THIS WAS THE DAY

THIS WAS THE DAY

On this day we lost our beloved leader, never to see him again. He lives in our aspirations, in our dreams and in our fondest hopes that he will one day be born again to guide his beloved motherland to her glorious destiny, following the footprints of his preceptor, Swami Vivekananda, who had never been there to bless this blessed spiritual child of his but had impregnated his being with the fire of his love for his country. INDIA, these five letters that form the word fabric of the motherland, when the Swami uttered, Sister Christine has recorded, exhibited a world of emotions and ideals that became instantly living in its resonance in all who heard. And when Miss Josephine MacLeod had asked Swamiji what she could do by way of service to him, the response was instant, "Love India."

This love for the motherland, of one who eternally belonged to the highest realm of the undifferentiated and had but temporarily descended to the terrestrial plane at the magic touch of the Master, was spiritually transmitted into many a recipient who had come into Swamiji's earthly orbit, and even post-mortem was inspired into many others among whom the subject of our discussion was a prime recipient.

He was in his final month of gestation when Swamiji landed in mainland India in December 1896 and by the time Swamiji was addressing the people of Calcutta in February, 1897, he was barely a month old, seeing the light of this world with his infant eyes. He was five years and a half and Swamiji had taken to his final flight to his eternal abode.

The boy grew up in Cuttack in Orissa and stumbled upon the works of Swamiji at the age of fifteen. The next few months were spent devouring the books as a series of galvanic shocks went through him, transforming him forever. The mendicant monk's life he took to with a dear boyhood friend, Hemanta Kumar Sarkar, and after months of travel through the Himalayan sites of pilgrimage, they landed in Varanasi and at the feet of Swami Brahmananda, the Abbot of Belur Math, then residing in the ancient city. The boy, afire with a Vivekananda within, sought sannyas (monasticism) but the seer blessed him and, with prophetic words about his patriotic mission in life, sent him back home to pursue his now altered career track.

The spirit to renounce never left him, though, but he now launched into his newly found mission to serve his country along the altered line. While dazzling in academic studies and supplementing them with social service rendered unto the poor and the needy, the dying and the destitute, just as his spiritual mentor at a distance had directed him in his recorded messages in his Complete Works, the boy blossomed into youth, a fiery idealist and an uncompromising patriot.

He stood second in his school-leaving Matriculation Examinations in the whole of the Bengal Presidency among 10,000 candidates, placed second in the University examinations again and after qualifying for the Indian Civil Service in England where he placed fourth in the examination, he rejected his would be appointment on grounds of patriotic love. Thereafter, he underwent political discipleship under Chittaranjan Das and joined the Congress, underwent incarceration eleven times, deportation and banishment from India when he met world leaders like Eamon de Valera and savants like Romain Rolland before assuming the highest role of service within the Congress as President (Rashtrapati) in 1938 at Haripura when he charted out a radically new programme of active resistance for the Congress which brought him into open conflict with the Mahatma of moderate methods. Disagreement with the country's political patriarch led to his eventual expulsion from the Congress after a second Presidential term, ruined by rancour and plain perfidy practised to perfection by the wily Mahatma and his conspiring cronies.

The stage was now set for the Grand Departure.

Subhas Chandra Bose had been unceremoniously made to resign from his office of Congress President, from all executive offices within the Congress for three years and finally expelled from the Congress itself and that, too, in his very hometown of Calcutta where when the public became enraged at the injustice and the insult, the patriot perennial sought his best offices with the mob to pacify their feelings and provided safe passage for his Congress colleagues who had just dealt him the deathblow.

But Bose was not one to sit idle. He had already made arrangements and within three days of his expulsion had floated his own party, the All India Forward Bloc, composed of all progressive and leftist elements within the Congress, those who had voted him to a second Presidential term in 1939, defeating Gandhi's nominee, Pattabhi Sitaramayya. Now Bose made a hurricane tour of India to galvanise public opinion in favour of his radical programme for liberation.

Europe was at war since 3 September, 1939 and the international situation was ripe for India to assert her claims to freedom. But Gandhi would not have freedom for his motherland at the expense of Britain's ruin and refused to launch a massive civil disobedience movement demanding independence within six months as Bose had been urging him to do. Consequently, Bose, now side-lined within the Congress and marginalised by its Gandhi wing otherwise on every front, had to wage his war alone. And wage it he did.

Towards the end of 1940 Bose was arrested under the Defence of India Act and after his health broke down in prison following his indefinite hunger strike, he was kept under house arrest in his South Calcutta residence at Elgin Road. He now plotted his escape from India and on the night of 17 January, 1941, eluded the police in plain clothes loitering all around his residence to travel via Gomoh and Peshawar to Kabul, disguised as an upcountry insurance agent by the name Muhammad Ziauddin, and eventually under a forged Italian passport and the fake name of an Italian Count, Orlando Mazzotta, he landed in Soviet Russia, seeking asylum and assistance in his war effort against British imperialism.

But time was playing a perfidious sport, too. Stalin feared a German invasion of the Soviet Union despite the Ribbentrop-Molotov Non-aggression Pact of 1939, a scenario in which he reckoned he could require the alliance of the British who were already at war with Germany. Hence, he was reticent to complicate matters by helping Bose and instead allowed him transit visa to fly to Germany. A Luftwaffe aircraft carried Bose to Berlin where he was now grounded to all effect for some time before the Germans offered him token help by bringing under his command jointly with the Nazi High Command the Free Indian Legion of four thousand captured British Indian prisoners of war from the African front. But Hitler delayed giving Bose an interview for well over a year and this seriously jeopardised Bose's planned war effort to liberate India.

Operation Barbarossa had further complicated matters and Bose was now in no position to attack India with German military help from the north-western front in the Himalayas. A large part of the terrain leading to the Himalayan passes was either under Soviet control or influence. Hence, when the Quit India Movement broke out in India, Bose was a mute spectator in Berlin, only privileged by the Nazis to carry out propaganda work through radio broadcasts. And it was in one such broadcast that Bose announced that he was alive and asked his countrymen to ready themselves for the onslaught he was to launch for the liberation of the motherland before long. Prabhavati Devi was that day listening to the words that floated through the air in Bengali, "I am Subhas speaking." Instantly tears rolled down her cheeks as mother had her dead son come alive, dead because of British propaganda that Bose, while making his escape, had died in an air-crash.

When in May 1942 Bose had finally met Hitler, the Fuhrer refused him any immediate assurance of Germany giving diplomatic recognition to a prospective Provisional Government of Free India. Meanwhile, Rash Behari Bose, another firebrand revolutionary from the first decades of the twentieth century, was now a resident of Japan for the past 28 years and had tirelessly striven to make imperial Japan see the significance of bringing over the stranded Bose to the Far East and to support him in his cause of the liberation of India and Asia from the colonial clutches of the Anglo-French forces. In this he succeeded and with his express efforts diplomatic contact was made with Germany to provide conveyance for Bose to travel to East Asia. Hitler relented, obviously sensing some political advantage in this ploy and provided Bose a submarine that carried him across perilous seas to Madagascar where he shifted to a Japanese submarine that docked him in Sumatra from where he flew to Tokyo to meet Emperor Hirohito and his Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo.

Japan gave unstinted support to the Bose war effort and the Provisional Government of Free India was formed on 21 October, 1943, in Singapore after Bose had landed in the city, now under Japanese control, in July of the same year. The Provisional Government, headed by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, and with Rash Behari Bose as Adviser, declared war against the Anglo-American forces but not against the Soviet Union, for Japan was bound by a peace treaty with the Soviets. The details of war, thereafter, are historically well chronicled and easily accessible. Hence, they are not being recounted here.

Eventually, the tables were turned against the Axis Powers and Germany surrendered. Japan was nuked and brought down to her knees. The Indian National Army had fought a valiant war in Burma and in Imphal and Kohima but had to be disbanded post Japan's surrender. Bose was advised by his Council of Ministers to escape arrest by the Allied forces and was last seen on 17 August, 1945, emplaning in Saigon at 17:15 hours, headed for an undisclosed destination. He was photographed last thus.

Thereafter, history has drawn a blank and on 23 August, 1945, Domei News Agency of Japan broke the news that Bose had boarded an aeroplane at Taihoku Airport on 18 August, 1945 along with his INA officer, Colonel Habib-ur-Rehman, and several Japanese military officers, and their plane had crashed soon after take off in the airfield itself. Bose had suffered severe third degree burns and had succumbed to them close to midnight on 18 August. No photographs of the burnt Bose or his dead body were available, neither was any cremation certificate from the local Taihoku crematorium there nor any record whatsoever beyond Habib-ur-Rehman's verbal testimony and that of the surviving Japanese officers.

Speculation soon became rife that Bose had made his escape yet again under the smokescreen of a concocted air-crash.

Eleven investigation committees and commissions have been set up since the disappearance of Bose but no definite conclusion about his whereabouts or destiny in disappearance has as yet been reached. The Governments of India and Japan maintain till date that Bose had died, as narrated, post the reported plane crash.

But the devotees of Bose are divided on this. One group, the more rational one, holds that Bose had either died in the Taihoku air-crash or had later perished in Russia where he, according to some accounts, was headed for and might have managed to reach with Russo-Japanese help. Some others believe, and they cite their specific reasons for doing so, that Bose had been allowed by Stalin to leave Russia and managed to slip into India through Nepal and had lived for decades in various places in Uttar Pradesh, incognito as a reclusive monk, and finally died in Faizabad in 1985. But there is yet another very ardent band of devotees and almost fanatical followers of this mysterious monk who believe that he is still alive and will one day make his public appearance when times are propitious for the great event.

So, speculations abound this enduring mystery centring Bose and it is the most hotly debated issue in independent India to this day as to what happened to Bose? Did he die in the air-crash on 18 August, 1945 in Taihoku? Did he fake the crash story and had instead taken submarine route from Singapore to an unknown destination? Had he married in Nazi Germany his private secretary by the name Emilie Schenkl and fathered a daughter by the name Anita who grew up to be a renowned professor, an economist and an intellectual of considerable acumen? What happened to the INA Treasure Chest worth crores (I crore = 10 million) of rupees? Why were the Bose files kept classified by the Government of independent India for so long and why are some of the files still kept under wraps in the closets of the Intelligence Bureau and in the Prime Minister's Office? Why has Britain decided to open up all Bose files only by 2047? Why has Japan been holding on to three crucial Bose files as yet? Why were the relatives of Bose snooped upon by Indian intelligence officers, 17 of them at a point of time, for 21 years (from 1947 to 1968), their mails checked and withheld till the other day when on declassification they came to be released even unto them, their telephones tapped, their whereabouts watched, even foreign trips kept under surveillance? Why? We do not know the answers and can only conjecture. Meanwhile rumours run rife as Bose in absentia remains the preeminent presence for millions of idealistic, even indulgent Indians who must know what happened to Bose and, in the absence of such concrete knowledge, hold on to fantastic notions of his return at the ripe old age of 123 years and growing.

And this is the day when it all began. Bose, the enigma, has now assumed godlike status among his devotees by the millions as the Netaji-Bhagwanji-Mahakaal of imperishable, immortal self, even in the flesh, right up to this moment when I record these last words of this essay. They await each day for Netaji's heroic return in shining armour even against all injunctions of logic and reason. Long live Netaji !

Written by Sugata Bose

[P.S. : This essay was originally written on 18 August, 2020. It has now been reprinted here.]