“These and a few more files from the PMO were later transferred to NAI”, a Culture Ministry official said.
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Tan Ti-Ti confirmed that on the day of the cremation, the same Japanese army officer “came to the crematorium in a auto in the company of an Indian”, said to be Bose’s aide-de-camp Colonel Habibur Rehman, who survived the crash.
“The website, www.bosefiles.info has been coming out with serialised ‘revelations” backing the theory that the Indian revolutionary leader died in a plane cash on 18 August 1945, in Taiwan.
In compliance with the said announcement the first lot of 33 files were declassified by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and handed over to the National Archives of India on 4 December 2015.
On October 14, the PM had hosted the extended family of Bose at his 7-RCR residence and had promised them to declassify Netaji files.
Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Saturday paid homage to freedom fighter Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose on his 119th birth anniversary. He also tweeted that he would attend the declassification of Netaji’s files at the National Archives.
There is no convincing answer on why the Indian establishment would snoop on the Bose family for almost three decades after Independence, something that the 64 declassified files with the West Bengal government have already proved, if it did not believe in the possibility of Bose being alive well beyond 1945. “Will go to National Archives myself for the same”, Modi said in another post. The other says that Netaji returned to India as an ascetic, “Gumnami Baba”, and continued to live in Uttar Pradesh’s Faizabad till 1985.
Tewari also emphasized that one must respect the viewpoint of Netaji’s daughter, Anita Bose Pfaff, who is possibly in the best position to appreciate all the information that is available with her.
A museum in Kolkata dedicated to Bose preserves memories of the leader.
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Other pictures capture his 90-day journey from Germany to Japan aboard a submarine between February and May 1943. The family feels that the whole truth about the death of Bose has not yet been revealed.
