A prominent Congress leader apparently told Dr Chandan Roychowdhury that there would be an international crisis if the facts were made public and so the project needed to be stopped.
Kolkata: Netaji researcher Dr Purabi Roy, in an interaction with political analyst Niladri Banerjee, in the digital space, has revealed forgotten facts about the disappearance of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.
Dr Roy went to Russia on behalf of the Asiatic Society in the mid-1990s for a research project on Indo-Soviet relations between 1917 and 1947. The project was initiated by the then General Secretary of the Asiatic Society, Dr Chandan Roychowdhury. While in Russia, Dr Roy found mentions of “Chandra Bose” in almost all the documents related to Indo-Soviet relations she went through. While further investigating the matter, she came across a note of a meeting chaired by Joseph Stalin in 1946 where “Chandra Bose” was mentioned as being present in Soviet Russia. When this astounding fact was released to the media by Dr Chandan Roychowdhury, the funding for the project was stopped by the then Congress government at the Centre. A prominent Congress leader apparently told Dr Chandan Roychowdhury that there would be an international crisis if the facts were made public and so the project needed to be stopped. The untimely death of Dr Chandan Roychowdhury in 1997 put an end to the discovery temporarily, but Dr Purabi Roy has finally spoken about the incident in her interaction with Niladri Banerjee.
Sarat Chandra Bose, the elder brother of Netaji, had raised this matter when in a headline in his newspaper, The Nation, in 1949, he had asserted, “Netaji in Red China”.
The daughter of Sarat Chandra Bose, Chitra Ghosh said in an interview on a TV channel sometime back that the then Congress leader, Pranab Mukherjee had met Emilie Schenkl—who was married to Netaji in Germany—to persuade her to declare that Netaji had died in the air crash in 1945. But Netaji’s wife refused to do so and continued to believe that Netaji was in Soviet Russia.
In the context of this revelation, it has become extremely important to explore the possibility of releasing the Netaji files that are with Russia, of which Dr Roy has mentioned in her interview.
The biggest tribute to Netaji in his 125th birth anniversary year would be to solve his mysterious disappearance, finally.