NEW DELHI:Much of the attention has shifted to the PMO and the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) after West Bengal declassified 64 files on Subhas Chandra Bose on Friday, but 76 files on Netaji and his Indian National Army are quietly locked away in the Intelligence Bureau headquarters in New Delhi.
Those waiting for a closure with the declassification of 64 files by the Mamata Banerjee-led government will have to wait a little longer. Apart from 89 files on Netaji—29 files with the MEA, 60 files with PMO—the IB has 76 files, five files and 71 microfilms, which require microfilm reader to view the documents.
Foreign Espionage on Netaji with IB?
Not much is known about these documents except that some files may be copies of Government Communications Headquarters’ (GCHQ) intelligence reports. GCHQ is a British intelligence and security organisation that was formed after the First World War in 1919. GCHQ’s earlier avatar, GC&CS (as it was known till 1946), was snooping on Netaji, and all his activities were recorded by the spies and stored in the British agency’s headquarters in Bletchley Park, 80km northwest of London. GC&CS is learnt to have generated volumes of intelligence on Netaji and his close aides, while he was travelling to Germany, Bangkok and Singapore.
Among the files, sources said one file throws light on Netaji’s travel to Bangkok in May 1945 when he and his associates were carrying gold and diamonds in four boxes. It is a known fact that Netaji held several rounds of meeting with a colleague in Bangkok for future course of action. However, in-depth details related to his subsequent journeys remain in the domain of speculation.
Besides, sources said the IB files might have more information on activities of INA members, and some files could be related to the special operation group that was responsible for surveillance on Netaji. It is not yet clear whether three Commissions of Inquiry set up by governments in 1956, 1970 and 1999 had examined the IB files while authoring the report on Bose’s mysterious disappearance in 1945.
PMO Files May Decode Russia, China Mystery
There is also reportedly a letter dated May 24, 1949, from Chinese national Hsiang Kuang to Amiya Nath Bose that was intercepted by the IB, in which Kuang quoted a report in a Chinese newspaper claiming that Netaji was alive and kept in a camp in Manchuria. Some files already declassified by the government had suggested another version that Netaji was imprisoned by Russians in Cell No. 45 in Yakutsk, Siberia, where over 516,841 perished under Stalin.
“Though the letter adds to the mystery surrounding Netaji’s disappearance, it will be all the more important to declassify and place everything in the public domain to ascertain the facts,” a senior government official told The Sunday Standard.
Although the Modi government had constituted an inter-ministerial panel to review the Official Secrets Act (OSA) and to decide on declassifying the Netaji files in April this year, little progress has been made so far. Top sources in the government said they had not examined any files lying with the PMO in the last four-five months.
“No decision has been taken so far to examine the files, which is an exercise before declassifying them. If the government takes a decision, the entire process of examination, preservation and release could be done within a week,” a government source added.
But, it would be excellent, sources said, if the government could access records from Russian Spy agencies KGB, SMERSH and GRU which are said to have huge volumes of intelligence dispatches on Siberian gulags, where Bose was suspected to have been imprisoned along with other prisoners of war and dissidents.
Sources also said that the Ukraine parliament in April had decided to declassify some records of Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), CHEKA, NKVD, SMERSH and the Ministry of State Security (MGB) dated between 1917 and 1991.
“The government may get in touch with the Ukraine authorities to access the records to ascertain the facts,” a source added.