Netaji family dispute '1945 death' claim

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's family members are obviously angry at an RTI reply stating that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose died in an aircrash in 1945 by a Central Government Department in New Delhi.

Though this came from a bureaucrat, it is totally malefide and irresponsible, said Abhijit Roy, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's elder brother and Sarat Chandra Bose's grandson.

That Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose died in an aircrash in 1947 is widely contested by family members who even met the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to demand declassification of secret Government files on the leader.

"Though the Shahnawaz Committee and G D Khosla Commission concluded that he died in a crash, Suresh C Bose had submitted his dissention report. Also the government did not accept the latest Justice Mukherjee Commission report but the RTI reply mentions it with regard to the Gumnami Baba theory. We will protest," Roy told Millennium Post.

Meanwhile the BJP leader from West Bengal and Bose's grandnephew Chandra Kumar Bose said that he will try to meet the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and seek

penalty for the bureaucrat who made this embarrassing statement on Netaji.

"The BJP has already said that it is a mistake. Also, I have already demanded a SIT probe into his death", Chandra Kumar Bose told Millennium Post.

Earlier, 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.

"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 earlier said. 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 as well as information about one Gumnami Baba living in Uttar Pradesh in the 80s.

Interestingly, the Justice Mukherjee Commission had also trashed his death. 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.