Bose documents bring no closure

Declassified by the West Bengal government on Friday, 64 files relating to Subhas Chandra Bose raise questions about whether he had indeed died in an air crash at Taihoku, now in Taiwan, on August 18, 1945. On his return from Europe sometime after Independence, Sarat Chandra Bose had said he was inclined to believe from information gathered on the continent that his younger brother had not died in a 1945 plane crash and was somewhere in China, says one of the files dated January 1949. “It is not known whether the news of a living Bose is based upon positive evidence of his whereabouts suspected to be in Red China or Soviet Russia or upon what is described as the negative evidence of the failure of the best brains of the Anglo-American security services to dig up slightest evidence in confirmation of the story of Bose’s death in a plane crash and subsequent cremation with full military honours in Tokyo,” it says. The declassified files indicate that in 1942, three years before the purported plane crash, similar reports of Bose’s death had done the rounds. Netaji’s grand nephew Chandra Bose said family members who were alive at the time believed that the freedom fighter was alive.