Sugata Bose also joins the league of some extraordinary men—Jawaharlal Nehru, his minister Shah Nawaz, his friend GD Khosla and his ardent follower Shivraj Patil—in branding his own granduncle Suresh Bose a liar. All on the basis of a note created fraudulently by the government nominee on the committee. Blood is usually thicker than water, but political inclinations often dilute family ties. Sugata Bose should have known better that Suresh Bose had no need to change his mind about Subhas Bose’s assumed death after June 1956, as this “injustice league” propagated throughout the years. From the day one to his last, Suresh shared his elder brother’s, Sugata’s grandfather’s, views about their younger brother’s disappearance.
A few years ago Chandrachur and I met a former Gaimusho official in New Delhi. Tomoji Mutoh had in May 1956 liaised with the Shah Nawaz Committee and especially Suresh Bose. He told us that he accompanied Suresh Bose to the residence of Katanko Tojo, the widow of war-time Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. “He cried there. He said ‘my brother did not die’,” the retired official told us. Mutoh asked us to visit the Renkoji temple and see for ourselves how respectful the Japanese are towards “Chandra Bose’s ashes”. “Your respect for Netaji is not in doubt, and we are grateful for that,” we told him.
If he were alive today, Suresh Bose would have been greatly pained to see his own grandnephew terming his view as “rambling dissent”, borrowing the word “rambling” from GD Khosla. Suresh Bose was not an accomplished writer and at that he was not given enough documents or facilities to produce a slick report. But he did make some valid points and he did set a standard in probity and openness as he called upon the people to not to believe his dissent or the majority report until the Government had made public all relevant records.
There is no chance of misconstruing that the Harvard professor is so impartial and objective that he has not even spared his granduncle. Because in his zeal to back the government version, he has lauded someone who came closer to getting jailed for trying to vilify Subhas Chandra Bose and a friendly foreign nation which sacrificed thousands of its men in helping India attain freedom. This was GD Khosla, whom Sugata Bose describes as “eminent jurist”. Worse, Sugata makes libelous statements against Justice Mukherjee.
It is horrendous that a Bose family member should use a glowing term for a man who portrayed Subhas as an impractical hothead and a puppet of the Japanese in his report. This abhorring idea was not an aside but part and parcel of Khosla’s report. The Bose family dragged him to court and he could wriggle out only after rendering a written apology.
According to Prof Bose, Khosla’s report “fell victim to political partisan” whereas the Congress-led government “quite sensibly, rejected outright” the Mukherjee Commission's report. He is disheartened, as a Congressman at heart should be, that Indira Gandhi’s government which had been compelled to institute Khosla’s inquiry lost elections in 1977 and the Janata government set aside Khosla’s findings. Such unabashed whitewash makes me feel worried about the professor’s American students. Between September 1974, when Khosla Commission’s report was tabled in Parliament and 1977, when Moraraji Desai became Prime Minister, India had for most part been under an authoritarian rule. It was the biggest blot on Indian democracy, the best legacy of the British Raj. It was during this dark age, when prostitutes were paraded to create fervour in favour of the government and innumerable people were forcefully sterilised to stem India’s population boom, that Khosla’s report was finally approved in Parliament sans Opposition.
The people who fought against the Emergency were the people forming the “political partisan” against Khosla’s report. They included politician Samar Guha, lawyer Gobinda Mukhoty—who went on to fight for justice for the victims of 1984 genocide—and journalist Barun Sengupta.
Disregarding the actual turn of events, Sugata Bose further writes that more than twenty years after Khosla’s report was rejected, “yet another” commission was appointed by the Government. There is no light what had led to all this momentous decision. The setting up of new commission was not a government decision per se; it just had to obey the order of the Calcutta High Court. Sugata Bose is giving his readers an impression as if the formation of the new commission was result of some governmental whim at a time when his favourite dispensation was out of power.
The facts of Khosla’s closeness to Nehru, his self-proclaimed disagreement with Bose during their student days in London, his writing the biography of Indira Gandhi during the period he was heading the Netaji Inquiry Commission and his churning out a book from his inquiry, the apology he rendered to the Bose family have not shaken Sugata’s faith in him. But His Majesty’s opponent describes Justice MK Mukherjee as “retired Bengali judge” to impute impartiality to him. Added to it is the disparaging remark that he “held court” and provided “a venue for increasingly fanciful stories”.
Sugata Bose goes on to allege that Mukherjee “himself harboured a preconceived notion”. He thinks it is proven by two factors: In October 2002, the commission had asked some Bose family members to provide blood samples for a DNA match with Bhagwanji of Faizabad. Then in 2010 Mukherjee was seen on TV, making an off-the-record remark filmed without his knowledge that he was sure that Bhagwanji was Netaji. The history professor adds that there is no evidence to back this theory and Mukherjee’s entertaining a “most preposterous” claim about Bhagwanji caused confusion among the public. His stray comments about the Mukherjee Commission occupy no more than two paras and just with these he has trashed an inquiry which lasted for six years and indicted the Government of India on several points.
As a non-Bengali who followed commission’s work closely, I am in a position to assert some facts. The Calcutta High Court judgment which directed the central government to form a commission was issued by then Chief Justice Prabha Shankar Mishra. It is the norm in India nowadays for the chief justices of the state high courts not to be hailing from those states. Things seem to have changed from the days when Lahore-born GD Khosla could have become Chief Justice of the Punjab High Court.
I had the opportunity to speak with retired Justice Mishra in New Delhi a few years ago. He told me that the main reason for his reaching that decision was the disclosure made by the Government that it itself was not sure of Bose’s death.
Justice Mukherjee’s name as the chairman of the new commission was recommended by the Chief Justice of India. Incidentally, I don't find Sugata Bose mentioning, much less underlining, in his book that Mukherjee is a former Supreme Court judge. He just sees a “Bengali” in him. It is as if Sugata Bose is taking a leaf out of GD Khosla’s book. The judge's personal papers, now kept at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, also reflect a similar parochial point of view. Even after a case was filed by the Bose family against him in Kolkata for trying to defame Subhas “to please patrons for largesse and assignments”, Khosla was unrepentant. He filed—and apparently later withdrew—a transfer petition in the Supreme Court in which he painted the entire matter as a Bengali issue. He described Prof Samar Guha “a prominent Bengali member of the Lok Sabha” and claimed that he did not expect to “receive a fair and impartial trial” in Kolkata, home to his sister, and had “every reason to apprehend physical danger and injury to himself in the event of the trial being held in West Bengal”.
Sugata Bose's description of Jutice Mukherjee a “Bengali judge” is a low blow. This is not how we look at our judges. Justice SH Kapadia is not a “Parsi judge”; he is the Chief Justice of India. We associate people who occupy or have occupied high offices with a particular region or religion only in the complimentary sense.
Sugata Bose was nowhere in sight when Justice Mukherjee examined the witnesses. Mukherjee put pointed, pertinent questions to probe whether or not the person standing in the witness corner possessed any evidence to back his statements. The former Supreme Court judge did not “held court”; he conducted proceedings according to the Commission of Inquiry Act.
Two of Sugata’s uncles that I have known, know it well because they didn’t have to let their imagination wander to visualize what had actually happened. Late Pradip Bose was there on some occasions, and Subrata Bose attended most of the commission’s public hearings. Later 43 members of the family, including these two cousins, issued a statement which expressed deep appreciation for “the arduous efforts” of “Mr Justice MK Mukherjee and his team in the commission”.
~~India's Biggest Cover Up -by- Anuj Dhar
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