Thursday, March 12, 2009

Netaji's Death – Perennially Shrouded in Mystery

Even as the nation celebrated the 112th birth anniversary of Netaji on the 23rd of January, his unique personality cult continues to keeps him ‘alive’ even in ‘death’ among his passionate admirers. Even though, there has been no evidence to disclaim his demise as has been chronicled in history, there are people who surface time and again asserting that he escaped the fatal air crash and lived much longer. Despite the report of the Mukherjee Commission (set up in 1999) too having been cast aside by the Central Government after a scathing rebuttal of facts including the claim that the ashes in Renkoji temple in Japan were not of that of Netaji’s, matters have continued to perpetrate regarding the circumstances surrounding his death.

To look back at the sequence of events, the British on their part had set up two inquiry commissions, the Finnings Commission in September 1945 and the Chakroborty Inquiry in December 1945 and these were followed by the Frigg's Report in 1953, none of which corroborated the sequence of events though, the one person who could have given conclusive evidence as the only Indian to have witnessed Netaji's death, Col. Habibur Rehman, refused to depose before either of the two commissions. The first of many enquiries in India, was by Shahnawaz Khan, one of the figureheads of the Red Fort trials followed by the report by Justice G.D. Khosla, a retired Chief Justice of the Punjab High Court in 1970, both of which, gave a conclusive report that Netaji indeed, died during the air crash. However, several years later a 102-year-old Nizamuddin claiming to be Netaji’s driver-cum-bodyguard, said that the latter was not killed in an air-crash in 1945, but died a natural death in oblivion in 1985 as ' 'Bhagwan ji - Gumnami Baba' in Faizabad. There is no explanation as to why this venerable old gentleman suddenly decided to come out with this version after lying dormant for more than 40 years of Netaji’s death. This Gumnami Baba folk-lore too has remained inconclusive as such.

From details that do carry a semblance of truth, Netaji flew off from Japan to Bangkok on the 16th of August, 1945 and the next morning to Saigon from where he was to leave for Taipei (then Japanese Taihuku) and then to Dairen (in Manchuria), en route to Russia. The pilot decided to land at Tourane during the twilight hour, spend the night there and attempt the over water flight to Formosa (now Taiwan) the next day. The next day morning, the plane with its crew of four, its six Japanese passengers and two Indians, took off and headed for Taipei nearly a thousand miles away. After a flight of about seven hours, the crew refueled at Taipei and at about two thirty in the afternoon, took off again. Then at less than a hundred feet the port propeller was lost and the plane nosedived to split into two. Netaji was supposed to have suffered third degree burns and after several hours of struggle, died sometime between ten and eleven in the night. This was the evidence given by Dr. Yoshimi Tameyoshi as a first-class eye-witness account and there is no reason not to believe it, for it was a pre-cursor to Netaji’s disappearance.

While so many claims and counter-claims have surfaced, not one of them have answered a most straightforward question – ‘If Netaji did survive the crash, why didn't he made himself public at any stage’? After all, he wasn’t perceived a national threat and neither did India & Britain enter into any such treaty as would have extradited him to England to be tried as a ‘war criminal’. On the contrary, he would have been accorded a rousing welcome in India, post-independence. Strangely, while Netaji’s life has been meticulously chronicled, his death continues to baffle rational sensibilities, unearthing material & accounts, which rather than unravel the mystery tend to further shroud the incident into obscurity. What holds as incontrovertible truth is that Netaji in life as in death stood and continues to stand tall as a perennial warhead who shook the Colonial yoke from its roots.

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