It was the Congress-led UPA government that declassified the secret documents that showed that the Jawaharlal Nehru government spied on the family members of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose for over two decades. Senior Congress leader Shivraj Patil, who was Union Home Minister in 2007, decided to declassify the secret documents at the time. These caused major embarrassment to the Congress this week. It took five years, that is until 2012, for some parts of the files to reach those who had asked for them. It took until 2014 for the snooping file to become public.

"I have a feeling that the two files mentioning about snooping by the Nehru government came out by mistake," said Anuj Dhar, who is leading the campaign to declassify the Netaji files.

In 2006, Anuj Dhar along with fellow activists Sayantan Dasgupta and Chandrachud moved the Ministry of Home Affairs, demanding that the documents regarding Netaji's mysterious disappearance in 1945 be made public under the RTI Act. However, initially the MHA was reluctant to do so. The Central Information Commission, in 2007, asked the MHA to make the files public. After this the matter was referred to the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs, which cleared it, following which the MHA decided to declassify about 10,000 pages of the 70,000-page Netaji files.

The documents include communications to and from the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the chiefs of intelligence, which had been given to the Shah Nawaz Khan Committee of 1956 and Justice G.D. Khosla Commission of 1970. As per the findings of the two commissions, Netaji died in an air crash in August 1945. However, this was trashed by the Justice M.K. Mukherjee Commission in 2005.

Sources said that a part of the 10,000 pages was declassified in 2012 and sent to the National Archives of India (NAI). The two IB files that talk about spying on Netaji's relatives too were declassified in 2012 and sent from the West Bengal's intelligence branch to the Intelligence Bureau in Delhi.

Sources said that although the MHA had sent the declassified files to the NAI in 2012, it was only in November 2014 that the NAI completed the task of arranging the files, after which these were made accessible to research scholars. Apart from the documents relating to the two inquiry commissions, the NAI also has four other files related to the Azad Hind Fauj.

While replying to a query by Nityanand Rai in the Lok Sabha in February this year, Union Minister of State for Home Haribhai Parathibhai Chaudhary said: "The Ministry of Home Affairs has sent all the files/documents relating to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose to NAI on 1.10.2012 for permanent retention. It has been informed by NAI that they have prepared the list of these files and publicized the records to the scholars visiting the research room, NAI, with effect from 17.11.2014."