You may dislike or hate Prime Minister Narendra Modi but you have to credit him for keeping the legend of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose alive. Last year, Modi took a bold step of installing the idol of Netaji at India Gate where the statue of King George V once stood. That statue was taken down in 1968, and at one point, there were rumours that a bust of Mahatma Gandhi would replace it. But that was not to be. In fact, it was Netaji who first hailed Mahatma Gandhi as the ‘Father of the Nation’.
Undeniably, Modi has been striving to keep the legend of Netaji alive. In 2022 Modi installed a hologram and later an idol of Netaji.
Now, fresh investigations are unravelling what may have happened to him.
The story of the fate Netaji met continues to be shrouded in mystery because of former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s determination to conceal the truth. The official narrative claims that Netaji died in an air crash on August 18, 1945, in Taipei while trying to escape to Manchuria (that time under Soviet Union) which is now part of China.
Records in Taiwan do not show any crash occurring on that day. Yet, the story persists on account of a report from the inquiry committee established by Shah Nawaz Khan, who was previously a member of the Indian National Army (INA).
Two other members of the committee, SN Maitra, an ICS officer, and Netaji’s brother SN Bose, were engaged in fishery business in Odisha. Bose, however, refused to sign the report despite pressure to do so. This is confirmed by his grandson Amit Mitra, later West Bengal’s finance minister. Mitra told this writer: “Yes there was enormous pressure on him to agree to the report but he went ahead and wrote a dissent note.” This indicates that Netaji’s brother did not buy the air crash story.
Following all of this, the Nehru government directed the Intelligence Bureau (IB), which was headed by Bhola Nath Mallik for an unusually long period of 20 years, to float the theory that Netaji had returned to India in the late 1950s or later, set himself up as Gumnami Baba, and settled at Faizabad near Ayodhya.
Gumnami Baba himself claimed to be Netaji, and many of his lesser beings, who became his followers, began to believe him. Gumnami Baba could not speak Bengali and communicated only in Hindi. “He was obviously an imposter who spread stories about himself,” said a former senior officer from the Intelligence Bureau, who is now deceased and therefore remains unnamed.
“There was fear in top circles that Netaji could possibly return to India in the garb of a holy man and capture the imagination of common men,” the official told me.
This Gumnami Baba theory captured the imagination of many, and even a Bengali commercial movie was made about him. To intrigue the public, Gumnami Baba displayed pictures of Netaji’s parents near his bedside. But analysts believe that they must have been arranged by his IB handlers. Bhola Nath Mallik is long dead.
Researcher Purabi Roy, who dedicated years to uncovering the truth about the fate Netaji met, found evidence indicating he had been in the Soviet Union. Even documents from the top-secret Podolsk archive near Moscow revealed records of a conversation between Stalin and his aides, Yaakov Malik and Vyacheslav Molotov, in October 1946 about where to keep Subhash Chandra Bose. These records were stored in the GRU archives, which were accessible only to Russians. That’s why Roy was unable to lay hands on them, even though she was fluent in Russian and was present in the USSR at the time.
The documents were uncovered by a serving Russian officer, Major General Kalashnikov. When Justice MK Mukherjee, part of the commission established by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, travelled to Moscow to meet him, he had already left for Istanbul and did not return. The Mukherjee Commission, in its report, firmly stated that Netaji did not perish in an air crash. In contrast, an earlier committee led by Justice GD Khosla—set up during Indira Gandhi’s time—concluded that Netaji did indeed die in an air crash.
Major General Kalashnikov was interviewed by TV journalist and independent producer Iqbal Malhotra in Moscow in 2016. During this interview, he revealed details that he had previously shared with Purabi Mukherjee.
Iqbal Malhotra conducted thorough research and uncovered that Netaji’s escape did not actually take place by air. Instead, it involved a secretive journey from Singapore on a submarine belonging to the Monsoon group, which had been left in Penang, Malaysia, by the German naval forces. Though Germany surrendered in May 1945, they allowed Japan the use of their submarines. The day news spread about Netaji’s death in an air crash, he was at the house of a sympathiser in Saigon. From Saigon, he flew to Singapore, where he boarded a submarine that took him to Vladivostok en route.
Upon arriving in Vladivostok, he proceeded to Omsk in Siberia, which acted as the wartime capital of the USSR and had an office of the INA. Stalin took him into custody to verify his credentials. That was deemed necessary since British authorities had been sending suspicious messages about Netaji to Stalin’s representatives.
In 1946, when the INA trials were on at Red Fort, three intercepts of messages broadcast by Netaji (on Shortwave 19) were discovered in the National Archives. These messages were intercepted by the IB office in Calcutta. The messages, now made public, indicated that “He” (Netaji) was in a neighbouring friendly country and planned to launch an offensive in Delhi to free the INA prisoners. The messages, kept confidential by the Nehru government, were only revealed during Modi’s tenure.
Iqbal Malhotra’s research discloses that Netaji planned to enter India through the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), now in Pakistan. He sought the assistance of an ex-INA officer, who was the ruler of a small principality outside the NWFP. He had been court-martialed, jailed and released. “He was Prince Burhanuddin of Chitral, a small state north of NWFP which was controlling Ladakh Scouts and the British feared that the Scouts would assist Netaji’s forces,” says Malhotra.
That did not happen because after the US conducted atomic bomb tests in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin sought to test his own Russian bomb in the same region and ordered Netaji to leave. This unexpected directive left Netaji feeling let down and he confronted Stalin. Unaccustomed to dissent, Stalin imprisoned Netaji in the Gulag in Siberia. What happened to Netaji thereafter remains unclear; however, Nehru, influenced by Lord Mountbatten, began to promote the Gumnami Baba theory. “His advisors told him that if Netaji came back to India, then Gumnami Baba would be publicly presented to counter the possible claims of Netaji,” Malhotra says.
Another baba, Shalumari Baba, was set up in north Bengal with the same purpose. Shalumari Baba was eventually uncovered and fled to Dehra Dun, where he passed away a few years later. He was an imposter, says Amit Mitra. Whatever ultimately happened to Netaji is still a matter of conjecture. But one day the truth will surface.
Kingshuk Nag is a senior journalist who worked for TOI for 25 years in many cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Bangalore & Hyderabad. Known for his for fire brand journalism, he is also a biographer of Narendra Modi (The NaMo Story) and many others.
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