Kolkata, Sep 19: Secret documents on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose released here on Friday showed that some members of his family believed that the nationalist leader was alive after 1945, the year he was reportedly killed in an air crash.
A declassified file contained a letter written by Netaji’s nephew S K Bose to his father and Netaji’s elder brother Sarat Chandra Bose in 1949 that he had information of Netaji going on the air on a radio channel.
“Peking Radio announced that Subhas Chandra Bose would broadcast. The radio also gave details regarding the time and wavelength of the broadcast. The Hong Kong office tried to listen in according to the details but nothing could be heard. I have asked the guard to let me have further details if possible,” he had written to his father from London on December 12, 1949.
The letter was intercepted by the Kolkata Police’s intelligence wing following a government order, according to the declassified files.
Accident theory
Netaji had gone missing in 1945 and some of his family members have rejected the theory that he had died in a plane crash in Taihoku airport in Taiwan on August 18 that year.
Another letter written by Sarat Chandra Bose to one Miss Lilly Abegg of Switzerland on December 28, 1949, stated: “If you had heard in 1946 from Japanese sources that my brother (Subhas) was still living, it strengthens my conviction more than if you had heard it from British and American sources.”
The files also have a number of letters written by Sarat Bose and received by him, which were intercepted mostly at the general post office in the city or the post office at Elgin Road, where the family lived.
Netaji’s grandnephew Chandra Bose said family members alive at that time believed the freedom fighter was alive. “But why did the Indian government keep our family members, who were reputed citizens and well-known personalities, under surveillance? We demand an inquiry into this from the central government,” he said
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