Netaji's revenge

The dominant narrative of India’s freedom struggle has been that it was achieved through non-violence. This account has remained unquestioned despite a hellish follow-through of Partition, which led to the largest mass migration in human history and the deaths of between 200,000 and 500,000 persons.

Was this pacifist narrative also why historians consigned Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s legacy to calendar art? The figure in military fatigues, breeches and Gandhi glasses but not the architect of Free India’s first army, the Azad Hind Fauj drafted from British Indian army soldiers captured by the Japanese. Indian historians parroted the line of how Bose was a ‘misguided patriot’ partly because he allied with the Axis powers—Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Japan’s Hideki Tojo. Historians however, underestimated the critical role Bose had played in shaking the unwavering faith of the British in their most powerful instrument of control over the sub-continent—the Indian army.

This forgotten freedom fighter returned this year but not how his admirers, sceptical of his demise, would have wanted him to.

INDIA TODAY took a close look at recently declassified files from the West Bengal state archives and discovered a shocking political secret. The Bose family had been under intensive surveillance by the Intelligence Bureau for over two decades. What made this snooping even more egregious was that the surveillance was authorized by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Netaji’s colleague in the freedom  movement. The revelations led to renewed interest in the legacy of a forgotten freedom fighter, not the least of which are tour companies in Kolkata offering a Netaji tour circuit. More tangibly, the issue has lent fresh urgency to the issue of declassifying thousands of classified ‘Netaji Files’ still with the central government and the West Bengal government. Most of these files contain material thrown up by inquiries into his mysterious disappearance in August 1945. Two of the three probes ordered by the government believe he died in an air crash in Taiwan. A third, in 2006, refused to believe the air crash theory. But as we now know, the files also contained the politically  embarrassing secrets of a rigorous surveillance by the Indian secret services, that is now out for historians to study. What other secrets the files hold will be known only next year. Prime Minister Narendra Modi met and assured Bose family members and assured them that the files would be declassified— beginning with the freedom fighter’s birth anniversary, January 23 ,2016. But it was West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee who acted first. In September, Banerjee declassified all the files and transferred them to the police museum. The assembly elections in West Bengal, just months away, were doubtless, a powerful incentive for her to reclaim the icon.

--Sandeep Unnithan.