NETAJI REVISITED ... 7 (REFUGE IN RUSSIA?)

Dummies of Netaji perhaps abounded post his disappearance on 18 August, 1945 and must not be confused with the iconic leader. There seems to have been a huge conspiracy hatched to hush up his final fate wherever it may have been (Russia?) but truth-seekers must not be misled by such obvious falsities. Netaji was too virile a personality to hide behind the mendicant monk's cloak and while away time in a bleeding motherland doing nothing to redress the situation. It is highly improbable that he did so for it was uncharacteristic of him. Such a valorous one, who had once circuited half the globe in his bid to secure his motherland freedom from the monstrous British imperial power, could not be expected to idle away time, given his rebellious dynamic nature, meditating on transcendental principles, abstractions far removed from the concrete world of phenomenal reality. He had throughout his life been an ardent devotee of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda and had even contemplated in youth renouncing the worldly life. But the Abbot of the Belur monastery founded by Swami Vivekananda, Swami Brahmananda by name, had dissuaded him from choosing the path of monasticism as his tendencies lay in the direction of national service. This put paid to his extreme spiritual proclivities and Subhas Chandra directed his youthful energy and aspiration towards the struggle for securing political freedom for his much-molested motherland.

His became a burning zeal, a fire that blazed away day in and day out, a searing passion that would leave him neither rest nor respite till his goal was reached, the complete independence of India. He, along with Jawaharlal Nehru, blossomed into the radical left-wingers within the Congress, much to the discomfiture of the mild Mahatma who had determined in his own flawed manner that freedom was to be honourably obtained from the oppressive British by moral persuasion of the perpetrator of perfidy leading to conquest of his heart and his automatic withdrawal form the shores of India. Gandhi, mild and passive as he temperamentally was, could not contemplate violence as a legitimate means of fighting for freedom and was naive enough to assume that all of humanity was fundamentally susceptible to the force of feeble spirituality thrust upon them by someone as unformed spiritually as he. That Subhas was of a sterner mettle made was small comfort for Gandhi and he spared no means to bring him into the mainstream of his debilitating politics but failed miserably to achieve his desired end. Subhas remained a radical, true to his leonine moral fibre and collided in his aspirations for national freedom eventually with the titular Mahatma, not in intent or in intended end but in the modus operandi thereof. Tripuri witnessed the epic clash in 1939 as the Mahatma sidelined the blossoming leader of the land to perfidiously hold on to power, forcing him finally into exile from where he staged his comeback into national and international reckoning and waged his war against British imperialism, striking its death-knell and altering the course of world history for good. India became free under the impact as the national leader ('Deshanayak' in Tagore's epithet) was transformed into Netaji (the leader) who dealt terrible death-blows to the British Raj by mounting a fierce armed offensive against it in the latter phase of the Second World War.

And then he simply disappeared. A reported air-crash at Taihoku on 18 August, 1945, was all that surfaced from the vanishing act of Netaji as he went underground never to appear before his countrymen again. Subsequent enquiry conducted by the Justice Manoj Mukherjee Commission has categorically debunked the theory of the air-crash and has left a big note of interrogation regarding the whole disappearance issue but, owing to 'lack of clinching evidence', has not been able to establish with any degree of certitude the final fate of the hero.

Justice Mukherjee's personal predilection for Netaji being the Faizabad monk living incognito notwithstanding, serious students of the subject cannot subscribe to such facile presumptions in the absence of, as has already been stated, definitive proof, 'clinching evidence'. The Russian archives may provide the clinching clue towards resolution of the whole episode but it remains to be seen if the Modi Government has the political will to press forth the issue and come to conclusions about independent India's most enduring mystery. Till then wild assertions will abound in the public domain and each 'researcher' will translate his particular fancy into dubious deliberation bordering on babble. Lest we fall into such incongruity, let us hold our guard against such pernicious proclivities and listen to those that have done original research on the subject, seeking facts from primary archival sources and subjecting them to the rigour of proper scientific scrutiny which is the historian's mode of sifting fact from fiction.

Dr. Purabi Roy is the outstanding champion of this cause of unearthing the leads of the Netaji Disappearance Case from Russian archives and has been tirelessly trudging on since 1990 with her labour of love amidst a sea of difficulty posed by red tape at the behest of a Central Government ever intent on suppression of classified information on Netaji. The reasons for such secrecy are not clear although conjectures do their regular rounds and the Congress Party is squarely held guilty for now proven misdemeanours regarding the Netaji Files including destruction of some key files by Indira Gandhi's government, snooping on the Bose family members, mischievously holding on to the air-crash theory of Netaji's unconfirmed demise despite supposed governmental knowledge of its invalidity and, above all, refusing to lay open all information regarding Netaji before the people of this country. Dr. Roy did seminal research work of fact-finding about Netaji in the Russian archives in the 1990s and with the assistance of her friend, Alexander Kolesnikov, a retired Warsaw Pact Major General, was instrumental in unearthing a document that doubtlessly proved the existence of Netaji within the borders of the then Soviet Union as late as October 1946, fourteen months after his reported demise in the air-crash at Taihoku. In this document Stalin, Molotov, Vischenskii and Malik are seen deliberating what they ought to do with Chandra Bose (Netaji) who is within the Soviet Union.

Back in the 1990 s, barely years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the open spaces provided by Gorbachev's glasnost, the Russian archives were free zones for research scholars and Dr. Purabi Roy took fullest advantage of her access to Russian files in dozens of archives. It was during this painstaking search for light on Netajis' whereabouts in Russia as she suspected from Netaji's wartime correspondence with Stalin's office that she and Kolesnikov stumbled upon the formidable file attesting to his survival of the reported air-crash which was a subterfuge after all to facilitate his escape into the then Soviet Union. Dr. Roy's subsequent statement in the press created a sensation and till date remains for many the only credible evidence of Netaji's presence in the Soviet Union despite Kolesnikov's subsequent failure to depose before the Mukherjee Commission in Moscow to corroborate officially the point. On the eve of the deposition Kolesnikov disappeared to give an ironic twist to the whole episode. Much later it was learnt that for some mysterious reason the Russian Government had deputed him that very evening to be the envoy in Ankara. The Mukherjee Commission's Russian quest for truth was thus foiled by the forces that be which further raises suspicion about Netaji's possible execution in the Soviet Union for whatever reason there may have been.

But all this is pure conjecture in the absence of more definitive proof. Scholars are being exhorted to take up this most fascinating of studies and help resolve this longstanding mystery with which is entwined India's past struggle, present predicament and future aspiration. Let Netaji who had been the architect of our nation's independence seek deliverance from the worm-eaten pages of ancient files unto the sunshine of his countrymen's consciousness at last. Jai Hind!