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Therefore, I earnestly request Tokyo to act as “go-between” and let me approach Soviet Russia. I have perfect confidence in my success in persuading Russia to help our Independence movement and at the same time I am sure I can do something to improve relations between Japan and Russia.’
Among the Japanese on the flight was Lieutenant General Tsunamasa Shidei, Vice-Chief of the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria.
By all accounts the bomber was overloaded and later in the evening it stopped at a place called Tourane in Vietnam.
Even though he had third degree burns, Bose was remarkably clear in his mind and told Rahman to continue the fight for India’s freedom. The next day he was cremated. Two days later his ashes were carried to Tokyo in an urn by the Japanese and handed over to the representative of the Indian Independence League in that city. After a memorial service, the urn was handed over to the Buddhist Renkoji Temple in Tokyo in mid-September.
Anuj Dhar—who has researched in depth on the circumstances of Bose’s disappearance—it is now known that no plane crash took place at Taihoku airport during that period.
The circumstances of the surrender and what happened to Netaji in the immediate aftermath can only be recreated with the limited information available in the public domain. Netaji’s flight reached Dairen in the afternoon of a particular day in August 1945. After disembarking, Subhas Bose ate a modest meal of a banana and some
Clement Attlee, who had taken over as Great Britain’s prime minister after Winston Churchill lost to the Labour Party in the 1945 general elections in the United Kingdom. The letter said, ‘Dear Mr Attlee: I understand from a most reliable source that Subhas Chandra Bose, your war criminal, has been allowed to enter Russian territory by Stalin. This is clear treachery and betrayal of faith by the Russians, as they were allies of the British-Americans. Please take care and do what you consider proper and fit.’ This damning piece of evidence was not acknowledged by the Khosla Commission, which
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One thing is certain. The Soviets would have wanted to keep Netaji incarcerated in secrecy and not allow other Allied powers to know that they held him. After all, in the world of international diplomacy, information is power and is often shared only on a need to know basis.
At the same time, the Nehru regime also tried to foster close relations with the Soviet Union. This may have to do with the United States’ attempts to bring Pakistan under its sphere of influence. Moreover, after Nehru tried and failed to receive food aid during his visit to the United States, a request was made to the Soviet Union. The latter obliged.
Alexander Kolesnikov, a former Major-General of the Warsaw Pact countries, who accessed the Russian military archives in Paddolsk (40 km outside Moscow) in October 1996 found papers which suggested that in October 1946 Stalin and his men were discussing how to deal with Bose.
Roy accessed a 1946 report of a Soviet secret agent writing from Bombay, ‘It is not possible to work with Nehru and Gandhi. We have to use Subhas Bose.’ At the very least, this proves that Bose was alive in 1946.
Satya Narayan Sinha, who had served as an aide to Nehru and excelled in foreign languages, had deposed before the Khosla Commission in October 1970 that a former NKVD agent (NKVD was the precursor to the KGB) named Kuzlov had told him that Netaji was a prisoner in Cell Number 45 of Yakutsk Prison in Siberia. Kuzlov, suspected of being a Trotskyite, had been jailed in Yakutsk by the Stalin regime. He was later rehabilitated and
On hearing this, Sinha met Nehru on 13 April 1950 and apprised him of what he had learnt. Sinha told the Khosla Commission that Nehru had not shown much interest but said, ‘I will check up the matter, but I think this is American propaganda.’ Sinha said that he again took up the matter with Nehru on 16 January 1951 on the sidelines
He had also added that Netaji went by the name Khilsai Malang there. However there is a little discrepancy in this part of the testimony because Abani Mukherjee was executed in a Stalinist purge in October 1937. Since Netaji was in the Soviet Union only after August 1945 he could not have encountered Abani Mukherjee.
Another witness had deposed that Radhakrishnan had actually met Subhas Chandra Bose in Moscow in 1948, visiting the Soviet capital in a non-official capacity, as a participant in a philosophy conference.
Goswami also told the Khosla Commission, rather dramatically, ‘if Dr Radhakrishnan denies that he told me all this I will commit suicide.’ Goswami also said (but did not reveal how he knew) that Vijayalakshmi Pandit had also seen Netaji in Moscow when she was posted there as India’s ambassador. On her return to New Delhi, at a meeting in the Constitution Club, Pandit announced that she had some important information which if revealed would electrify the whole country. At this stage, her brother, Prime Minister Nehru,
Nehru arrived in Moscow in June 1955 on a state visit which was followed in November and December that year with return visits by Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Khrushchev who was the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. The Soviet Union also began to endorse India’s policy of Panchsheel—five principles of peaceful
coexistence and non-alignment. This implies that even if Netaji still stood a remote chance of receiving justice at the time of Stalin’s passing, in the new era of Indo–Soviet bonhomie he was at best forgotten.
Stalin probably never received any request from the India’s post-Independence leaders to set Netaji free, but what did Stalin have against him that impelled him to keep the Indian leader in jail? There are no easy answers what with documents from the archives of the erstwhile Soviet Union still not fully declassified. The answer may lie in the nature of the Stalinist
state when huge deposits of gold and platinum
But Siberia was remote, 6,000 km from Moscow and had no connectivity. Roads were required and mining stations had to be set up. Political dissidents from states absorbed into the the Soviet Union (like Ukraine) who resisted communist rule, common criminals and others were forcibly conscripted. At its peak between 1940 and 1950, about 80,000 to 200,000 labourers worked in the gulags. The conditions of work were harsh and many died due to exhaustion and sicknesses. Others were shot dead for not working hard enough.
estimated half a million perished in the gulags during this period. Prisoners who died while working were buried under the roads that were then being built. For this reason, the Kolyma Highway that leads out of Yakutsk towards the west en route to Moscow, gained notoriety as Siberia’s ‘Road of Bones’.
Virendra Nath Chattopadhaya, the younger brother of Sarojini Naidu, who had been attracted by the movement also lost their lives in Stalin’s
To use an analogy from Indian prison conditions, Netaji’s position was like that of an extremely poor man, languishing in jail without a trial for years together without any succour. It was as if in an insensitive jail system his case file had been lost and he had no lawyer or well-wisher outside to ring the bell of justice.
Why did others who could have saved Netaji not move to bail him out of the situation that he was in? This would include his own family and others in India including those from his native Bengal.
Significantly, when news first broke about the air crash, Mahatma Gandhi sent a telling telegram to the eldest among the Bose brothers, Satish Chandra, ‘don’t perform shradh (post-death ceremonies).’ Even the Mahatma had his doubts about Netaji’s
again a few days later. He notes in his memoirs how his ‘mind was made up’ after the meeting. Bose writes, ‘I felt that I had found a leader and I meant to follow him.’ Bose began to work with Das, effectively kick-starting his own political career.
The Muslims hailed Das even as the pact was cleared by the Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee (BPCC) at its meeting on 18 December 1923. Das’ popularity was at its zenith and he became the uncrowned king of Bengal.
A similar proposal was passed by the Corporation. The resolution appreciated Saha’s courage and spirit of sacrifice although it condemned the act of killing. Needless to add, this brought Bose into focus and the British decided that he was too dangerous a man to be allowed to continue with his political activities.
Bose also noted that Gandhi had failed because the ‘false unity of interests that are inherently opposed is not a source of strength but a source of weakness in political warfare.’ This means that different interest groups could align together in name but in reality would work at cross purposes and the purpose of coming together would be lost.
This included the inordinate belief in fate and the supernatural and indifference to modern scientific development.
On the way back he disembarked at Naples onwards to Rome where he met the Italian leader Benito Mussolini in January 1935. In 1936, on the invitation of Irish president Éamon de Valera,
Things could not have been better—a popular party with a popular president. Setting the tone, Bose in his presidential address enthusiastically said, ‘the objective of the Congress is an independent and United India where no class and group or majority or minority may exploit one another to its own advantage and where all the elements in the nation may cooperate together for the common good and the advancement of the people of India.’
Bose foresaw that the British would try to divide the country before leaving. He pointed out that the main feature of British imperialist policy in India was a policy of ‘divide and rule’ that set one community against another. He said, ‘It is a well-known truism that every empire is based on a policy of divide and rule. But I doubt if any empire in the world has practiced this policy so skilfully, systematically and ruthlessly as Great Britain.
One of the most novel ideas he espoused was to promote a hybrid version of Hindi and Urdu as the national language of India.
This was a golden opportunity to put pressure on the British as Subhas Bose had earlier pointed out.
On 29 November 1940, after writing this letter, Bose embarked on the hunger strike.
He writes of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda’s influence, and their teaching that there could be no realization, without renunciation.
The next morning—23 January—on Subhas’ birthday they began the long trek to the Afghan border.
From Moscow he flew into Berlin. The date was 2 April 1941.
The German leadership was impressed by the confidence and resolution shown by Bose, which prompted them to allow him into Berlin in the first place.
this would be taken with some scepticism by the Indians. This was especially so because Indian leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were critical of the Nazi regime.
The meeting took place on 29 May 1942 at the Reich Chancellery.
At the end of the meeting a slightly miffed Bose (on wrongly interpreting a statement by Hitler) told his interpreter Adam von Trot to tell the Führer, ‘Your Excellency, I have been in politics all my life and I do not need any advice from anyone.’
The salutation ‘Jai Hind’, so commonly used in India now,
especially in the modern Indian Armed Forces has its origin in the Indian Legion. It is the shortened version of ‘Jai Hindustan Ki’ which was framed by Netaji’s secretary Abid Hasan Safrani as the Legion’s battle cry. It was Bose who shortened it to Jai Hind.
But the idea of flying out the Indian leader was finally given up upon Hitler’s orders who said that the Indian leader was too important a person to allow his life to be risked in such a manner. There were chances that his aircraft would be shot down by the Allied Forces.
In fact, more than Mountbatten, Nehru was closer to the Viceroy’s wife Edwina, and by all accounts had an affair with her.
In an interview to Indian journalist Karan Thapar in July 2007 in the programme Devils’ Advocate on the CNN–IBN television channel, Lady Pamela Hicks, the younger daughter of the Mountbattens admitted that her father did use his wife’s influence over Nehru on tricky matters of state.
acceptable, used this proximity to influence the Partition of India and the future of Subhas Chandra Bose (as would best serve the British interests).
