Special committee must scrutinise declassified Netaji files, says family

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s family has demanded that a special committee be set up to scrutinize the declassified files that Centre and the state Governments have released or are going to release on Bose.

Netaji’s family, gearing up to meet the Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 14, will demand that this committee be comprised of experts: researchers on Bose, activists, historians, family members and not just bureaucrats. “Bureaucrats will have to be there.

Officials from the Home and External Affairs have a vital role to play in declassification since foreign countries will have to be dealt with. But there must be other experts on Netaji who will scrutinize the files,” Abhijit Ray(Sarat Chandra Bose’s grandson) told Millennium Post.

Busy drafting a formal letter to be presented to the Prime Minister at the scheduled meeting, family members also want that the said committee  look into the missing documents or files on Netaji. “We already know that among the 64 files declassified by the Mamata Banerjee Government quite  a few vital pages (relating to Netaji’s disappearance in 1945 and subsequent activities)are missing. We doubt whether all the files shown to Justice Manoj Mukherjee in 2006 (for his commission) are here or whether he got to see all the said 64 files now declassified. Also, some secret Netaji files lying with the PMO are said to have been destroyed. The team must have an investigative outlook”, added Ray.

Interestingly, the team going to meet the PMO on Oct 14 will have not just family members on board but Justice Ashok Ganguly, researchers like Anuj Dhar and Chandrachur Ghosh from Mission Netaji, Major G D Bakshi and a few members from Open platform for Netaji. “The family is also ready to work with the bureaucrats to unravel this crucial aspect of history. The whole country wants to know: what happened to Netaji after 1945?", added Ray.