Netaji’s Family: ‘Spying’ is an Affront to Freedom Fighters

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s family in Kolkata is “shocked” by the snooping revelations.

Sugata Bose, historian, Harvard professor and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s great-grandnephew, is appalled by the declassified files he saw at the National Archives in Delhi this week.

This is not a family matter it is a national issue. It is an affront to freedom fighters.

The two documents declassified by Intelligence Bureau (IB) revealed that India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had the agency spy on Netaji’s family for 20 years, between 1948 and 1968. Nehru was Prime Minister for most of those years till he passed away in 1964.

As a historian, Sugata (also a Trinamool Congress MP), has been urging the government to declassify all files that are more than 30 years old and not just the ones pertaining to Netaji. “If files are very sensitive they could be accessed after 50 years, ” he adds.

Sugata is not willing to accept the government’s claim that declassification of files could jeopardize relationships with foreign governments.

I referred to allegations of Winston Churchill plotting Netaji’s assassination but surely we don’t hold British Prime Minister David Cameron responsible for what Churchill may have done. That’s a lame excuse.

Sugata grew up in 1 Woodburn Park in Kolkata where he lived till 1974. The family house in Elgin Road was converted to the Netaji Research Bureau. These were the properties that were kept under constant surveillance for two decades.

It is an unacceptable invasion of privacy. My father, Sisir Bose‘s letters to and from Netaji’s wife Emily Schenkl, who was in Austria at the time, were being tracked by the IB.

In a strong bid to preserve the traditions of the freedom struggle, Sugata’s father was in constant touch with those who were associated with Netaji’s Indian National Army (INA). He would painstakingly record memoirs to which the government of the day seemed indifferent.

While the family finds it difficult to accept this intrusion, for Sugata it is even harder to reconcile this revelation with the friendship Nehru extended to his father in the early sixties.

I was just 4 years old . Whenever my father went to Delhi, he was invited by Nehru for breakfast It is hard to come to terms with the surveillance for my father.

Did the Nehru government fear Subhash Chandra Bose’s return or the resurrection of the INA?

While an embarrassed Congress party accuses the BJP of attempting to distort history by selectively leaking files, Sugata feels the Nehru government feared a political challenge.