Protest mounts as Rahul Gandhi tweets death date of Netaji

January 23: While the entire nation is busy celebrating the 122nd birth anniversary of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose with honour, a tweet from Congress President Rahul Gandhi has given rise to protest throughout the country. Mr. Gandhi tweeted a photograph of Subhas Chandra Bose, wherein he has mentioned the date of death as 18 August, 1945. This is the date on which the alleged plane crash occurred in which some claim that Subhas Bose died! However, since independence many commissions were set up whose reports remained debatable. The Mukherjee Commission report clearly mentioned that Subhas Chandra Bose was not killed in that controversial plane crash.

नेताजी सुभाष चंद्र बोस जी की जयंती पर उन्हें शत् शत् नमन।#netajisubhashchandrabose pic.twitter.com/qCAQNeVUA3

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) January 23, 2019

What exactly happened when the aircraft carrying Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, the tragic hero of India’s freedom struggle, was never really conclusively understood as everyone who survived that incident and the official power centres of the world had a different opinion about it. A major reason that prevented a credible discussion on the death of Netaji was the breakdown of the internal mechanism of the Congress party. Jawaharlal Nehru who took over as the prime minister of India remained on difficult terms with the Boses who maintained a power centre in the Congress party. The cold war between Sarat Bose and Nehru was well known and cast a shadow on conduct of frank conversations between the two.

However though much uproar was made following the tweet of Rahul Gandhi, but another fact which needs mention here is a RTI reply given by the present Modi government in this connection. In April 2017, one Sayak Sen filed a Right to Information (RTI) application asking about Gumnami Baba — the identity that many claim Netaji had taken up after surviving the plane crash. The RTI application also asked if the government has any information about Netaji’s whereabouts after August 18, 1945. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) responded in 2017 saying that the government, after considering reports from various commissions, has concluded that Netaji had indeed died in the 1945 plane crash. So going by this response from the Indian government, it seems that Rahul Gandhi just echoed what the present BJP government officially declared in 2017.

Netaji’s daughter has urged that his DNA should be extracted from the remains kept at the Shinto shrine near Tokyo. However, till date none has come forward to do the DNA tests. The tweet of Mr. Rahul Gandhi mentioning the date of Netaji as ’18 August, 1945′ has once again opened the Pandora’s box of the mystery surrounding the greatest Hero the nation has ever produced.