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Netaji Files : Centre Approached Japan, Russia, UK

NEW DELHI: The latest tranche of declassified papers related to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, released by the BJP government on Tuesday, confirm longheld suspicions that documents on his disappearance and death were destroyed. This disclosure could become a political hot potato in the upcoming West Bengal polls.Documents belonging to the PMO on the Justice Mukherjee commission of inquiry mention that some files, including a proposal to keep Bose's ashes in a memorial at Delhi's Red Fort, were either not “readily traceable“ or “destroyed“. Most of the files are likely to have been destroyed in the 60s and 70s, one file noting points out.The commission had sought photocopies of orders regarding destruction of filesdocuments concerning Netaji as also photocopies of the lists of files documents destroyed.The PMO had informed the commission that “one file no. 12(226)56-PM has been destroyed on 6.3.1972; certain documents of file no. 23(156)51-PM have been destroyed while recording that file; and one file no. 2(381)60-66PM (proposal to bring Shri Subhas Chandra Bose's ashes from Tokyo to put up a memorial to him in front of the Red Fort in Delhi) is not readily tracea ble in our records". It is not immediate ly clear why these documents were de stroyed or what their exact contents were, though there have been reports that Bose's death in the 1945 aircrash was a smokescreen allowing him to es cape to the then USSR.Author Anuj Dhar, who has done ex tensive research on Netaji, said, “I hate to draw this parallel, but just as the gov ernment is making an inquiry into missing correspondence concerning the Ishrat Jahan case, they should find out how documents of historical im portance were destroyed by Congress governments. Under which rule of the official manual was a file concerning Subhas Bose's death destroyed in 1972 when the matter was under investiga tion by a judicial commission?" The 50 files declassified on Tuesday include 10 from the PMO, 10 from MHA and 30 from MEA, and pertain to the period 1956-2009. The declassification of files on Netaji was started on his 119th birth anniversary, January 23, this year, when PM Modi released the firs lot of 100 files.