When Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Berlin on Monday, freedom fighter Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s grandnephew Surya Kumar Bose requested him to declassify files relating to his life and also address the prejudicial treatment accorded to his contributions to the Indian freedom struggle. When the BJP was in the Opposition it had attacked the UPA for not making the Bose files public.
However, after assuming power, the BJP too refused to make the files pertaining to Netaji Bose accessible when an RTI request was placed for them. Now, with the government deciding to review the Official Secrets Act, in the context of the Bose files, the demand to declassify relevant documents has risen again.
Anuj Dhar, author of India's Biggest Cover-up , whose research had exposed the controversial charges of Jawaharlal Nehru snooping on Bose, told The Hindu that the newly-appointed committee is only a tactic to buy time before the issue dies down. “If the government has nothing to hide, then they should simply open up the files for scrutiny.”
Speaking to The Hindu over the phone from Hamburg, Surya Kumar Bose said, “The Prime Minister was honest about the need to declassify files relating to Subhash Chandra Bose’s life in the light of recent revelations about Jawaharlal Nehru snooping in over his family members, including that of my father Amiya Kumar Bose. If we don’t declassify secret documents ourselves, how can we demand it of other countries, Mr. Modi told me during our discussion.”
He added that back in November 1976, when he and his father Amiya Kumar Bose met Lord Mountbatten, the last Governor General of India during the British era, he had confessed that the reason the British left India was its fear of the armed rebellion forged by the Indian National Army under Netaji’s leadership. “We need to challenge the propagation of historical falsehood by the Congress since Independence that it was ahimsa that won us our freedom,” he said.
“The British imperial force cannot be negotiated with to leave,” observed Chandra Kumar Bose, the Kolkata-based grandnephew of Netaji. “There are 64 classified documents with the West Bengal government and 45 files in the PMO. Only if these are opened up the truth will emerge,” he said. “Even my sister Madhuri Bose in London is writing to the U.K. government to reveal information on Netaji under the Freedom of Information Act,” he told The Hindu .
Major General (Retd.) Gagandeep Bakshi, an Indian war veteran, cited author Ranjan Bora’s research paper ‘Subhash Bose, the INA and the War of India’s Liberation’, published in the Journal of Historical Review in 1982, in which he quotes the former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee telling Justice P.B. Chakravarthi, the first Governor of West Bengal, in 1948 that it was Subhash Bose and his INA, and not the Gandhi-led non-violent struggle that had influenced the British decision to leave India. This quote from Attlee has also been cited by Co-Convenor, BJP, National IT Cell, Vinit Geonka in his Facebook page and elsewhere.
Historian Mridula Mukherjee, co-author of India’s Struggle for Independence (1988) and former Director, Nehru Memorial and Museum Library, dismissed the charges against Nehru and that of prejudicial treatment toward Bose as political propaganda. “To recognise the contribution of any one leader, it is not necessary to put down anyone else’s,” she said.
She said that ever since the BJP came to power, there have been efforts to politically appropriate historical icons. “Earlier it was Nehru vs. Patel, now it is Nehru vs. Netaji. But the truth is despite their differences, leaders like Nehru and Netaji were mature and never squabbled, like some are doing over them now,” she said.
Major General Sheonan Singh, a nephew of freedom fighter Bhagat Singh, doubted if the surveillance was politically motivated. “Our family too was under surveillance for a very long time. These were practices started by the British and our police continued these practices for a very long time,” he told The Hindu .
