The file from the 1970s reveals a correspondence between the home ministry, intelligence bureau and external affairs ministry on a proposal that Bose’s ashes be brought back.
The recently declassfied files about Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose have revealed quite a bit about the popular leader. One file reveals why the Indian government did not wanted to bring back Netajai’s ashes from the Tokyo.
The file from the 1970s reveals a correspondence between the Home Ministry, the Intelligence Bureau and the External Affairs Ministry about a proposal that Bose’s ashes be brought back to India. The government was ‘not included to favour’ bringing back the ashes ‘due to possible adverse reactions from members of Netaji’s family, as well as certain sections of the public, who refused to believe in his death in the plane crash in August, 1945’.
The suggestion about ‘adverse reactions’ was made by NN Jha, Joint Secretary in the External Affairs Ministry’s North and East Asia department in 1976. TV Tajeswar, Joint Director of the IB, also advised his colleagues that the ashes shouldn’t be brought back because they could create complications. Neither Netaji’s kin nor Netaji’s party the Forward Bloc, were willing to recognise the ashes and said that the government would be accused of ‘foisting a false story upon the people of West Bengal and India, taking advantage of Emergency, and this may well figure as an important plant of propaganda if and when the elections are announced’.
The 100 files comprise over 16,600 pages of historic documents, ranging from those of the British Raj to as late as 2013, an official said after the ceremony at the National Archives of India (NAI) in Delhi where the Prime Minister declassified the secret papers on Saturday.
Also present at the ceremony were members of the Bose family and Union Ministers Mahesh Sharma and Babul Supriyo when the files were opened for public viewing.
In addition to the 100 files, the NAI plans to release digital copies of a set of 25 declassified files on Bose in the public domain every month. NAI also opened a dedicated website to store all the declassified files related to Bose. Modi and his ministerial colleagues went around glancing at the declassified files, spending over half an hour at the National Archives. He also spoke to the members of the Bose family.
The move came after Modi met the family members of Netaji in October last year and announced that the government would declassify the files relating to the leader whose disappearance 70 years ago remains a mystery. While two commissions of inquiry had concluded that Netaji had died in a plane crash in Taipei on August 18, 1945, a third probe panel, headed by Justice MK Mukherjee, had contested it and suggested that Bose was alive after that. The controversy has also split members of the Bose family.
The first lot of 33 files were declassified by the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) and handed over to the NAI on December 4, 2015.
With inputs from agencies
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