The mystery of our enduring fascination with Netaji Bose: What 64 declassified files can't resolve

In 1941 my great-aunt eloped from the family estate in Hazaribagh, stealing out in the dead of night past guard dogs and gatekeepers. The scandal reached all the way to Kolkata. Family lore has it that even Subhas Bose’s brother was impressed. “She must have learned it from Subhas,” he apparently said admiringly. Subhas Bose had just become the gold standard of escapees by escaping from house arrest and constant surveillance in Kolkata. My mother remembers how Subhas Bose’s mother told her great-grandmother wistfully, “Aamaar Nemai paaliye gelo (My Nemai has escaped)” after Bose snuck out of the house without telling her goodbye. Or eating his dinner much to a Bengali mother’s lasting distress. To this day my mother regrets, that despite traveling all over the world from the pyramids of Egypt to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, she never made it to Rangoon or Singapore or Tokyo. “Those places fascinated me because Netaji was there,” she says. She remembers her uncles listening secretly on crackling radios to his “Aami Subhas bolchhi” (This is Subhas speaking) broadcasts from those far away places. Even for a sheltered middle-class Bengali girl in Kolkata, raised in a family where girls were not allowed out alone, the allure of Subhas Bose ran strong. No wonder, the declassification of 64 Netaji files in Bengal is being dubbed a pre-election gambit by Mamata Banerjee. “She wants to use the sentiments revolving around Netaji for her own political benefits before next year’s Assembly polls,” says state Congress president Adhir Chowdhury. Political parties hope that 70 years after his disappearance, Subhas Bose can be a vote-getter in Bengal. Almost bigger than the actual mystery of what happened to Subhas Bose is the mystery of this enduring appeal. [caption id=“attachment_2441148” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. AFP[/caption] Much of this fascination is due to the fact that Bose was the last great martial hero to fire the Bengali imagination. The men who followed in his footsteps, the Jyoti Basus and Pranab Mukherjees, were great survivors and cunning strategists but hardly action heroes who could go down in a blaze of glory. Ink seemed to run in their veins, rather than hot blood. “Netaji was the last symbol of Bengal’s golden age,” writes Dipankar Mukhopadhyay in the Bengali daily Ei Shomoy. “After he vanished from Indian politics, Bengal regressed in all aspects. That is why, ignoring all logic, Bengalis imagine that one day Netaji will return. And all will be well again.” With his disappearance, Nehru had an open playing field and hence the suspicion that Nehru had the most to gain by suppressing the truth about Subhas Bose. When the Congress government rubbished the Mukherjee Commission findings that claimed Netaji did not die in that plane crash, two Bengalis, Pranab Mukherjee and Priya Ranjan Das Munshi, led the charge. An MIA Subhas Bose can conveniently belong to everyone in a way a real Subhas Bose would not. The Congress can claim him as its own, if slightly wayward son. Narendra Modi tells the nation in his Mann ki Baat that he looks forward to meeting the Bose family because the BJP can eulogize him as an alternative hero, one who was sidelined by the Nehru-Gandhi stranglehold over India’s Independence movement. The Communists have absorbed his Forward Bloc into their Left Front. Trinamool has made an MP out of his grand-nephew, the historian Sugata Bose, from the branch of the family which has become the custodian of the legend. Subhas Bose’s biggest selling point? He disappeared as a freedom-fighter and never had to be tested as a politician in independent India. Unlike his peers, his charisma was not whittled away by retail politicking, electoral compromises and the grind of daily governance. Like the Promised Land, he became the Promised Bose but one who never had to live up to those Great Expectations. The #64Netajifiles released with such hashtag fanfare by the Bengal government do little to resolve the essential mystery. Much of it just puts on record what already existed in public rumour. A report with “sensational news” about Bose being alive and waiting to return sent to District Intelligence Branch of CID in 1949 is actually based on something that appeared in the tabloid Blitz. To add masala to the mystery now come reports that 12 files about Netaji’s activities were not declassified. And some pages with crucial information are missing in the files that were declassified. The NGO India’s Smile is demanding a judicial commission to “probe when and how they went missing.” The mystery just keeps getting thicker the more it’s unraveled and that’s what makes for a good conspiracy theory. That’s why perhaps it’s just as well if this conspiracy never gets completely resolved. Multiple commissions could not fit all the pieces of the jigsaw together to everyone’s satisfaction. We want to solve this mystery, yet at some deeper level we understand that the solution, whatever it is, will diminish it. It cannot be more thrilling than the mystery itself with all those conflicting what-if scenarios embroiling Soviet gulags, a snooping Nehru and a Gumnaami Baba with his unexplained maps and round glasses. It is perhaps a fitting epitaph for the restless Subhas Bose, that he continues to elude those who would pin him down the same way he eluded his British guards and escaped over 70 years ago. His mother’s Nemai escaped then and 64 files later he’s still not ready to rest in peace at home.