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లాల్ బహదూర్ పక్కన ఉన్నది నేతాజీనేనా?

KOLKATA: In the first ever visual evidence of Subhas Bose two decades after he was declared dead in an alleged plane crash, Netaji researchers have produced a forensic face-mapping report by a British expert that has found strong resemblance between Bose and a man photographed with former PM Lal Bahadur Shastri during the Indo-Pak peace talks in Tashkent in 1966.Citing the forensic report, the team has urged PM Narendra Modi to press Russian President Vladimir Putin to disclose the truth during his visit to Moscow later this month. If the photographs are indeed those of Netaji, they nullify two theories — that he died in an air crash in Taihoku in 1945 and that he was executed by Joseph Stalin in the early 1950s.According to Neil Miller, who has presented expert opinion in cases at UK high courts and the International Court of Justice in Hague, the face mapping of the mystery man seen in the Tashkent “lends support leaning on strong support to the contention that the person seen in the picture and Subhas Chandra Bose are one and the same person”.The face-mapping report lends credence to a claim made by Shastri’s kin that he may have spoken to Netaji during his Tashkent visit. Shastri mysteriously died of a heart attack in Tashkent on January 11, 1966. The former PM’s grandson, Sanjay Nath Singh, who was nine then, recounted that during a phone conversation barely an hour before he was declared dead, Shastri had said he would disclose something on return that would make the Opposition forget everything else.The forensic face mapping was commissioned by former Mission Netaji member and Dutch national of Indian origin Siddhartha Satbhai. The 36-year-old software professional, who had earlier highlighted the ‘Paris Man’ (an unidentified bearded man resembling Bose posing as a journalist in a group photo taken in Paris on January 25, 1969 during the Vietnam peace talks between the US and North Vietnam), sourced photographs and video footage from a variety of sources — British Pathe Online video archive, Topham Picture Point in UK’s Kent, RIA Novosti in Russia and Chughtai Museum in Pakistan’s Lahore as well as from the Anonymous Group—and had them analyzed by Miller.Miller examined the evidence for a month and then submitted a 62-page report last month where he noted that there were noticeable similarities in the facial features including ears, eyes, forehead, nose, lips and chin. The differences like hairline could be attributed to image quality, capture angles and items such as glasses and clothing that mask certain areas.“Serious consideration must be given to the contention that the Tashkent Man (TM) and Subhas Chandra Bose (SCB) share very similar facial features and could potentially be one and the same person. In a level of support scale, the imagery—both still and moving—lends support leaning towards strong support to the contention that TM and SCB are one and the same person,” the report noted.The confirmation could have been stronger had the resolution of photographs and video footage been better. In all the cases, the Tashkent man appear behind others and, therefore, at a distance from cameras that was focused primarily on Shastri, Pakistan President Muhammad Ayub Khan and Russian statesman Alexei Kosygin.A team of researchers and Netaji followers in Kolkata helped Satbhai raise £800 to pay Miller’s fee. Though they had initially tried to rope in an Indian expert, no one was willing to take it up. They then turned to an international expert and felt the report would be more credible as the examination would be free of biases.Once the report arrived, they followed it up with RTI applications to the ministry of external affairs inquiring about the identity of the Tashkent man. The government initially did not send a reply and then referred the matter to different desks, which said they had no information.The team comprises Netaji’s great grand-niece Rajyashri Chowdhury, nephrologist Shankar Kumar Chatterjee, researcher and deponent before the Justice Mukhejee Commission Jayanta Chowdhury and Netaji activist Debasish Sen among others.“During his meeting with the Bose family in October, the PM had said he would personally speak to Putin about Netaji files. Now that there is a forensic report by an international expert that points to a strong possibility of Netaji’s presence in Tashkent in 1966, he should present it to Putin and seek Russia’s cooperation to unravel the truth,” said Chowdhury.