Netaji's family rejects Centre's RTI reply on Bose's death; demands SIT probe

Kolkata: Rejecting the Centre's statement on the death of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, BJP leader and his grand nephew Chandra Bose on Wednesday demanded setting up a special investigation team to unravel the mystery of Netaji's disappearance.

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose died in an aircrash in 1945, the Central government said today, putting to an end a controversy that refuses to be buried about the freedom fighter having survived the accident.

The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) said in a reply to an RTI application from a Kolkata resident that the government had come to this conclusion after considering the reports of various committees that probed the death of Bose, who, many believed, had not perished in the crash.

"I demand the Central government immediately take action against the officer who gave such an irresponsible reply. How can the government come to a conclusion regarding Netaji's death without concrete evidence?" he asked.

"The Central government should apologise for such misleading statements and form an SIT to unravel the mystery of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose's disappearance," Bose, vice-president of the Bengal BJP unit, told PTI.

The RTI query was filed by Sayak Sen, convener of Open Platform for Netaji, under the Right To Information Act to the Home Ministry about the whereabouts of Netaji post August 18, 1945.

He also sought to know how many files were declassified by the MHA and how many were yet to be declassified besides the information about one Gumnami Baba living in Uttar Pradesh in the 80s.

On the question of Gumnami Baba, the RTI reply said, "Some information regarding Gumnami Baba and Bhagwanji is available in the Mukherjee Commission report on page 114-122...The Mukherjee Commission had come to the conclusion that Gumnami Baba/Bhagwanji was not Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Ministry of Home Affairs has declassified all available files (37) relating to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose."

Netaji had gone missing in 1945 and some of his family members had rejected the report of his death in a plane crash in Taihoku airport in Taiwan on August 18 that year.

In October, 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met the family members of Netaji and announced that the government would declassify the files relating to the leader.

Last year, on Netaji's 119th birth anniversary on January 23, as many as 100 secret files were made public by Modi.