Bose, the late Indian nationalist leader, did not die in a plane
crash in 1945. The founder of the cult that is responsible for the trouble in
Mathura was a fraudster called Jai Gurudev, who claimed to be Netaji Bose. His
successor, after Jai Gurudev’s death in 2012, claims that Bose is not dead and
will make an appearance soon.
What I wish to show
here is that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose died
in 1945, even if stories of his survival are true.
***
Who Was Bose?
Netaji Subhas Chandra
Bose was one of the most dynamic leaders to come out of Bengal. He was born in
1902 and attended Presidency College in Calcutta (as Kolkata was then known),
and was expelled from the college because he assaulted a
Professor in the college who disparaged India and Indians in his comments.
Bose subsequently
completed his graduation from another college in Calcutta, the Scottish Church College.
Subsequent to this, he studied for the Indian Civil Service, was placed fourth
in the examination and was selected for the British Indian Civil Service in
1920, but quickly resigned from it as he was unhappy serving an “alien”
government.
He decided to go into
politics and joined the Indian National Congress, the main party agitating for
Indian freedom, in 1921. He advocated aggressive nationalism in Calcutta under
the mentorship of Chittaranjan Das and became mayor of Calcutta in 1924. In
1925, the British arrested him for his anti-national activities and he was sent
to jail in Mandalay.
After his release in
1927, he worked closely with leading Congress leaders and became general
secretary of the party. He was again arrested by the British, and when he came
out of prison he became mayor of Calcutta in 1930.
In the 1930s Bose
visited Europe, meeting Mussolini in Italy. He wrote a book titled “The Indian
Struggle,” which talked about the struggle for Indian freedom during the period
1921-34. The British banned the book.
By the time of his
return to India, he was a very famous national leader in the struggle for
Indian independence. This became obvious when he was elected the President of
the Indian National Congress in 1938. However, in sharp contrast to the moral
leader of the Congress, Mohandas Gandhi (a.k.a. Gandhiji or Mahatma Gandhi),
who advocated a nonviolent struggle for freedom against the British, Bose
argued for a violent freedom struggle. This caused deep division in the
Congress and, despite winning the election for President of the Congress again
in 1939, handily defeating Gandhi’s nominee for the post, Pattabhi Sitaramayya,
Bose had to resign as President as Gandhi and other Congressmen refused to
cooperate with him.
By this time war clouds
were looming over Europe. When war did break out, the British included India in
their war against Hitler. Bose protested against this, calling for a mass civil
disobedience against the British. Gandhi refused to agree with Bose, and so
Bose organized mass protests in Calcutta demanding the destruction of the
British monument to the “Black Hole of
Calcutta,” a monument to commemorate an event where 146 British prisoners
of war died through suffocation due to being confined in a small closed place
(a dungeon) by the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah, in 1756. For this
effrontery, the British jailed Bose again, but released him after 7 days of a
hunger strike. He was released from jail but kept under house arrest.
Bose made a daring
escape from house arrest, right out of a movie, and escaped to Afghanistan,
then the Soviet Union, and finally to Germany to meet the Nazis for help to
India in the freedom struggle. The details of this escape itself could be the
basis of a movie. Subhas Bose was a man of great courage, daring, and
ingenuity.
The Nazis helped Bose
establish a radio station for the Azad Hind Radio, through which Bose made speeches
propagating armed struggle for the benefit of Indians living in Europe. The
Nazis helped him found the Indian Legion, an armed unit comprised of Indian
soldiers attached to the Wehrmacht. Many of these soldiers were later captured
in North Africa by the British.
In 1942, Bose met
Hitler and realized that Hitler’s priorities were elsewhere and that he could
not help Bose militarily, especially now that Asia was under the Japanese
sphere of influence. So, in 1943, Bose left Germany on a submarine, transferred
to a Japanese submarine off the coast of Madagascar, and travelled onward to
the Japanese Empire.
In Singapore, Bose
took over the Indian National Army (INA), an organization that the Japanese had
conceived to help them eventually overthrow the British in India, that was
comprised of captured British Indian soldiers. Bose organized the Azad Hind
Government, which was recognized by the Axis powers and their satellites –
Germany, Japan, Italy, Croatia, a Japanese puppet regime in Nanjing, a puppet
regime in Burma, Manchukuo (Japanese-controlled Manchuria), and
Japanese-controlled Philippines.
Bose fought along with
the Japanese in Burma and in north-east India. The British defeated the Japanese
and the INA troops and Bose retreated to Singapore. When Japan surrendered in
August 1945 after the Americans dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, Bose knew he
needed to leave Japanese territory. He left Singapore for Saigon, and later
from Saigon he went to Taihoku, Taiwan. From Taihoku, he boarded a plane
destined for Dairen, Manchuria, intending to surrender to the Soviets, but the
plane crash-landed shortly after take-off and caught fire. Bose died later of
third-degree burns. He was cremated and his ashes are interred in the Renkoji
Buddhist Temple in Tokyo.
There ends the
official version of the life and death of Subhas Bose.
Controversies
Regarding Bose’s Death
In spite of the
testimony of eyewitnesses and several inquiry commissions, a lot of people,
especially Bengalis, believe Bose did not die in that plane crash in 1945. It
did not help things that there were no photographs of Bose’s dead body; but in
the chaos of war, it is hard for people to think of taking photos. The Japanese
had lost the war and had much bigger things to worry about than taking photos
of a dead Indian leader.
Here
is a partial list of the rumours and developments concerning the “conspiracy
theories” regarding Bose’s survival:
1.
An
organization called the Subhasbadi Janata propagated a story that the sadhu
(saint) of an ashram in Shaulmari, North Bengal, was actually Bose in disguise;
that now, with India having achieved freedom, he was now engaged in meditation
to “free the world.” These rumours continued in spite of the fact that the
sadhu himself denied he was Bose.
2.
Bose was rumoured
to be living voluntarily either in China or in the Soviet Union.
3.
Bose
attended Jawaharlal Nehru’s funeral in 1964.
4.
Khrushchev
told Nehru that if Nehru wished, Khrushchev could produce him within 45 days.
5.
The Soviets
were blackmailing Nehru and Indira Gandhi by telling them that they had Bose in
prison and would release him unless Nehru and/or Indira acceded to the wishes
of the Soviets.
6.
Nehru knew
Bose was in a Soviet prison, and ensured that the Soviets did not release him.
7.
Another
sadhu, a certain Gumnami baba of Faizabad, near Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, was
said to be Bose living secretly.
8.
Bose was
living as a sadhu in the Naga hills in Assam.
9.
He was
living in China and part of the Chinese army.
10.
Several
official enquiries were carried out. The first was the Figgess report, which
was performed in 1946 and concluded in no uncertain terms that Bose had died in
the Taihoku crash.
11.
The Shah
Nawaz committee, headed by Shah Nawaz Khan, a general in Bose’s INA, concluded
in 1956 by majority that Bose had died in the Taihoku crash. However, one of
the three main committee members, Suresh Chandra Bose, Subhas’ brother, wrote a
dissenting note accusing Nehru of orchestrating a cover-up. Among the many
reasons for his dissent was the incredulous assumption that “Bose could not
have died before India achieved independence. Therefore, he must not have died
in the 1945 crash.”
12.
That Bose
died in Taihoku in 1945 was also concluded by another commission, the Justice
Khosla commission, in 1970.
13.
The
Justice KM Mukherjee committee of 1999-2005 concluded that Bose had not died in the plane crash, and that
the ashes in the Renkoji temple in Japan were that of a Japanese soldier.
But Bose Died
in 1945 … And Here’s Why
Most people who claim
that Bose did not die in the Taihoku crash are people who claim to love Netaji.
They want to show their love and support for Netaji by claiming he was alive
and that the news of his death was a fabrication by Nehru or the Congress, for
whom his return to India would have been problematic as he would have been a
highly charismatic and an immensely popular political competitor. When asked
about why Netaji would be afraid to come back to India, they answer that if he
came back to India, the British would try to have him executed as an enemy of
the state.
But all of these
people are doing a disservice to the memory of Bose.
While the fear of
being treated as an enemy of the state may have been true until 1947, it is
certainly not a good argument in an independent India. Even in British
India, the British found that they could not carry out the sentence on the key
accused in the INA trials in 1946 – they had to commute the sentences. The INA
under-trials were defended by people like Nehru himself. If Bose’s generals
themselves were so popular that the British could not touch them, how untouchable
would Bose himself have been, had he returned to India?
Even if the unfair
allegations against people like Nehru (that they did not want Bose back in
India) were allowed, is it even conceivable that Nehru or anyone else would
dare to harm Bose, were he to come out in the open, say in 1948?
People who try to say
that Bose was living the life of a sadhu in anonymity somewhere in India are
insulting the great man’s memory. Look at the career graph of Bose that I have
presented in brief. This is a man who could never sit quiet, who was not afraid
of anybody. Here is a man who engineered a brilliant escape from house arrest
that took him to Afghanistan and Russia on his way to Germany. This is a man
who was never afraid of being jailed by the British, who had served several
jail sentences, and yet kept challenging the powers-that-be. Do you really
think he would be afraid to come out in the open just because the British might
accuse him of treason, or because he was afraid for his life in a Congress-ruled
India? Such explanations diminish his greatness and insult his memory.
Could a man who had
been as active as Bose had been all his life live the remainder of his life in quiet
anonymity as a sadhu in some village in North India? Bose was a man of the
world, and his interest in public life was not limited to India achieving
independence. He wanted to see India come out of its poverty, and believed in a
socialist future similar to the Soviet Union as the way forward for India. There
is no way he would have been sitting still in an ashram simply because India
had achieved independence from the British. Had he been alive and come back to
India in 1948, Bengal would have become communist, not in 1977, but in 1950. It
is staggering that suggestions about Bose’s post-1945 life such as being a
recluse are suggested or welcomed by members of Bose’s family. They are great
insults to a life lived in the most dynamic way possible. More than any other
leader of India’s independence movement, Bose was extremely impatient for
change, and one cannot imagine a man of his nature ever sitting idle in an
ashram for 30 or 40 years. To suggest that he would be afraid of a Nehru or any
other Congress leader, when he had no fear of the British and its jails, and when
he was not afraid of dying on the battlefield fighting the British army, is
again a serious insult to his memory. Again, I cannot believe close family
members advocate or admit such insulting possibilities. Essentially, suggesting
that Bose lived in hiding in India after 1947 is tantamount to calling him a
coward, and it is astonishing to hear self-styled admirers of Bose advocating
this theory.
Bose would also never
have lived secretly in China or the Soviet Union for years of his own volition.
If he were free, he would definitely have returned to public life in India. The
only way he could have been living in the Soviet Union after 1945 was if the
Soviets had imprisoned him. But Stalin lived until 1953, and anyone who has
studied Stalin carefully would know how paranoid a man he was, and that he
would never keep such dangerous people as Bose in his captivity. The same is
true of Mao, who took power in China in 1949. If Bose had ever been in
captivity in the Soviet Union, my guess is that he would have been executed
instantly in 1945 as having been a Japanese collaborator. Given that the reason
the Indian government is giving in not releasing their archives on Bose is that
such a release “might hurt relations with friendly nations,” my guess is that this
is the most likely possibility regarding what happened to Bose in 1945. It should
also be pointed out that, had the Soviets actually executed Bose in 1945, they
would never had discussed this with Nehru or the Congress, because India was
still a British colony and Nehru was not yet PM of India. Most likely they
would have discussed this with the British, who at that point of time would not
have been in the least averse to Bose being executed quietly, never to be heard
from again.
There is still the remote
possibility that Bose underwent a change in personality and became a coward who
lived the rest of his life in anonymity as the Gumnami baba in Uttar Pradesh
(or other baba theories). If that is the case, then such a person is irrelevant
to India. The Bose we love and respect, the person who had the guts to militarily
defy the mighty British Empire, died in 1945. The person who may have survived
is a coward who is not fit to keep his old name, and it is meet that he lived
the rest of his life as an unknown sadhu.
The Bose we knew died in 1945. One way or the
other.
