Despite Formosa probe, Nehru closed chapter on Netaji
What did Jawaharlal Nehru do with the result of the Formosa inquiry which bunked Netaji's death-by-aircrash theory? The British High Commission in New Delhi passed them on to him on August 10, 1956.
Courtsey : Udayan Namboodiri in www.dailypioneer.com
What did Jawaharlal Nehru do with the result of the Formosa inquiry which bunked Netaji's death-by-aircrash theory? The British High Commission in New Delhi passed them on to him on August 10, 1956.
Yet, one month later, not only did he accept the report of the Shah Nawaz Khan Committee which told a diametrically opposite story but also told Parliament on September 11 that Netaji's death was a "closed chapter".
Did he simply take the Formosa papers and burn them? Technically, any document in the possession of a Government should be filed away - either in classified or declassified form. Since their contents were material to the work of the Shah Nawaz Committee, common wisdom demanded that they should have been placed at its disposal by the MEA.
But the three-member panel's innocence of the very existence of the documents was quite apparent from the manner in which they relied on secondary and tutored sources wherever they went in their mission to "prove" that Netaji had died in an air crash in Taihoku airport. Denied permission to travel to Formosa, the scene of the alleged "accident", these documents constituted the only first-hand evidence that was available.
As reported on Tuesday, the Government of India had used British channels to get the official Formosan version. Between May and August, the British Consul in Formosa collected considerable evidence to demolish the Japanese story that Netaji had met his doom on August 18, 1945. Nehru had hoped that the report from ground zero would be music to his ears. But, because the result was unfavourable, the papers were vanished.
Did the first Prime Minister of India treat the Formosa papers as his personal property? There is reason to believe in the affirmative. He did not place it before Shah Nawaz Khan. Fourteen years later, his daughter, Indira Gandhi, did not turn them over to the GD Khosla Commission she had constituted to perpetuate the fiction about the Taihoku crash.
Had the British Government not declassified them in 1996, the Formosa papers would never have reached JMCI. The Vajpayee Government, which turned over hundreds of valuable files to JMCI during its six-year term, would certainly have included the Formosa papers if they were available in the archives of the MEA.
Further proof that the Government completely hushed up the Formosa findings was produced by Keshub Bhattacharya, a Kolkata High Court advocate and deponent before JMCI. He referred to a question fielded in the Rajya Sabha on August 2, 1966 by Forward Bloc's Chitta Basu in which the then External Affairs Minister, Sardar Swaran Singh was asked whether the Taiwanese authorities had begun a probe into the alleged air crash and, if yes, would the Government of India like to join it?
In his reply, Swaran Singh said he had "heard" about such a committee but would have nothing to do with it since India and Taiwan did not have diplomatic relations.
What is significant is that he merely played along with rumours about a Taiwanese probe in 1966. There was no reason for the Taiwanese to conduct a fresh probe a whole decade after they had conclusively established that there was no plane crash, no Subhas Chandra Bose in Taihoku and no cremation of his dead body. Moreover, Swaran Singh proved to be completely in the dark about the 1956 report.
To the post-Independence generation, Nehru's hidden fear of the Netaji specter was a matter of conjecture. But, after JMCI's clinching report (submitted earlier this month and awaiting presentation in Parliament) that he intentionally concealed information that could have led to the closing of the mystery surrounding the great patriot's disappearance, few would be left in doubt of the smallness of Nehru's political vision.
The Justice MK Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry (JMCI), which presented its final report to the UPA Government in early-November, has conclusively established that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose did not die in an air crash at Taiwan's Taihoku airport on August 18, 1945.Did he simply take the Formosa papers and burn them? Technically, any document in the possession of a Government should be filed away - either in classified or declassified form. Since their contents were material to the work of the Shah Nawaz Committee, common wisdom demanded that they should have been placed at its disposal by the MEA.
But the three-member panel's innocence of the very existence of the documents was quite apparent from the manner in which they relied on secondary and tutored sources wherever they went in their mission to "prove" that Netaji had died in an air crash in Taihoku airport. Denied permission to travel to Formosa, the scene of the alleged "accident", these documents constituted the only first-hand evidence that was available.
As reported on Tuesday, the Government of India had used British channels to get the official Formosan version. Between May and August, the British Consul in Formosa collected considerable evidence to demolish the Japanese story that Netaji had met his doom on August 18, 1945. Nehru had hoped that the report from ground zero would be music to his ears. But, because the result was unfavourable, the papers were vanished.
Did the first Prime Minister of India treat the Formosa papers as his personal property? There is reason to believe in the affirmative. He did not place it before Shah Nawaz Khan. Fourteen years later, his daughter, Indira Gandhi, did not turn them over to the GD Khosla Commission she had constituted to perpetuate the fiction about the Taihoku crash.
Had the British Government not declassified them in 1996, the Formosa papers would never have reached JMCI. The Vajpayee Government, which turned over hundreds of valuable files to JMCI during its six-year term, would certainly have included the Formosa papers if they were available in the archives of the MEA.
Further proof that the Government completely hushed up the Formosa findings was produced by Keshub Bhattacharya, a Kolkata High Court advocate and deponent before JMCI. He referred to a question fielded in the Rajya Sabha on August 2, 1966 by Forward Bloc's Chitta Basu in which the then External Affairs Minister, Sardar Swaran Singh was asked whether the Taiwanese authorities had begun a probe into the alleged air crash and, if yes, would the Government of India like to join it?
In his reply, Swaran Singh said he had "heard" about such a committee but would have nothing to do with it since India and Taiwan did not have diplomatic relations.
What is significant is that he merely played along with rumours about a Taiwanese probe in 1966. There was no reason for the Taiwanese to conduct a fresh probe a whole decade after they had conclusively established that there was no plane crash, no Subhas Chandra Bose in Taihoku and no cremation of his dead body. Moreover, Swaran Singh proved to be completely in the dark about the 1956 report.
To the post-Independence generation, Nehru's hidden fear of the Netaji specter was a matter of conjecture. But, after JMCI's clinching report (submitted earlier this month and awaiting presentation in Parliament) that he intentionally concealed information that could have led to the closing of the mystery surrounding the great patriot's disappearance, few would be left in doubt of the smallness of Nehru's political vision.
The rest is still a mystery. But one thing is clear. The "ashes" kept in a box (not an urn) in Renkoji Temple near Tokyo belong to somebody else. No, it did not require a DNA test to establish this fact.
The entire story, which began with Netaji's aide Colonel Habibur Rahaman collecting the "ashes with one tooth filled with gold" from a crematorium in Taipei (Shah Nawaz Committee report, page 23) on August 21, 1945 (the Formosa papers declassified by Britain say it happened on August 23) and ended with his depositing two wooden boxes to Major Kinoshita of the Imperial Japanese Army on September 7, was a fabrication.
When Justice Mukherjee, accompanied by key deponents, went to Renkoji Temple in September 2002, there was only one box. He was not able to look inside the box as it was a holiday and a carpenter could not be found to open it. On October 24, two officials of the Indian Embassy in Tokyo, First Secretary C Rajasekhar and Second Secretary T Armstrong Changsan, went there and had the box opened in the presence of the chief priest.
They found no ashes. There were parts of a human skull, portion of a jaw, some teeth (no gold filling in any of them) and some bone fragments. If, as the Shah Nawaz Khan Committee and GD Khosla Commission claimed, "Netaji's body" had been "cremated " for an entire night, no medico-legal expert would adduce that such soft bones would survive. Dr Madhusudan Paul of Kolkata Medical College, who went as a deponent, opined that skull fragments, three-fourths of the mandible and teeth would, in the event of cremation, be the first to vanish. Justice Mukherjee saved this crucial piece of insight for his final report.
As for DNA testing, two reputed experts, Dr Terry Milton of the United States and Dr N Saitou of the Department of Genetics at University of Tokyo, who were approached by the JMCI, declined to accept the bone fragments, saying incinerated bones leave no DNA for latter-day testing.
The last leg which supported the Taihoku air crash story was the version of Dr K Yoshime, the Japanese Army medic who claimed to have written out the death certificate of "Ichiro Okura", the false identity given to the alleged body of Netaji at the Nan Men military hospital.
Dr Yoshime had testified before a large number of inquiry panels preceding the JMCI (including Shah Nawaz's and Khosla's command performances). He would have died with his secret, but he admitted to the JMCI in September 2002 that some time in 1988, he had been approached by two Indians who made him change the name on the death certificate from "Ichiro Okura" to Subhas Chandra Bose.
Now that a judicial commission has unequivocally stated that the box at Renkoji Temple could be containing anybody's bones but Netaji's, would the Government of India continue to promote its fiction?
The entire story, which began with Netaji's aide Colonel Habibur Rahaman collecting the "ashes with one tooth filled with gold" from a crematorium in Taipei (Shah Nawaz Committee report, page 23) on August 21, 1945 (the Formosa papers declassified by Britain say it happened on August 23) and ended with his depositing two wooden boxes to Major Kinoshita of the Imperial Japanese Army on September 7, was a fabrication.
When Justice Mukherjee, accompanied by key deponents, went to Renkoji Temple in September 2002, there was only one box. He was not able to look inside the box as it was a holiday and a carpenter could not be found to open it. On October 24, two officials of the Indian Embassy in Tokyo, First Secretary C Rajasekhar and Second Secretary T Armstrong Changsan, went there and had the box opened in the presence of the chief priest.
They found no ashes. There were parts of a human skull, portion of a jaw, some teeth (no gold filling in any of them) and some bone fragments. If, as the Shah Nawaz Khan Committee and GD Khosla Commission claimed, "Netaji's body" had been "cremated " for an entire night, no medico-legal expert would adduce that such soft bones would survive. Dr Madhusudan Paul of Kolkata Medical College, who went as a deponent, opined that skull fragments, three-fourths of the mandible and teeth would, in the event of cremation, be the first to vanish. Justice Mukherjee saved this crucial piece of insight for his final report.
As for DNA testing, two reputed experts, Dr Terry Milton of the United States and Dr N Saitou of the Department of Genetics at University of Tokyo, who were approached by the JMCI, declined to accept the bone fragments, saying incinerated bones leave no DNA for latter-day testing.
The last leg which supported the Taihoku air crash story was the version of Dr K Yoshime, the Japanese Army medic who claimed to have written out the death certificate of "Ichiro Okura", the false identity given to the alleged body of Netaji at the Nan Men military hospital.
Dr Yoshime had testified before a large number of inquiry panels preceding the JMCI (including Shah Nawaz's and Khosla's command performances). He would have died with his secret, but he admitted to the JMCI in September 2002 that some time in 1988, he had been approached by two Indians who made him change the name on the death certificate from "Ichiro Okura" to Subhas Chandra Bose.
Now that a judicial commission has unequivocally stated that the box at Renkoji Temple could be containing anybody's bones but Netaji's, would the Government of India continue to promote its fiction?
Courtsey : Udayan Namboodiri in www.dailypioneer.com