BOSE’S DAUGHTER SAYS DNA TEST WILL LET HER FATHER REST AT LAST
▶ Anita Pfaff, child of Indian freedom fighter, thinks his ashes are in Japan and believes science can prove her right, writes Samanth Subramanian
The daughter of one of India’s most famous freedom fighters has called for a DNA test of her father’s cremated remains to end the “fantastic claims” about his mysterious death.
Experts are divided as to whether such tests can be done on the ashes of Subhas Chandra Bose.
But in the foreword to a new book about her father’s death, Anita Bose Pfaff, an economist in Germany, repeats her belief that Bose died in an air crash in Taiwan in 1945 and that his remains are in the Renkoji Temple in Tokyo.
A test would provide proof, “provided DNA can be extracted from the bones remaining after his cremation”, Pfaff wrote. “However, the governments of India and Japan would have to agree to such an attempt.”
Laid to Rest: The Controversy Over Subhas Chandra Bose’s Death by Ashis Ray, the grandson of Bose’s brother, builds on 30 years of research and includes documents supporting Pfaff’s belief.
But the book is doing little to shake the convictions of those who doubt the air crash theory and are sure that Bose’s life after 1945 was every bit as audacious and enigmatic as his life until then.
“Netaji”, or “Leader”, as Bose was known, is as divisive in death as he was during the freedom struggle.
A radical nationalist, he was initially a member of Congress, the party dominated by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. But his ideas of achieving freedom for India diverged from the non-violence espoused by Gandhi.
Bose captured the imagination of his home state of Bengal, now called West Bengal, in particular, said Nirban Ghosh, a historian at the University of Calcutta.
“Bengalis liked to compare him against Gandhi and Nehru,” Mr Ghosh said.
The state’s political influence after Indian independence dwindled, and “Bengalis liked to think that if Subhash had been around, things would have been different”.
Ousted from the Congress party in 1939, Bose helped to build an armed force called the Indian National Army, which at its peak had 43,000 members willing to fight for Indian independence.
“Give me blood and I will give you freedom,” he said in his speeches.
Operating on the principle that his enemy’s enemy was his friend, Bose made overtures towards Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. The British placed him under house arrest but he escaped in 1940, fleeing through Afghanistan and the Soviet Union to Germany, where he met Adolf Hitler.
Later, he travelled to Madagascar by submarine and then to South-East Asia and Japan. From there, he supervised the strategies of his army in battlefields in Burma, but fearing arrest by the British he never returned to India.
It was while he was in Germany that he had a child, Pfaff, with Emilie Schenkl. His daughter last saw Bose when she was 4 months old.
India has set up three commissions of inquiry to ascertain the facts around Bose’s death. The first two concluded that he had died in hospital shortly after the plane crash.
But the third, which it submitted its report in 2005, claimed that several files on Bose were missing in government records and that Taiwan’s government denied a plane crash on its soil on August 8, 1945.
India has yet to declassify selected intelligence reports on Bose but some released files show that the government spied on his family for at least 20 years after his death.
Bose’s love of the adventurous life and his problems with Congress and the Allied powers led to theories that he had been killed, or that he chose to lie low after 1945. Kingshuk Nag, who wrote
Netaji: Living Dangerously in 2016, believes Bose made it into the USSR.
“I think Stalin wanted him there as a counter to Nehru,” who became India’s prime minister in 1947, Nag said. “After Stalin died, the new rulers had a good equation with Nehru. So what happened to Netaji, we don’t know. Maybe he died in Siberia or was bumped off.”
In 2015, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Russia, he promised to inquire about Bose’s presence in the former Soviet Union. But Mr Modi made no statement about Bose after his trip. In the 1990s, the Russian government had denied that Bose had gone to the USSR after 1945.
In an alternate theory that is championed by among others Anuj Dhar, the author of three books on the Netaji mystery, is that Bose lived in China for a while before returning to India and living out his life as a Hindu mystic named Gumnami Baba, in the north Indian town of Faizabad.
He did not reveal his identity, Mr Dhar, said because he was reviled by Congress and western powers.
“He’s believed to have said it wouldn’t be in India’s national interest,” Mr Dhar said.
“But it was very likely to be him. What else explains a baba living in this small town reading Time magazine regularly, as he did?”
Gumnami Baba died in 1985, when Bose would have been 88. But there are still “large sections of the educated public who believe that Bose is somehow still alive”, Mr Ghosh said with a laugh.
“That, I think, is at the very least highly improbable.”
After Stalin died, the new rulers had a good equation with Nehru. So what happened to Netaji, we don’t know KINGSHUK NAG Author