Declassified Netaji files hint at China trip

The 64 files recently declassified and released by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee have taken the lid off many an unknown facet about Subhas Chandra Bose’s life after 1945 — the officially accepted year of his death in a plane crash in Taipei. In fact, Bose may have travelled to Communist China and not just the Soviet Union — which many researchers believe to have been his destination from Japan in 1945.

In fact, File no 58 revealed a letter <g data-gr-id="30">written</g> in 1948, which stated that Bose may have moved to China and Soviet Russia post 1945 from Taiwan. The CID (Howrah) cites British intelligence sources and said they believed that Bose was alive and sighted in Russia and China. “This is a new aspect to various theories about where Netaji went from Japan. Till now we knew only about <g data-gr-id="28">Soviet Union</g> but now we need to get more information about his possible visit to China,” Chandra Kumar Bose, Netaji’s <g data-gr-id="20">grand nephew</g>, told Millennium Post.

Researcher Purabi Roy said, “I have worked on Russian archives for <g data-gr-id="27">years</g> but Netaji’s visit to Communist China is a new possibility and must be investigated.”  In fact, another letter was found in these declassified files dated March 6, 1948, from Chow <g data-gr-id="23">Hsiang Kuang</g> (I & B ministry, New Delhi), to Netaji’s nephew Amiya Kumar Bose, stating that he believed Netaji was alive since no Chinese newspaper reported his death in 1945. “If Netaji had died in an air crash in Taiwan in 1945, it would have been reported in Chinese papers,” said Chandra Kumar Bose.

In her letter to Netaji’s brother Sarat Chandra Bose in December 1949, a journalist Lily Abegg said she believed that Netaji was alive in 1946. Abegg, in her letter, quoted Japanese sources. The letter was intercepted at the Elgin Road Post Office, said Chandra Kumar Bose.