Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose

Netaji missing from crash death register
Mukherjee Judge cites evidence to back claim he didn’t die in Formosa
NANDINI GUHA
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Posted online: Wednesday, December 14, 2005 at 0340 hours IST

The death register (left) KOLKATA, DECEMBER 13: Add one more to the swirl of conspiracy theories around Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s disappearance.

It’s now with the Home Ministry as Exhibit Number 304. Written in Japanese, it’s a 60-year-old “death register” issued by the local municipality in Taihoku 10 days after the August 17, 1945 aircrash in which Netaji is said to have been killed. The death register does not have Netaji’s name. Neither does it mention the name of the pilot or the co-pilot.

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This forms the key evidence behind the conclusion of the Justice Manoj Kumar Mukherjee commission—as first reported in The Indian Express on November 13—that Netaji did not die in the plane crash.

“The Commission’s report indeed cites this evidence. I cannot comment on whether there is any further scope of inquiry”, Mukherjee told The Indian Express.

The evidence he is referring to—he submitted his report last month—contradicts the official Indian line and the finding of the previous two commissions, Shah Nawaz Committee (1956) and the Khosla Commission (1972), which concluded that Netaji had died in the plane crash.

The death register is a 25-page list of 273 persons—Japanese, Chinese and British—cremated and buried under the Taihoku municipality from August 17, 1945 to August 27, 1945.

The Mukherjee Commission had asked for death records of that period from the Taipei City Government in January, 2005.

The death register reached the commission after its visit to Taipei and Bangkok on January 26 and 27 this year. Translator Sandeep Kumar Sett’s letter to the commission (Exhibit 305) reads: “There is no entry in the name of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose/Chandra Bose, Pilot Takizawa, Co-Pilot Aoyagi and General Shidei in the above documents of cremation”.

Another letter which Justice Mukherjee has cited in his report as evidence against the crash theory is one from the CIA, archived at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Maryland.

The letter, which reached the Mukherjee Commission via the MEA on Jan 27, 2005, is on the letterhead of the Department of State and is dated June 28, 1946. It says: “A search of the files in the Intelligence Division reveals that there is no direct evidence that Subhas Chandra Bose was killed in an airplane crash at Taihoko, Formosa, despite the public statement of the Japanese to that effect”. This document was informally sent by the Friends of India Society in the US after it was declassified in 1986 but a certified copy reached the Commission only in January 2005.