Journalist turned researcher, Anuj Dhar has written the well-known books concerning the controversy surrounding the fate of Subhas Chandra Bose: India’s Biggest Cover-up (2012 and What Happened to Netaji (2016) published and distributed by Vitastaa Publishing Pvt. Ltd. His book, What Happened to Netaji is recently launched in India. His book release tour in North America was planned with several events in different states. His inspirational and enlightening talk was arranged in Canton, MA on Tuesday 11^th October, 2016 evening. Many Indians interested in knowing about the findings of his research into the death of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose attended the event.

Mr. Kanchan Banerjee invited and thanked all the audience for coming with so much enthusiasm and interest. He introduced in brief the author Mr. Anuj Dhar. He said that Mr. Dhar is a former journalist who wrote several books on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. He started researching into the disappearance of Netaji around 2001 and discovered some startling facts. He runs an NGO called Mission Netaji. He also runs a website on the same subject and proposed several theories about Subhas Chandra Bose. He also encouraged the audience to interact with Mr. Dhar directly after the talk to clarify some of their doubts.

Mr. Dhar who is very passionate about the topic said that Netaji Subash Chandra Bose’s death is still covered with mystery. But the various conspiracy theories about it make it even more mysterious.  He mentioned about some of the most thought-provoking conspiracy theories with some declassified documents and pictures:  1) Netaji died in the plane crash. If that is true then why there is no dead body. In the outcome, an exciting, and perhaps critical fact emerged: Netaji’s other lieutenants, who were to follow him on another flight, never saw his body. No one took photographs of Bose’s injuries, or his body, nor was a death certificate issued.  As news reached India, senior INA officer JR Bhonsle rejected the news. Mahatma Gandhi said, “Subhas is not dead. He is still alive and biding his time somewhere.” Soon, rumors began doing the rounds that Bose was either in Soviet-held Manchuria, as a prisoner of the Soviet Army, or had gone into hiding in Russia. Lakshmi Swaminathan, of the INA’s Jhansi Regiment, said in 1946 she thought Bose was in China. Another story is prevailed for some time that his bones and ashes are stored but DNA test was not yet done to confirm the fact and even most family members also did not show interest in the story. 2) In 1950s, there emerged stories that Netaji had become a sadhu. And elaborative facts of this story took a shape a decade later. Some of Netaji’s old associates formed the ‘Subhasbadi Janata’, and claimed Bose was now the chief sadhu in an ashram in Shoulmari in North Bengal. According to the ‘Subhasbadis’, Bose returned to India after the war, became a sadhu, attended Gandhi’s funeral unseen in 1948, lived in a temple in Bareilly in the late 1950s, before finally settling in Shoulmari as Srimat Saradanandaji in 1959.  Other versions, too, began gathering credence. Bose remained either in Maoist China or the Soviet Union. He attended Jawaharlal Nehru’s cremation in 1964, of which there appeared to even be photographic evidence.

3) According to the Soviet Connection and a Conspiracy theory, after independence, Nehru took the Foreign Affairs portfolio himself and appointed Vijayalekshmi Pandit as the ambassador to Russia. After her term, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan took her place. There are reports that Dr. Saroj Das, of Calcutta University, told his friend Dr. RC Muzumdar that Dr. Radhakrishnan had told him that Bose was in Russia. In another report, former Indian ambassador Dr. Satyanarayana Sinha met CPI founder Abani Mukherjee’s son Georgey, who said his father and Netaji were imprisoned in adjacent cells in Siberia. In 1995, a team from Calcutta’s Asiatic Society found a bunch of declassified files that hinted at Bose having been in the USSR after 1945. Dr. Purobi Roy, a member of the team of scholars, said she found a document stamped “most secret”, dated 1946, in the military archives of Paddolosk, near Moscow, which mentioned Stalin and Molotov discussing Bose’s plans — whether he would remain in the USSR or leave. Dr. Roy also said she found a KGB report in Bombay from 1946, which said, “it is not possible to work with Nehru or Gandhi, we have to use Subhas Bose”. This implies Bose was still alive in 1946.

Later in time, three enquiry commissions have been set up to inquire into the Bose’s mystery so far. The first two committees, Shah Nawaz Khan Committee of 1956 and Justice G D Khosla Commission of 1970, concluded that Bose died in an air crash.  But Anuj Dhar alleges that the witnesses — who mostly belonged to the Congress government and Intelligence Bureau (IB) — presented 'manipulated’ documents before these committees. In his book, Mr. Dhar cites truncated documents and false statements given by top officers of IB.

Then Justice MK Mukherjee Commission was appointed during the AB Vajpayee-led NDA government. The Vajpayee government fell, but Justice Mukherjee continued his inquiry. With the UPA back in power, Pranab Mukherjee became the Minister of Defense and was one of the seven witnesses who testified in favor of air crash death theory before Justice Mukherjee. Dhar claims that Pranab Mukherjee went to Japan and met the foreign minister there in 1995. And then he went to Germany to meet Bose’s German wife. "Pranab had gone there to persuade her to come to India with Bose’s ashes to put all controversies to rest. But Bose’s wife simply asked him to get lost,’’ he says. When Justice Mukherjee ruled out the possibility of Bose dying in the air crash in his 2005 report, Pranab and his UPA government trashed Justice Mukherjee’s report and did not accept it. "Even in 1996, when a joint secretary level officer in the ministry of external affairs recommended that India should seek evidences on Bose’s presence in Russia from the KGB archives, the then external minister Pranab Mukherjee put it under wraps, on grounds that it would spoil the Indo-Russian relationship," claims Dhar. Anuj Dhar asserts that the death of Subhas Chandra Bose was the bigger cover up in the history of India. He did not die in the plane crash in Taiwan. In fact, no such plane crash ever took place. He was not either captured or killed by Stalin. He also talked about The Figgess Report of 1946, and The Shah Nawaz Committee of 1956. 

Mr. Dhar raised several pertinent questions and examined the roles of several top leaders of India like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and even current leaders like Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pranab Mukherjee. He also examined Subramaniam Swamy's claim that Netaji was done away with in the Soviet Union on the orders of Jawaharlal Nehru. He comes down to the present times and examined why the current Modi government is not able to take concrete steps on the Netaji files. This is political surveillance at its best- Mr. Dhar says with a laugh.

Mr. Dhar says, of all this, the legend of a sadhu in Azizabad who was called Gumnami Baba, who went by the name Bhagwanji is more convincing but the truth has come out from the government declassified files. He lived in Uttar Pradesh – Lucknow, Faizabad, Sitapur, Basti and Ayodhya – for more than 30 years till his death on September 16, 1985. He maintained contact with Dr. Pavitra Mohan Roy, the former top Secret Service agent of the INA. However, more than his life, what Bhagwanji left behind after his death seems to confirm that the sadhu and Bose were one and the same: Gold-rimmed spectacles identical to what Netaji was always pictured wearing, powerful German binoculars, a color photograph of Swami Vivekananda, Bengali books, the original copy of the summons issued to Suresh Chandra Bose to appear before the Khosla Commission, a map of undivided India, an album containing family photographs of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Mr. Dhar confidently says that Bhagwanji’s handwriting samples had matched with the ones of Mr. Bose. So, Mr. Bose spent the remainder of his life in anonymity in India itself, according to Mr. Dhar.

Mr. Dhar’s talk was very interesting and supported his arguments with convincing docs and pictures. He spoke more than two hours and held the audience’s curiosity unbroken. Mr. Dhar’s talk was followed by Q&A session where several remarkable questions were asked for which he provided very convincing answers. For a question about his research, the author Anuj Dhar said that he was justified by the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court and his research was stamped as 'genuine and based on relevant material'.

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