Indian Intelligence Read the Bose Family's Mail After 1947. No File We Found Shows Nehru Ordered It. What the Netaji Files Show

A note from the Prime Minister's desk, 25 November 1957

Tokyo. 13 October 1957. Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India for ten years, visits a small Buddhist temple in the Suginami ward of the city. It is called Renkoji. Beside its main altar stands an urn. Inside, the temple's priest says, and the 1956 inquiry the Government of India accepted concluded, are the ashes of Subhas Chandra Bose, the man Indians call Netaji, who on the official record died after an air crash in Taiwan on 18 August 1945.

His visit is recorded there. A black stone tablet carries his name, cut in Japanese with his signature beneath, next to the names of Rajendra Prasad, who came on 4 October 1958, and Indira Gandhi, who came on 26 June 1969.

Six weeks later, back in Delhi, Nehru sends a short typed note to his Foreign Secretary, Subimal Dutt. He encloses photographs of the temple visit. Then he adds a second paragraph.

"Just before I left Japan, I heard that Shri Amiya Bose, son of Shri Sarat Chandra Bose, had reached Tokyo. He had previously, when I was in India, informed me that he was going there. I should like you to write to our Ambassador at Tokyo to find out from him what Shri Amiya Bose did in Tokyo. Did he go to our Embassy? Did he visit this Renkoji Temple?"

He signs it and dates it: 25.11.1957.

Amiya Nath Bose was Netaji's nephew, the son of his elder brother Sarat. The ambassador, C.S. Jha, replies on 10 December 1957. Amiya Bose, he writes, came to collect material for a biography of his uncle. He told the ambassador that the 1956 inquiry into Netaji's death "had not done its job properly". And then:

"We have no information about Amiya Bose having indulged here in any undesirable activities or expressions of opinion adverse to the Government of India or to its policies."

"As far as we have been able to ascertain, Amiya Bose did not visit the Renkoji Temple."

That exchange sat in a Top Secret file for nearly six decades. When it came out, in 2015 and 2016, it was put next to something much bigger: intelligence officers in Calcutta had been opening and copying the Bose family's letters since 1949. A national magazine called it independent India's "dirty state secret". Politicians called it Nehru's snooping. Others went further, and said the files proved Nehru knew Netaji was alive in Stalin's Soviet Union, and had even written to the British Prime Minister to call him "your war criminal".

This file reads the papers those claims rest on. It is free, because it is the way into this series, and so it is held to the strictest standard we have. Every claim gets a grade. Where the record proves something, we say so plainly. Where a popular claim fails against the record, we say that plainly too.

The eight claims, in eight lines

Read these first. Each is a chapter below with its own evidence and its own verdict.

• Claim 1, the watch. After independence, police and intelligence officers in Calcutta intercepted and copied the Bose family's letters, followed their contacts, and sent copies to the Intelligence Bureau in Delhi. (West Bengal file 62: 1949, 1961, 1965, 1971 pages)
• Claim 2, the order. "Nehru ordered the snooping." The documents we read show government orders of 20 September 1948 and 14 September 1949, numbered like the Bengal government's pre-1947 interception orders, Calcutta police paperwork, and copies to the Home Ministry's Intelligence Bureau. They do not show an order from Nehru. (Government Orders No. 1735 P.S. and No. 719 P.S.; Nehru's note of 25 November 1957)
• Claim 3, the files. The 2015 West Bengal release and the 2016 Government of India releases put hundreds of files in public. What they hold, and what is not in them. (National Archives of India; Lok Sabha answers of 5 May 2015 and 26 April 2016)
• Claim 4, the death. Three inquiries: 1956 and 1974 said Bose died in the Taihoku crash; 2005 said he did not, but could not say where or how he died; the government rejected that in 2006. (Shah Nawaz report; Khosla report; Mukherjee report; Cabinet direction of 9 May 2006)
• Claim 5, the sadhu. "Gumnami Baba of Faizabad was Netaji." A DNA test excluded Bose; the 2005 commission held the claim unproved; the 2017 commission called it "not correct". (Mukherjee report paras 4.15.10–4.15.12; Sahai report, Part VI)
• Claim 6, the urn. Are the Renkoji ashes Bose's? The 2005 commission said they belong to a Japanese soldier; the government said it did not agree; we found no record that a DNA test has ever been done. (Mukherjee report p. 107; MEA notes 1955 and 1995)
• Claim 7, the Soviet Union. "Bose escaped to Stalin's Russia." Russia's archives, including the security service's, told India they had nothing; even the commission that rejected the crash could not place him there. (Russian note verbale, 27 October 1995; Mukherjee report paras 4.10.2, 4.12.18)
• Claim 8, the letter. "Nehru wrote to Attlee calling Bose 'your war criminal'." No such letter appears in any record we read. Its only source is a stenographer's recollection, given in 1970, of something he said he typed in 1945. No record shows Bose on any war-criminal list, and British and Indian officials said he was on none. (Khosla witness 21; UK Ministry of Defence, 7 December 1998; Khosla report para 5.34)

The words you need, in plain language

Five minutes here and nothing below will confuse you.

Netaji. "Respected leader". The title Indians gave Subhas Chandra Bose (born 23 January 1897), twice President of the Indian National Congress (1938, 1939), who resigned the presidency in 1939 and formed the Forward Bloc, escaped from house arrest in Calcutta in January 1941, sought help from Germany and Japan, and led the Indian National Army (INA) against the British in Burma and north-east India in 1944–45.

Taihoku. The Japanese name for Taipei, in Taiwan (then called Formosa, a Japanese colony). The crash everyone argues about is said to have happened at its airfield on 18 August 1945, three days after Japan announced its surrender.

Renkoji. A Buddhist temple in Tokyo. Since September 1945 it has kept an urn said to hold Bose's ashes.

IB, Intelligence Branch, Special Branch, Security Control. The Intelligence Bureau (IB) is the Government of India's internal intelligence agency, part of the Ministry of Home Affairs. West Bengal's police had their own Intelligence Branch (state IB). Calcutta Police had a Special Branch. The West Bengal files also show an office called "Security Control, Calcutta", headed by an officer styled "Assistant Director & Deputy Commissioner of Police". Different offices. People who say "the IB snooped" usually mean all of them at once. This file keeps them apart.

Interception. Opening, reading, copying and resealing letters in the post. Under the Indian Post Office Act of 1898 a government could order it. The West Bengal forms in this file say each interception was "authorised, vide Government Order No." The orders cited on the Bose intercepts in the pages we read are No. 1735 P.S. of 20 September 1948 (March 1949 letter) and No. 719 P.S. of 14 September 1949 (November 1949 letter).

Commission of inquiry. A body appointed by government, often under the Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952, to find facts. It can summon witnesses, but its findings bind no one. Government must lay its report before Parliament with an Action Taken Report (ATR) saying what it accepts and rejects.

Declassify. Remove a secrecy marking so a file can be opened. Netaji Papers is the government's name for the files released from 2015; the website is netajipapers.gov.in, run by the National Archives of India.

DNA test. A laboratory comparison of genetic material. For the Faizabad sadhu, teeth were tested against blood from Bose's relatives. For the Tokyo urn, no test has ever been done.

Our grades. Every claim carries one: DOCUMENTED (we read the original or an official copy); REPORTED (a credible press or book report of a record we could not open, and we say whose); ALLEGED (by a commission, agency or court filing, not proved at trial); CLAIMED (by a party, politician, activist or author, and we say whose); NOT CLAIMED BY THIS FILE (things people say that we do not).

Who is who

Only the people this file needs, and only what the record says about them.

Sarat Chandra Bose (died 1950). Netaji's elder brother, a Calcutta lawyer and politician. Amiya Nath Bose and Sisir Kumar Bose were his sons, Netaji's nephews. Sisir drove Netaji out of Calcutta on the night of his 1941 escape and later founded the Netaji Research Bureau in Calcutta. Both are dead.

Suresh Chandra Bose. Another elder brother of Netaji; member of the 1956 inquiry, who refused to sign its final report.

Emilie Schenkl (died 1996) and Anita Bose Pfaff (born 1942). Netaji's Austrian wife and their daughter, an economist in Germany. Anita Bose Pfaff is living; she appears here only through her own recorded words and the official record of them.

Shah Nawaz Khan. An INA major general tried by the British in 1945–46; in 1956 a Congress MP and parliamentary secretary, and chairman of the first inquiry.

G.D. Khosla. Retired Chief Justice of the Punjab High Court; sole member of the second inquiry, 1970–74.

M.K. Mukherjee. Retired judge of the Supreme Court; sole member of the third inquiry, 1999–2005.

Vishnu Sahai. Retired judge; sole member of the Uttar Pradesh inquiry into the Faizabad sadhu, 2016–17.

Samar Guha. Member of Parliament who campaigned for decades for a fresh inquiry.

Claim 1: Calcutta's intelligence officers watched the Bose family after 1947, opened their letters and sent copies to Delhi

What happened. Independence did not end the watch on the Bose family's houses at 1 Woodburn Park and 38/2 Elgin Road in Calcutta. It changed hands.

The West Bengal government declassified 64 files from its police records on 18 September 2015. India Today reported the number of pages as 12,744 and quoted Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee at the release: "The documents prove that the Bose family was spied upon … it's proven." We read one of those files, file 62, in an Internet Archive copy of the release. Its typed pages are copies of police documents, each headed with an office file number and the pages it came from. Four of them show what the watch looked like.

March 1949. A typed copy of a letter "dated 23.3.49 intercepted at Elgin Road P.O. 24.3.49", from Amiya Bose in Calcutta to his brother Dr Sisir Kumar Bose, then in London. The heading records that the copy was forwarded "under Memo. No. 4930/P.P.632/49 dated 24th March, 1949 from D.C.S.B., Calcutta to S.S.P., I.B., West Bengal" — from the Deputy Commissioner, Special Branch, Calcutta Police, to the Special Superintendent of Police, Intelligence Branch, West Bengal. Then the authority: "Government Order No. 1735 P.S. dt. 20.9.48." The letter itself is about setting up a London office of a political party and which Indians in London might help it.

November 1961. The page does not say how this letter was obtained; it is filed as an informant's report: "A casual agent reports on 23.11.61 that Amiya Bose … communicated on 21.11.61 with Dr. E.N. Komarov, c/o. Institute of Peoples of Asia U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences". The page reproduces Amiya Bose's letter to a Soviet scholar about books, journals and his visit to Tashkent. A copy went from the "Asstt. Director & D.C.S.C., Calcutta to S.S.P., I.B., West Bengal, Calcutta, and others."

1965. "SECRET", "Calcutta Police Security Control", "Secret Weekly Survey No. 26 for the week ending 1.7.65", under the heading "Netaji Research Bureau": "It was secretly collected that Dr. SISIR KUMAR BOSE of this Bureau … informed YOICHI YOKOBORI of the KYODO News Service … about receipt of a parcel containing the material (in Japanese) on Netaji." A covering memo of 5 May 1965 forwards a casual agent's report "for favour of information" to, first on the list, "Shri A.S. Syali, Joint Assistant Director (F), Intelligence Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, New Delhi".

August 1971. A teleprinter message dated 20 August 1971, "SSS/MOST IMMEDIATE", from New Delhi to the Deputy Inspector General, Intelligence Branch, West Bengal, asks to be told at once whether there is "ANYTHING ADVERSE ON YOUR RECORD AGAINST DR. SISIR KUMAR BOSE". The 1965 extracts above carry the initials "AKS" and the dates 26 and 28 August 1971: they were copied out of older files in answer.

The Union government's own files add one more piece. On 22 June 2000 a Home Ministry director filed an affidavit before the Mukherjee Commission saying that there were "reportedly no files/papers concerning Netaji / INA" in the possession of the Cabinet Secretariat, the Intelligence Bureau, or the Research and Analysis Wing. The commission recorded that the claim "stood belied" by the Prime Minister's Office, which told it that its file on the investigation into Bose's death, holding a Cabinet agenda paper and decision, had been destroyed in 1972 and that Cabinet records were kept permanently in the Cabinet Secretariat.

How it happened. The paperwork tells the method. Letters were stopped in the post: at the Elgin Road post office in 1949, and in 1952–53 at the Park Street post office and at a foreign-mail point the forms call "DDAP". Each was copied, sometimes photographed, and either delivered or held; the printed form asks the officer to say which. Copies were kept in numbered files (606/39, "Dupl."; 356A/65; 1372-65 "Japan") and passed between three offices: Calcutta Police's Special Branch, the West Bengal Intelligence Branch, and "Security Control". Some went on to the Intelligence Bureau in Delhi. "Casual agents", informants, filled in what the post did not.

The same release shows what an interception order looked like. Pages from 1939 in another West Bengal file carry letters headed "Government of Bengal, Home Department, Political", numbered with the suffix "P.S.", addressed to Calcutta postmasters: "In exercise of the power conferred by section 26(1) of the Indian Post Office Act, 1898, the Governor is pleased to direct the interception of all ... postal articles" addressed to a named person, to be handed to "the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Special Branch, Calcutta", for "a period of three months". The orders cited for the Bose letters, No. 1735 P.S. of 1948 and No. 719 P.S. of 1949, carry the same kind of number. That suggests, but the pages we read do not state, that they were orders of the West Bengal government's Home (Political) Department; we grade that as our inference, not a documented fact. India Today reported in September 2015 that a Special Branch letter in the release cites it as the order "which first authorised interception of the Bose family letters" and asks for a one-year extension because the interception had been carried on "with good results". We did not find that letter in the pages we read.

How long did it last? Our pages run from March 1949 to 1965. Interception forms and intercept copies are dated 1949, 1952 and 1953; from 1955 to 1965 the contents of family letters appear in "casual agent" reports and weekly surveys that do not say how the letters were read. The 1971 item is different: it is Delhi asking whether there was anything "adverse" on record about Sisir Bose, and Calcutta answering with extracts from old files. The figure everyone repeats, "two decades, between 1948 and 1968", comes from India Today's report of 9 April 2015 on files it said the Union Home Ministry had declassified and placed in the National Archives, having been kept at the state Intelligence Branch office in Kolkata; its report of 19 September 2015 said these were "two declassified special branch files of around 50 pages". We did not see those files. India Today's September 2015 report said the West Bengal papers showed surveillance "until 1971"; on the pages we read, 1971 is a records check, not proof of interception in that year.

Why it matters. A government watching a family's post is a civil-liberties question in any democracy, whatever the reason. And this was not any family. Sarat Chandra Bose, on his niece Anita Bose Pfaff's account, "was not in agreement with the Congress" after independence. His sons were, in the 1960s, collecting the history of the INA and corresponding with Japanese journalists and Netaji's former associates. The pages show officers recording the arrival of a parcel of Japanese material about Netaji in a secret weekly survey, in other weeks under the heading "International Affairs".

It also matters for a reason almost nobody mentions. In 2000 the Home Ministry told a commission of inquiry, by affidavit, that the Intelligence Bureau reportedly had no papers on Netaji or the INA. The 1965 pages show informants' reports, later copied into the record on Sisir Bose, being forwarded to a Joint Assistant Director of that same Bureau. The affidavit may have been literally true of what the Bureau still held in 2000. If those copies were kept, the affidavit was not the whole truth about what the Bureau had been sent; we do not know whether they were kept.

What they say in answer. We found no official explanation of the surveillance from any government. On 5 May 2015 the Home Ministry was asked in the Lok Sabha whether it had set up "any inquiry committee/commission to investigate the spying incidents". The written answer: "No, Madam." That was the BJP-led government, less than four weeks after a BJP Union Minister, M. Venkaiah Naidu, had told reporters, as India Today reported on 11 April 2015, "I feel a thorough inquiry should be conducted and full facts must come to the open." We found no explanation from Congress either. India Today reported on 17 April 2015 that Congress MP Deepender Singh Hooda "refused to comment on the snooping controversy", but said all classified documents should be made public for the truth to come out, and called talk of a Nehru–Bose rivalry "misconstrued".

The explanations on the record come from others. Anita Bose Pfaff, Netaji's daughter, told India Today on 10 April 2015 that her uncle Sarat "was politically active until just after India's Independence and he was not in agreement with the Congress", that it was "a bit startling" her cousins were watched, and: "The government possibly believed that if my father was alive and wanted to come back to India, my cousins would be the most logical people for him to contact." Of her cousins she added: "They had no security implications at all." V. Balachandran, a former special secretary of the Research and Analysis Wing, told India Today he believed the family was watched because of "communist leanings", watching communists being a priority the IB inherited from Britain's MI5.

Evidence. 1. Government of West Bengal, declassified file 62 (released 18 September 2015), pages 37 (teleprinter message, 20 August 1971), 38 (casual agent's report of 23 November 1961 copying a letter of 21 November 1961), 3 and 109 (interception forms, 1953 and 1952), 67 (letter of 18 November 1949 intercepted at Elgin Road; "Government Order No. 719 P.S. dated 14.9.49"), 81 (letter intercepted at Park Street P.O., 22 January 1953), 42 (letter of 23 March 1949 intercepted 24 March 1949; "Government Order No. 1735 P.S. dt. 20.9.48"), 48 (Security Control weekly survey, week ending 1 July 1965), 49 (forwarding memo of 5 May 1965 to the Joint Assistant Director (F), Intelligence Bureau). Read in page images of the Internet Archive copy. 2. Government of West Bengal, declassified file 11, p. 152 (a 1939 interception order of the Government of Bengal, Home Department, Political, under section 26(1) of the Indian Post Office Act, 1898). Read. 3. Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry, Report, Vol. I (2005), paras 2.4.1–2.4.2, pp. 10–11 (Home Ministry affidavit of 22 June 2000). Read in full. 4. Lok Sabha, Starred Question No. 556, answered 5 May 2015 (Ministry of Home Affairs). Read in full. 5. India Today, "Exclusive: Jawaharlal Nehru's govt snooped on Subhas Chandra Bose's family for two decades", 9 April 2015; "Revelations shock Netaji's daughter", 10 April 2015; "As Jawaharlal Nehru snoop on Netaji's family explodes, Venkaiah Naidu favours probe", 11 April 2015; "Congress MP bats for Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose regiment in Indian Army", 17 April 2015; "Netaji snooped: We demand a judicial probe, says outraged family", 10 April 2015; "Confirmed: Nehru's spy army snooped on Netaji's kin", 19 September 2015. Read in full.

Verdict on this claim. Documented: letters were intercepted in 1949, 1952 and 1953; informants' reports on the family's correspondence run from 1961 to 1965, and a 1965 report was forwarded to an officer of the Home Ministry's Intelligence Bureau; the "1948 to 1968" span is reported, not something we could check. The watch was real and official, and we found no official explanation of it from any government.

Claim 2: "Nehru ordered the snooping"

What happened. The claim moved fast. India Today's cover story, published online on 9 April 2015, was headlined "Jawaharlal Nehru's govt snooped". By the next day a family member was quoted saying more. "Now we know that under instructions from Pandit Nehru the government kept surveillance," said Chandra Kumar Bose, a grand-nephew, as India Today reported on 10 April 2015. M.J. Akbar, then a BJP national spokesperson, told the magazine there was "only one reasonable explanation for this long surveillance on the Bose family by IB, which reported directly to Nehru".

What do the documents say about who decided?

The authorities named on the interception pages we read are "Government Order No. 1735 P.S. dt. 20.9.48" and, for a letter intercepted in November 1949, "Government Order No. 719 P.S. dated 14.9.49". They carry the same kind of number as the Bengal Home (Political) Department's pre-1947 interception orders in the same release, and the copies move between West Bengal's police offices. That points to the state government, but it is our inference. In September 1948 West Bengal's Chief Minister was Bidhan Chandra Roy of the Congress; the Union Home Minister, responsible for the Intelligence Bureau, was Vallabhbhai Patel. Neither order is in the pages we read, so we do not know who signed them.

The only document we found in which Nehru personally asks about a Bose family member's movements is the note of 25 November 1957. It went to the Foreign Office, not to the Intelligence Bureau. It asked the ambassador in Tokyo two questions about a nephew's visit to Japan, a visit the nephew had himself told Nehru about in advance. The Foreign Secretary wrote to Tokyo on 26 November. The ambassador answered on 10 December that he had nothing adverse to report.

India Today, which broke the story, said this itself. "The only documentary evidence that Nehru wanted to know what the Bose family was up to," it wrote on 9 April 2015, "comes in a confidential November 26, 1957, letter the PM wrote to then foreign secretary Subimal Dutt." The file shows the Prime Minister's note is dated 25 November; 26 November is the date of the Foreign Secretary's letter to Tokyo.

How it happened. Two separate things have been joined into one story. One is a police and intelligence operation, run from Calcutta, under a 1948 government order, copied to the central Intelligence Bureau. The other is a Prime Minister asking, once, through the diplomatic service, what a famous man's nephew had done on a visit to the temple the Prime Minister had just visited himself. The second is real. It does not prove the first was his order.

Nehru led the Union government for most of the years in question, and the Intelligence Bureau was a Union government agency. Political responsibility for what the Bureau did under him lay with his government. That is a different statement from "Nehru ordered it". The pages we read show copies reaching the Bureau only from 1965, after his death in May 1964, so even the Union government's part under Nehru is not documented here.

Why it matters. Because the difference is the whole point of reading documents. If a file showed Nehru ordering his rival's family watched, it would be one of the most serious things ever proved about him. No file we read shows that. A weaker sentence is true and still serious: interception orders were issued in 1948 and 1949, apparently by a state then governed by the Congress, the interceptions we can date fall in 1949, 1952 and 1953, informants' reports on the family run from 1961 to 1965, the only copies we can show reaching Delhi are dated 1965 (after Nehru's death) and 1971, and we found no explanation from any Prime Minister of any party.

What they say in answer. Nehru's defenders point to his recorded attitude to the family. In 1974 Justice Khosla, after reading Nehru's correspondence, wrote that "after independence when the question of Bose's family and any assistance which they might need arose, Nehru took every possible step to help them" (para 5.5). Khosla records that Nehru created a trust of Rs 2 lakh from the INA Relief Fund for Bose's daughter, with Rs 45,000 from the West Bengal government, and that Emilie Schenkl wrote to thank him: "May God bless you" (para 5.8). India Today quoted Nehru's intelligence chief B.N. Mullick's 1971 memoir, My Years with Nehru, saying the Prime Minister "had such a moral aversion to this work (espionage) that he would not allow us to operate even against the offending country's intelligence groups".

Neither answer touches the interception. A man can help a widow and still let his police read her letters. The record shows both kinds of conduct by the governments of the time. It does not show which, if any, Nehru knew of.

Evidence. 1. Prime Minister's Secretariat, note by J. Nehru to the Foreign Secretary, 25 November 1957, MEA file 25/4/NGO Vol. II with KW (photocopy), p. 38. Read in the original scan. 2. C.S. Jha, Ambassador in Tokyo, to S. Dutt, Foreign Secretary, D.O. No. F.5(4) NGO-I, 10 December 1957 (citing Dutt's D.O. No. FS/1009 of 26 November 1957), same file, pp. 151–152. Read in the original scan. 3. Government of West Bengal, file 62, p. 42 ("Government Order No. 1735 P.S. dt. 20.9.48"). Read in the original scan. 4. Report of the Commission of Inquiry (G.D. Khosla, 1974), paras 5.5 and 5.8, as filed in MEA file 25/4/NGO Vol-III (Part), Netaji Papers, pp. 169–170 of that file. Read. 5. India Today, 9 and 10 April 2015 (as above). Read.

Verdict on this claim. Not supported by any document we read: the interceptions cite government orders of 20 September 1948 and 14 September 1949, numbered like the Bengal Home (Political) Department's pre-1947 interception orders, and reports were copied to the Union Intelligence Bureau; the one Nehru note asked the Foreign Office about one nephew's one trip. "Nehru ordered it" is a claim, made in 2015 by a Bose family member (Chandra Kumar Bose); a BJP spokesperson, M.J. Akbar, said the IB "reported directly to Nehru" and that the government was not sure Bose was dead; "it happened under governments he led" is documented.

Claim 3: what the 2015 and 2016 releases actually contain

What happened. For decades governments of every party refused to open their Bose files. On 2 February 2015, India Today reported, the Prime Minister's Office told an RTI applicant that disclosure "would prejudicially affect relations with foreign countries". That was the BJP-led government, whose Home Minister had promised as BJP president to declassify the files.

Then the position changed, in four steps.

• 18 September 2015. The West Bengal government released 64 files from its police records, as reported.
• 14 October 2015. Prime Minister Narendra Modi met 35 members of the Bose family at his residence. His office's release that day: "He said he sees no reason to strangle history. He declared that the process of declassification of files will begin on January 23rd, 2016".
• 4 December 2015. The PMO handed the first 33 declassified files to the National Archives of India.
• 23 January 2016. The Prime Minister released digital copies of 100 files. The National Archives then released 200 more "in seven batches" by 30 September 2016: in all 300 files, mainly from the PMO, the Home Ministry and the Ministry of External Affairs, with some from the Cabinet Secretariat. The Home Ministry told the Lok Sabha on 26 April 2016 that the second batch, 50 files "pertaining to the period 1956 to 2009", went public on 29 March 2016.

How it happened. We read an index of the first 100 files and the machine-read text of all 300, then opened the scans of every page we quote. The files are dull in the way that real government is dull, and that is their value. They are about the three inquiries: their appointment, their bills, their travel, the documents they asked for and did not get. They are about the ashes: dozens of notes, from 1955 to 2007, on whether to bring the urn home. They are about Parliament questions, court cases, the Bharat Ratna decision of the early 1990s, and the war-criminal question. And they are about Bose's widow and daughter: correspondence from 1956 to 1971 under titles like "Widow and daughter of Shri Subhas Chandra Bose – Misc correspondence with and about".

Why it matters. Because of what is not in them. In the 300 files we searched, we found no government record that establishes Bose was alive after 18 August 1945. The documents that suggest he was are reports of rumours, letters from claimants, petitions, and intelligence notes asking whether a rumour might be true. The files, and the Mukherjee Commission's record of what it asked for, contain things that embarrass governments. They show a Prime Minister's Office telling a commission in 2000 that its 1956 file on the investigation into Bose's death, which held a Cabinet decision, had been destroyed in 1972 "in course of routine review/weeding", while the Khosla Commission was sitting. They show the PMO unable in 2001 to find any of the "further contemporary official documentary records" that Prime Minister Morarji Desai cited to Parliament in 1978. They show the External Affairs Ministry in 1995 suggesting that "public figures and others" be "discreetly encouraged to make statements, including in Parliament" in favour of bringing the ashes back (Claim 6).

And we did not find the family surveillance records of Claim 1 among the 300 central files. They came from West Bengal, and, on India Today's account, from two Special Branch files that the Home Ministry declassified and sent separately to the National Archives.

What they say in answer. Successive governments said for years that opening the files would harm relations with friendly countries. The release lets the reader test that. The foreign-government material we found in the 300 files is a 1995 Russian note that its archives held nothing on Bose in the USSR, a 1998 British letter that he was never listed as a war criminal, and the 1956 Japanese report of his death. None of it, on its face, is the kind of thing that would damage relations with those countries. What the files expose, where they expose anything, is Indian offices that lost papers, contradicted each other, and gave Parliament answers they could not support.

Evidence. 1. National Archives of India, "About" page of netajipapers.gov.in (Internet Archive capture, 2016). Read in full. 2. Prime Minister's Office, "Family members of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose call on PM", 14 October 2015 (pmindia.gov.in, Internet Archive capture). Read in full. 3. Lok Sabha, Starred Question No. 23, answered 26 April 2016 (Ministry of Home Affairs). Read in full. 4. Index of the first 100 declassified files (spreadsheet distributed with the January 2016 release, as mirrored at the Internet Archive). Read in full. 5. Mukherjee Commission report, Vol. I, paras 2.4.1–2.4.5 (pp. 10–13) and 2.5.1–2.5.5 (pp. 14–17). Read in full. 6. India Today, 9 April 2015 (the RTI reply of 2 February 2015). Read.

Verdict on this claim. Documented: the releases happened on the dates given, and they contain no record that documents Bose alive after August 1945; the Mukherjee Commission's finding that he left Saigon on 17 August and evaded the Allies is that commission's inference, and the Cabinet rejected it. They are a record of three inquiries, an urn, and a great many lost and contradictory papers, not of a living Netaji.

Claim 4: how Bose died, and what three inquiries said in their own words

What happened. Three official inquiries. Two answers. One government decision that settled nothing.

1956: the Shah Nawaz Committee. Nehru announced in Parliament on 3 December 1955 that an official committee would look into Bose's last days. It was appointed by notification No. F. 30(26)FEA/55 of 5 April 1956: Shah Nawaz Khan, Suresh Chandra Bose (Netaji's elder brother), and S.N. Maitra of the ICS, nominated by the West Bengal government. It examined 67 witnesses in India, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan, including four of the six Japanese survivors of the crash and two doctors who said they attended Bose. Its report, introduction, para 5:

"All the members agreed then that there had been an air crash at Taihoku in Formosa, in which Netaji met his death; that he was cremated there, and the ashes now lying at the Renkoji temple in Tokyo are in all probability his ashes. Since then, for reasons of his own, Shri Bose has taken a different view and has not signed the report."

Suresh Chandra Bose wrote a dissenting report that there had been no crash. The committee could not go to Taiwan: the Government of India "did not consider a visit to Formosa feasible", the report says, because India had no diplomatic relations with its authorities.

1974: the Khosla Commission. Appointed by Home Ministry notification No. 25/14/70-Poll.II of 11 July 1970, under the Commissions of Inquiry Act, because of "a widespread feeling amongst the public that the problem of finding the truth about Netaji's death still remains". It examined 224 witnesses, by the External Affairs Ministry's count, went to Taiwan, and reported in 1974. Its finding, para 4.129 (quoted again by the Home Minister in 2006):

"I, therefore, find it proved beyond all reasonable doubt that Bose travelled in a Japanese bomber from Touraine to Taihoku on the morning of 18th of August, 1945. … The plane crashed to the ground, broke into two parts and caught fire. In this fire the pilot and Genl. Shidei died instantaneously and of the other men on board, the co-pilot Ayoagi died later and Bose also succumbed to his burn injuries during the course of the following night. His body was cremated and the ashes were taken to Tokyo."

The Home Secretary, N.K. Mukarji, put a Cabinet note on 27 August 1974 proposing this statement of action taken: "The Government have decided to accept the findings of the Commission that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose died in an aircrash on the 18th August, 1945 at TAIHOKU airfield in TAIWAN". The report was laid before Parliament on 3 September 1974.

1978: the doubt. On 28 August 1978, replying to Samar Guha's motion, Prime Minister Morarji Desai of the Janata government told the Lok Sabha that "reasonable doubts have been cast on the correctness of the conclusions reached in the two reports", that "some further contemporary official documentary records have also become available", and that "Government find it difficult to accept that the earlier conclusions are decisive." According to the External Affairs Ministry's 1995 record of the debate, he added that "no useful purpose would be served by having any further inquiry". When the Mukherjee Commission asked for those "further contemporary official documentary records", the PMO said in 2001 that "no such records could be found in this office". The commission looked at the PMO's 1978 file itself and found "no such 'official documentary records' that might have led Shri Morarji Desai to make the statement" (para 2.5.5).

2005: the Mukherjee Commission. On 30 April 1998 the Calcutta High Court, on a public-interest petition, directed the Union government to launch "a vigorous inquiry". The West Bengal Assembly passed a unanimous resolution on 24 December 1998. On 14 May 1999 the government appointed retired Supreme Court judge M.K. Mukherjee by notification S.O. 339(E). He examined 131 witnesses and 308 exhibits, and visited Britain, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Russia. His conclusions, 7 November 2005, are on the page above. His central reasoning, para 4.12.18:

"it stands established that emplaning at Saigon on August 17, 1945 Netaji succeeded in evading the Allied Forces and escaping out of their reach and as a camouflage thereof the entire make-belief story of the air crash, Netaji's death therein and his cremation was engineered by the Japanese army authorities including the two doctors and Habibur Rahman".

One of the commission's reasons: the Taipei city government told it that it had no record of a crash on 18 August 1945. When the chairman asked what that statement was based on, officials told him it rested "solely on contemporary newspaper accounts kept in their archives"; microfilmed Taiwanese newspapers carried no report of a crash (para 4.12.12).

2006: the rejection. On 8 March 2006 the Home Minister decided the government was "not inclined to accept the finding of the JMCI to the effect that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose did not die in the plane crash on 18th August, 1945 in the absence of conclusive evidence to support its findings". On 9 May 2006 the Union Cabinet:

"(i) observed that the Commission's inquiry was inconclusive in many ways, unable to provide a definitive finding on several issues and at variance with past well accepted Inquiry Commissions' findings in some critical areas; and (ii) directed that in the light (i) above, the Action Taken Report specifically mention that Government did not agree with the findings that: (a) Netaji did not die in the plane crash; and (b) The ashes in the Renkoji Temple were not of Netaji."

The report and the Action Taken Report were laid in Parliament on 17 May 2006. The Home Ministry noted that "no press briefing" would be sent "because of the secret nature of the matter".

How it happened. Look at what each inquiry relied on. The 1956 and 1974 inquiries believed eyewitnesses: Japanese survivors, the doctors, and Bose's aide Habibur Rahman, who was on the plane and was burned. They had little paper; as the government later argued, war and defeat had destroyed much of it. The 2005 commission reversed the weight. It treated the absence of paper as evidence, read the contradictions between witnesses as signs of a cover story, and found that a Taipei cremation record matched a Japanese soldier (Claim 6). But it could not say where Bose went or how he died.

There is a fourth, older document: the Japanese Foreign Office's own report, "Investigation on the cause of death and other matters of the late Subhas Chandra Bose", sent to India's embassy in Tokyo in early 1956. It records the plane leaving Taipei, a propeller blade breaking and an engine falling off soon after take-off, the crash, Bose's burns, and his death at about 7 p.m. In September 2016 a UK website, bosefiles.info, published it, and the Indian press reported it as made public for the first time. India did not need Japan's permission to read it. The MEA's 1995 notes say it was "taken into account by both Shah Nawaz Committee and Khosla Commission", and its text is in Indian files released in 2016.

Why it matters. A government that rejects its own commission must say why. In 2006 the government's written reason was one sentence. The Rajya Sabha MP Barun Mukherjee of the Forward Bloc said on 24 August 2006 that the government had, "simply, in one sentence", rejected the findings "without assigning any reasons or arguments". The full reasons came only in the Home Minister's reply to the Lok Sabha debate.

What they say in answer. Home Minister Shivraj Patil's reply, laid on the table of the Lok Sabha on 7 August 2006, is the government's case in its own words. On the 1956 inquiry: "This inquiry held was closer to the date of incident, than the enquiries held later on. The evidence given by the witnesses could have been more reliable and dependable." On Desai: "No dates, no names or no numbers to identify the said files were given". On the Mukherjee report: "The report has not said as to how Netaji died, where he lived, and why he lived away from his dear motherland. How can this kind of ambiguous report be accepted by all of us?"

The government's answer on the documents is that Bose's own staff accepted his death at the time. The INA's publicity minister, S.A. Ayer, drafted the announcement of Bose's death broadcast on 23 August 1945; a Home Ministry note of the 1970s records that in a 1951 report to Nehru, Ayer "discussed the story of the fatal air-crash in considerable detail" and accepted it.

The other side's case is in the Mukherjee report itself, and in the 2013 judgment of the Calcutta High Court, which held the Action Taken Report beyond judicial scrutiny under Article 122 but added: "It is unfortunate, even after sixty-six years of independence we would not know how our leader being universally acclaimed, spent his last days … it is our earnest endeavour to observe, the issue must not be closed forever."

Evidence. 1. Netaji Inquiry Committee Report (Government of India, 1956), introduction paras 1–6, pp. 1–4; Chapter VII, "Recommendation". Read in full (Central Secretariat Library copy). 2. Khosla report, 1974, para 4.129, as filed in MEA file 25/4/NGO Vol-III (Part), p. 167 (also quoted by the Home Minister, Lok Sabha, 7 August 2006); Home Secretary N.K. Mukarji, Cabinet note of 27 August 1974, and notification No. 25/14/70-Poll.II of 11 July 1970, in MHA file 21/51/76-T, pp. 50–51; the same file's annexure on Samar Guha's 1977 speech, pp. 57–58 (S.A. Ayer's 1951 report as quoted). Read; p. 57 checked in the original scan. 3. Mukherjee report, Vol. I, paras 1.2–1.5 (pp. 1–4), 2.5–2.5.5 (pp. 14–17), 4.9 (p. 76), 4.12.12 (pp. 93–94), 4.12.18 (p. 106), 5.1 (p. 123). Read in full. 4. Ministry of Home Affairs file 12014/8/05-NCB-II, pp. 2 (decision of 8 March 2006), 13 (no press briefing), 15 (Cabinet Secretariat letter of 11 May 2006 recording the Cabinet's direction of 9 May 2006). Read in the original scans. 5. Lok Sabha, 7 August 2006, Home Minister's reply laid on the Table; Rajya Sabha, 24 August 2006, short duration discussion. Read in full. 6. Calcutta High Court, Rudra Jyoti Bhattacharjee & Ors. v. Union of India, W.P. 2003 of 2006 with connected petitions, judgment of 19 September 2013. Read in full. 7. Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, "Investigation on the cause of death and other matters of the late Subhas Chandra Bose" (1956), as filed in MEA file 14(13)FEA/56 (Part B), pp. 21–22, and MEA file TOK/102/2/03, p. 334. Read. 8. MEA background note of November 1995 (Morarji Desai's words of 28 August 1978; 224 Khosla witnesses), MEA file KW-I of 25/4/NGO Vol. IV (photocopy), pp. 6–7 and 16–18. Read. 9. OneIndia, "Japanese govt report on Netaji says he died in plane crash" (London, 1 September 2016; updated 2 September 2016), https://www.oneindia.com/international/japanese-govt-report-on-netaji-says-he-died-in-plane-crash-2197939.html (publication by bosefiles.info). Read.

Verdict on this claim. Documented: two inquiries (1956, 1974) found Bose died after the Taihoku crash on 18 August 1945; the third (2005) found he did not die in the crash but could not say how or where he died; the government formally disagreed in May 2006. What happened to Bose is a finding of two commissions against a contrary finding of a third. The Mukherjee Commission held that he escaped the Allied forces after leaving Saigon on 17 August 1945 (para 4.12.18), could not say where he went, and concluded that he is dead; no commission, and no document we read, shows when, where or how he died, or whether he lived beyond 1945.

Claim 5: "Gumnami Baba of Faizabad was Netaji"

What happened. On 16 September 1985 a reclusive holy man known as Gumnami Baba ("the nameless one") or Bhagwanji died in a rented part of a house called Ram Bhawan in Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh. He was cremated on 18 September 1985. Followers said he spoke to visitors only from behind a curtain, and that he was Netaji. Among his belongings were books, letters and photographs connected with Bose.

The Mukherjee Commission heard 31 witnesses on the claim. It sent five of nine teeth found in Ram Bhawan, with blood from two relatives on Bose's father's side and three on his mother's, to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory in Kolkata. Its director reported:

"The individual - source of the teeth does not belong to either maternal or paternal DNA lineage of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, therefore, can not be of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose."

The commission concluded, para 4.15.12: "in absence of any clinching evidence to prove that Bhagwanji/Gumnami Baba was Netaji the question whether he (Netaji) died in Faizabad on September 16, 1985 … need not be answered."

On 31 January 2013 the Allahabad High Court directed the Uttar Pradesh government to set up an inquiry, on petitions including one by a Bose relative. The state appointed Justice Vishnu Sahai by notification of 28 June 2016. His report is dated 19 September 2017 and was tabled in the state Assembly in December 2019. Its answer, Part VI:

"Head No.1:- Witnesses who claim that Gumnami Baba alias Bhagwanji was/may have been Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. Commission's Answer:- Claim not correct for reasons mentioned in Part III and Part V of this Report."

And its final conclusion: the identity of the man "could not be determined". He was, the report says, a Bengali, extraordinarily well-read, "an admirer of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose but whenever rumour started spreading that he was Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, he immediately changed his house".

How it happened. The two inquiries relied on the same DNA report. Justice Sahai dealt directly with the main objection, that a High Court bench had found no evidence the teeth tested were Bhagwanji's. "With profound respect to the Division Bench, in my view, the said reason cannot be a basis for discrediting the DNA result," he wrote, and he held it "established beyond all reasonable doubt that the teeth sent to the DNA expert were of Gumnami Baba alias Bhagwanji". He rejected witness after witness who said Bhagwanji was Bose, in each case noting that the claim was "belied by the DNA test".

Why it matters. Because the claim is still put forward, in books and films, as a suppressed truth. Two inquiries, one Union and one state, and a central forensic laboratory, have looked at it. Neither inquiry found it proved; the second found it "not correct".

What they say in answer. The researcher Anuj Dhar, who also found the Bose family surveillance files in the National Archives, according to India Today, and who testified before the Sahai Commission as witness CW-3, argued, as the report records, that the Mukherjee Commission's DNA conclusion "does not merit acceptance" because there was no evidence the teeth were Bhagwanji's. The commission considered and rejected the argument. Mukherjee himself began by saying there was, apparently, "no reason for not acting or relying upon the evidence" of witnesses who said they had met both men, but then held that there were "other formidable facts and circumstances on record which stand in the way of this Commission in arriving at a conclusive finding" (para 4.15.7): disagreeing handwriting experts, and the DNA result.

Evidence. 1. Mukherjee report, Vol. I, paras 4.15.6–4.15.12, pp. 119–122. Read in full. 2. Report of Gumnami Baba @ Bhagwanji Inquiry Commission by Justice Vishnu Sahai (dated 19 September 2017), Preface; Part III paras 5.2 onward, printed pp. 26–27; Part VI, printed pp. 142–144. Read in full. 3. Hindustan Times, "Gumnami Baba was not Netaji, but his follower, says Justice Sahai Commission", 19 December 2019 (tabling, and the Allahabad High Court order of 31 January 2013). Read in full.

Verdict on this claim. The claim fails against the record: a DNA test excluded Bose, the 2005 commission found it unproved, and the 2017 commission found it "not correct". The man's identity remains officially unknown. That he was Netaji is not proved by any inquiry.

Claim 6: the urn in Tokyo

What happened. The ashes cremated in Taipei were flown to Japan in September 1945 and, according to the 1956 committee, deposited at Renkoji. All three 1956 members had first agreed they were "in all probability his ashes"; the two who signed the report concluded they "are his ashes" and recommended they be "brought to India with due honour".

They never were. And the government's own files show why, decade by decade.

1955. T.N. Kaul of the External Affairs Ministry, 28 July 1955: "My impression is that while Government of India have accepted the fact of Netaji's death, we have not necessarily accepted that the ashes in the Renkoji Buddhist temple are his ashes."

1957. Foreign Secretary S. Dutt, 29 October 1957: "Controversy in regard to the death of Shri Subhash Chandra Bose has not yet ended, at least so far as some members of his family are concerned. Prime Minister decided therefore, on receipt of the Netaji Enquiry Committee's report that no attempt should yet be made to bring the ashes of Netaji back to India."

1991. The Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs, on 27 February 1991, approved the Home Ministry's view that "no useful purpose would be served by holding yet another enquiry", or by bringing the ashes back to India at that time, because it "might create unnecessary tensions".

1995. The Union Cabinet, on 8 February 1995, deferred a decision. The External Affairs Ministry's notes of November and December 1995 record that India paid the temple Yen 600,000 a year for upkeep, that the Prime Minister had directed on 30 November 1995 that this be raised to one million yen, and that Japan's Foreign Minister had told India's External Affairs Minister he "personally felt that it would be better to return the ashes to his homeland and to his family". The MEA proposed "promotion of consensus in favour of burying the controversy and bringing back the ashes", including that "public figures and others" be "discreetly encouraged to make statements, including in Parliament". A Statesman report of 15 December, filed with the notes, says the ministry had "more or less shelved" the plan, and the idea of a DNA test, until after the coming elections.

2005. The Mukherjee Commission found that the body cremated in Taipei in August 1945 was that of a Japanese soldier, Ichiro Okura, who it found had died of heart failure on 19 August 1945, and that "the ashes lying in that temple cannot be of Netaji" (para 4.12.19, p. 107). It tried to test them. Experts in Japan told it DNA could not be recovered from such ashes; the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad said some less-charred bone might yield DNA. The temple's head priest replied to a proposal from India's embassy, as forwarded on 25 April 2005, agreeing to DNA testing of the remains but, the commission said, without answering its specific request for an expert to select less-charred bone fragments; the commission's letter to the External Affairs Ministry of 20 May 2005 "evoked no response", and a reminder of 4 July 2005 got no reply before it reported (paras 2.8.7–2.8.11).

2006. The Cabinet directed that the Action Taken Report state that the government did not agree that the ashes were not Netaji's.

How it happened. The urn has been a diplomatic object, not a forensic one. For fifty years the papers weigh family feeling, Forward Bloc protests, Japanese patience and Indian elections. They almost never weigh evidence. The only attempt to test it, the 2005 commission's, ran out of time waiting on the ministry and, the commission wrote, on account of "the Temple authorities' reticence".

Why it matters. It is the one question in this file that science might settle. A DNA test of less-charred bone, if any survives, compared with Bose's relatives, could show whether the urn holds Bose. Every government since 1995 has had that option on paper, though the files also show Japanese experts' doubt that DNA survives in such ashes and the temple's reticence.

What they say in answer. In 1995, the files record, Anita Bose Pfaff told India's External Affairs Minister she was willing to see the ashes brought back but "did not approve of the DNA test". Her public position later changed: in January 2016 she said "A DNA test could provide proof, provided that the bones are not too badly charred for extracting DNA" and "I believe that the plane crash is the most likely cause of his death" (The News Minute, 26 January 2016), and in August 2025 she again asked India to bring the remains home (Organiser, 17 August 2025). On 11 August 2004 India's ambassador in Berlin recorded that "her family, and she herself, did not believe that Netaji was still alive", and suggesting the 60th anniversary of the war's end as an occasion to bring the ashes home. The journalist Ashis Ray, a relative of Netaji, whom the MEA's notes describe inconsistently, wrote to the Prime Minister on 5 September 1995 proposing a DNA test by an international team; the same notes record his Statesman article of 12 December 1995 stating that Bose died after the Taihoku crash. S.A. Ayer, Bose's publicity minister, had told Nehru in 1951 he had "not the faintest doubt" the Renkoji ashes were Netaji's. The Forward Bloc, the party Bose founded, opposed a DNA test at the time, as the Statesman cutting in the file reports. In 2013 the Union government told the Calcutta High Court, by affidavit, that it no longer funded the temple's maintenance.

Evidence. 1. T.N. Kaul, note of 28 July 1955, and S. Dutt, note of 29 October 1957, MEA file 25/4/NGO Vol. II with KW (photocopy), pp. 3 and 36. Read in the original scans. 2. Kyoei Mochizuki, priest of Renkoji, to Nehru, 22 November 1957 (Nehru's visit of 13 October 1957), same file, p. 155. Read. 3. Foreign Secretary S. Haidar, note of 21 November 1995, with draft Cabinet note, background note, the Statesman cutting and Ashis Ray's fax of 5 September 1995, MEA file KW-I of 25/4/NGO Vol. IV (photocopy), pp. 3–15. Read in the original scans. 4. Mukherjee report, Vol. I, paras 2.8.7–2.8.11 (pp. 26–31), 4.12.13–4.12.19 (pp. 94–107). Read in full. 5. Ambassador in Berlin to Joint Secretary (EA), letter No. Berl/Pol/101/3/04 of 11 August 2004, MEA file WI/103/98/2000-EW, p. 2. Read. 6. Netaji Inquiry Committee Report (1956), Chapter VII. Read. 7. Calcutta High Court judgment of 19 September 2013 (government affidavit on temple funding). Read.

Verdict on this claim. Unresolved, and documented as unresolved: two inquiries accepted the ashes as Bose's, the third found they were a Japanese soldier's, the government rejected that finding, and no DNA test has been done. Whether the urn holds Bose is not proved either way.

Claim 7: "Bose escaped to Stalin's Soviet Union"

What happened. The Soviet story is old. Bose's own plan, every inquiry agrees, was to reach Manchuria, then being overrun by Soviet forces, and through it Russia. The 1956 committee wrote that he "was preparing to shift his struggle from South-East Asia to Russia via Manchuria" and had left Saigon "in an aeroplane bound for Manchuria". The question is whether he got there.

During the Khosla inquiry, a Home Ministry note records, the External Affairs Ministry asked India's embassy in Moscow to request any relevant documents from the Soviet government. The embassy "sent a negative reply", and quoted the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia's entry, which said Bose died in an air crash in 1945. In 1991 and 1995 India's embassy in Moscow asked again, this time the Soviet and then the Russian Foreign Ministry, to search the archives. Russia's note verbale of 27 October 1995, as summarised in the External Affairs Ministry's notes:

"as a result of investigations carried out at the Central Archival Collection of the Federal Security Service of Russia, and the Russian Centre for Retention and Perusal of Documents of Modern History, no information whatsoever has come to light on the stay of Subhash Chandra Bose on the territory of the former USSR in 1945 and in subsequent years"

The Mukherjee Commission, the inquiry most open to the idea that Bose survived, went further. It asked Russian archives directly. Three sent documents, which "did not contain any relevant material"; six, "including Central Archives of FSB (formerly KGB) of Russia intimated that they had no documents concerning Subhas Chandra Bose". It went to Moscow from 20 to 30 September 2005, visited six archives, and found "no record relating to Netaji" in five and only a file of newspaper cuttings in the sixth (paras 4.10.2–4.10.3). It examined three Russian scholars said to have spoken of Bose's presence in Russia. One told it: "I have no proof, really that he was in USSR in 1945 or later." Its finding on the main witness for the Soviet theory, para 4.10.9: her "assertion … regarding Netaji's presence in Russia after August 18, 1945 cannot be acted upon". And its overall conclusion, para 4.12.18:

"But the question whether Netaji thereafter landed in Russia or elsewhere cannot be answered for dearth of evidence."

How it happened. The Soviet claim rests on a chain of hearsay: rumours reported to British intelligence in 1945–46, stories attributed to Soviet diplomats in Kabul and Tehran, a 1946 letter from Gandhi's ashram to the American journalist Louis Fischer, and later, the recollections of witnesses who said Russians had told them. The Mukherjee Commission held the last category inadmissible: "As none of the persons from whom they heard and learnt about Netaji's presence in Russia was / has been examined, the statements of the above witnesses in this regard cannot be treated as evidence, being hearsay" (para 4.10.10).

Why it matters. Because the Soviet story is how the Nehru claims are usually told: Bose alive in a Soviet camp, Nehru knowing and doing nothing. If there is no evidence he reached the Soviet Union, there is nothing for Nehru to have known.

What they say in answer. Supporters of the theory say Russian archives are not fully open, and that India never formally asked hard enough. Pradip Bose, a member of Bose's family, wrote in a note of about 1996, sent to Prime Minister Vajpayee on 20 April 1998 and kept in a PMO file, that scholars of the Asiatic Society had been told Russian files would open only on "a formal and written request" from India, and that the Narasimha Rao government "refused to do anything about it". The record shows India's embassy did make formal requests to Moscow, on 16 September 1991 and 27 July 1995, both under the Rao government, and again through the 2005 commission. Whether every Russian file was searched is something only Russia can show.

Evidence. 1. Embassy of India, Moscow, notes to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR (16 September 1991) and of the Russian Federation (27 July 1995), MEA file 25/4/NGO Vol-III (Part), pp. 2–6. Read. 2. MEA background note, November 1995 (Russian note verbale of 27 October 1995), MEA file KW-I of 25/4/NGO Vol. IV (photocopy), p. 10. Read. 3. Mukherjee report, Vol. I, paras 4.9–4.10.10 (pp. 76–81), 4.12.18 (p. 106). Read in full. 4. Netaji Inquiry Committee Report (1956), introduction para 6, p. 3. Read. 5. Pradip Bose, "A Note on the Mysteries of Netaji's 'Life and Death'" (c. 1996), sent to the Prime Minister with a letter of 20 April 1998, PMO file 915/11/C/6/96-Pol, pp. 105–112. Read. 6. Ministry of Home Affairs annexure on Samar Guha's speech of 3 August 1977, MHA file 21/51/76-T, p. 57 (Moscow's negative reply during the Khosla inquiry; Khosla para 8.8). Read in the original scan.

Verdict on this claim. The claim fails against the record: no document from any government places Bose in the Soviet Union after August 1945, Russia's security-service archive told India it had nothing, and the commission that rejected the crash could not place him there "for dearth of evidence". That he was in Stalin's Russia is claimed, not proved.

Claim 8: the letter that calls Bose "your war criminal"

What happened. This is the most quoted text about Nehru and Bose that nobody has produced.

It comes from one man. Shyam Lal Jain of Meerut appeared before the Khosla Commission as witness No. 21, on 31 December 1970 and 4 January 1971; his testimony fills pages 1299 to 1400 of the commission's fourth volume of evidence. His sworn account, as quoted in a note by Pradip Bose, a member of Bose's family, kept in a PMO file, is that one evening, "the date may be 26 or 27 Dec. 1945", Nehru called him to Asaf Ali's house in Delhi with a typewriter; showed him a handwritten paper saying Bose had landed at Dairen in Manchuria on 23 August 1945 and driven off "towards Russian territory"; and then dictated a letter, which Jain typed in four copies. "The contents of the letter as far as I could remember," Jain said, were:

"To Mr. Clement Attlee, Prime Minister of Britain 10 Downing Street, London. Dear Mr. Attlee, I understand from a reliable source that Subhas Chandra Bose, your war criminal, has been allowed to enter Russian territory by Stalin. This is clear treachery and a betrayal of faith by the Russians. As Russia has been an ally of the British-Americans, it should not have been done. Please take note of it and do what you consider proper and fit. Yours sincerely, Jawaharlal Nehru"

That is the whole of the evidence for the letter. Test it against the record.

One: no letter has been produced. No original, carbon or reply appears in any Indian file we read, or in the UK Ministry of Defence and Imperial War Museum correspondence in the released files; we have not searched Nehru's papers at the Nehru Memorial Museum, the Attlee papers, or The National Archives at Kew. The text exists only as Jain's memory, given twenty-five years after he says he typed it.

Two: the words are not stable. Jain's sworn statement says "a reliable source" and ends "Please take note of it and do what you consider proper and fit". The version argued before the Calcutta High Court and summarised in its 2013 judgment says "most reliable source", "allowed by Stalin to enter into the Russian territory", and ends "This is just for your information and notice." Another version in the released files has Jain as "a confidential steno of INA Defence Committee"; another calls him "a Stenographer of Asaf Ali". A text recited from memory drifts. A document does not.

Three: the key phrase is wrong on the facts. "Your war criminal" assumes Britain listed Bose as one. It did not. Khosla asked the Home Ministry in 1970 and was told, after inquiries in The Hague, New York and Tokyo, "that the name of Netaji was never borne on any list of war criminals" (para 5.29). Parliament had been told the same in 1956 and on 22 August 1963, when the Deputy Minister of External Affairs answered that the UK High Commission in Delhi had stated in 1961 "that his name does not appear and has never appeared in such list". In December 1998 Britain's Ministry of Defence wrote to India's High Commission: "I have been unable to find any evidence that any such action was taken by the United Kingdom." An Imperial War Museum fax of 25 November 1998 reported a Foreign Office historian's view that Bose was never on any such list "because he was regarded at the time as a traitor and a political figure, not as a war criminal". Khosla's own finding, para 5.34, printed page 59: "There is, therefore, no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Bose's name was ever borne on any list of war criminals." Before independence, Khosla recorded, Vallabhbhai Patel had told the Legislative Assembly on 30 October 1946, in reply to Starred Question No. 89, "that there were no restrictions on the movements of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and there was no ban on his return to India" (para 5.33).

Four: Nehru held no government office in December 1945. He was a Congress leader; the Interim Government he would lead was not formed until September 1946. On 7 November 1945 the Congress Working Committee had made him one of the twelve members of its INA Inquiry and Relief Committee, set up "to gather information and give relief, where needed, to the I.N.A. personnel" (Khosla, para 5.12). A letter from that man, in those weeks, to the British Prime Minister, reporting the escape of a man Britain had never listed as a war criminal, would be a strange letter to write. Strangeness is not proof. But it is one more thing the letter's supporters have never explained.

How it happened. The testimony was heard by the Khosla Commission, which did not rely on it. The commission's report, in the copy we searched, lists Jain as witness 21, discusses the war-criminal question at length (paras 5.25–5.36), and does not mention or adopt his account. A Home Ministry note answering Samar Guha's 1977 speech, kept in the released files, puts it this way: "Shri Jain's testimony was obviously not considered of probative value by Justice Khosla in the absence of any supporting documents." The Mukherjee Commission, which rejected the crash and examined every Soviet theory put to it, does not rely on the letter either; its report records only that it sent the External Affairs Ministry a 2004 newspaper article about it and asked for a related American consular report, which it had "not yet" received.

Why it matters. Because this letter is the hinge of the most damaging version of the Nehru–Bose story: that Nehru knew Bose was alive with Stalin, and informed on him to the British. If the letter existed, it would be one of the most important documents in Indian history. Fifty-five years after Jain's testimony, we found no one who has produced it.

What they say in answer. The letter's proponents say its absence proves suppression: that the papers were destroyed, as the PMO's 1956 file on the investigation into Bose's death was destroyed in 1972. That file's destruction is real and unexplained (Claim 3). But a destroyed file is evidence that a file was destroyed. It is not evidence of what was in a different letter that no record we read, British or Indian, shows being sent or received.

Evidence. 1. Shyam Lal Jain, deposition before the Khosla Commission, as quoted in Pradip Bose's note (c. 1996; sent to the Prime Minister on 20 April 1998), PMO file 915/11/C/6/96-Pol, pp. 111–112. Read (secondary transcription; the original deposition, Khosla evidence Vol. IV pp. 1299–1400, not seen). 2. Khosla report, list of witnesses (witness 21, Vol. IV pp. 1299–1361 and 1362–1400), and paras 5.25–5.36, printed pp. 57–60, as filed in MEA file 25/4/NGO Vol-III (Part), pp. 175–177 and 244. Read; p. 59 checked in the original scan. 3. Ministry of Home Affairs, annexure answering points raised by Samar Guha in the Lok Sabha on 3 August 1977, MHA file 21/51/76-T, pp. 53–58 (p. 57 for Jain). Read; p. 57 checked in the original scan. 4. J.J. Harding, Army Historical Branch, UK Ministry of Defence, to Pavan Kapoor, High Commission of India, 7 December 1998; Imperial War Museum fax of 25 November 1998; MEA file Lon/Pol/103/45/98, pp. 3 and 24. Read in the original scans. 5. Calcutta High Court, judgment of 19 September 2013 (the version of the letter argued before it). Read in full. 6. Mukherjee report, Vol. IIB, status reports (Samit Dutta's article in the Dainik Statesman, 19 September 2004, and the Danovan report of 23 May 1946 "not yet been received"). Read in the Internet Archive OCR copy. 7. Khosla report, para 5.12 (Congress Working Committee resolution of 7 November 1945). Read.

Verdict on this claim. The claim fails against the record: no such letter appears in any record we read, and we know of none published; its only source is one witness's recollection, which the Khosla report did not mention or rely on; and its central phrase is contradicted by British and Indian records that Bose was never on any war-criminal list. That Nehru wrote it is claimed, not proved.

The strongest case for the other side

A case you cannot argue at its best is a case you do not understand. Here is the best case, from the record, for those who say the government hid the truth about Bose.

One. Governments did lose and destroy papers. The PMO's file 12(226)/56-PM, "Investigation into the circumstances leading to the death of Shri Subhas Chandra Bose", was destroyed in 1972 while the Khosla Commission was sitting. Replying to a letter from Samar Guha of January 1974, Indira Gandhi wrote that the "file contained only copies of certain documents which are still available in other files". A Deputy Secretary of the Cabinet Secretariat later told the Mukherjee Commission that "their organisation" had no record because it was formed only on 21 September 1968. The commission called the Cabinet Secretariat's stand "evasive and unfathomable" (para 2.4.5). It also found that of 202 exhibits before the Khosla Commission, the government gave it authenticated copies of only 26 and plain photocopies of 63.

Two. Officials gave the commissions answers that the record later contradicted or left incomplete. The 2000 affidavit that the IB had "reportedly no files/papers concerning Netaji / INA" is hard to square with Calcutta copies addressed to an IB Joint Assistant Director in 1965. The PMO in 2001 could find nothing behind a Prime Minister's 1978 statement to Parliament.

Three. The Taipei records are thin. The Mukherjee Commission found that Taipei's statement that no crash occurred rested on newspapers, and that Taiwanese newspapers of the time reported no crash. It argued that the Japanese army had reason to help Bose slip away from the Allies. It found a cremation record in Taipei for a Japanese soldier on the dates in question.

Four. The government's 2006 rejection was thin too. One sentence in the Action Taken Report, "no press briefing" because the matter was "secret", and a full explanation only months later in a speech laid on the table.

Five. The family was watched, and nobody has ever explained why. For at least sixteen years the Bose family was watched: letters were intercepted from 1949, and their correspondence was still being reported in 1965. In 2015 a BJP minister asked for an inquiry and a BJP government told Parliament it had set up none.

Every one of those points is real. None of them, alone or together, is evidence that Bose survived, that he went to the Soviet Union, that the Faizabad sadhu was him, or that Nehru wrote the "war criminal" letter. They are evidence of bad record-keeping, evasive officials and a secretive state. That is a serious charge. It is a different charge.

What is proved, what is only alleged, and what we refuse to claim

Every claim above, in exactly one column.

DOCUMENTED (we read the original, or an official copy): - That Calcutta's Special Branch and West Bengal's Intelligence Branch intercepted Bose family letters at the Elgin Road post office from at least March 1949, and at other post offices in 1952–53, under "Government Order No. 1735 P.S. dt. 20.9.48" and "Government Order No. 719 P.S. dated 14.9.49" (numbers of the kind the Bengal Home (Political) Department gave its postal interception orders; the issuing department is our inference); that intercepts and agent reports on Amiya and Sisir Bose were filed in 1961 and 1965; that copies went in 1965 to a Joint Assistant Director of the Intelligence Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs; that New Delhi asked West Bengal on 20 August 1971 for anything "adverse" on Sisir Bose. - Nehru's note of 25 November 1957 asking what Amiya Bose did in Tokyo, and Ambassador Jha's reply of 10 December 1957. - That the Home Ministry told the Mukherjee Commission on 22 June 2000 that the IB reportedly had no files on Netaji or the INA, and told the Lok Sabha on 5 May 2015 that no inquiry into the spying had been set up. - The release dates: West Bengal, 18 September 2015 (date as reported); PMO to the National Archives, 4 December 2015; 100 files on 23 January 2016; 50 on 29 March 2016; 300 in all by 30 September 2016. - The findings, in their words, of the Shah Nawaz Committee (1956), the Khosla Commission (1974), the Mukherjee Commission (2005) and the Sahai Commission (2017); the Cabinet's direction of 9 May 2006; Morarji Desai's statement of 28 August 1978 and the PMO's 2001 inability to find records behind it. - The DNA report that the Faizabad teeth were not of Bose's maternal or paternal lineage. - The MEA notes of 1955, 1957 and 1995 on the ashes; the Cabinet's deferral of 8 February 1995; the Russian note verbale of 27 October 1995 that "no information whatsoever" on Bose in the USSR had come to light. - That the Home Ministry (1970, as recorded by Khosla), the UK High Commission (1961, as read to the Lok Sabha in 1963) and the UK Ministry of Defence (1998: "unable to find any evidence") said Bose was on no British war-criminal list; we found no record showing otherwise. - That Shyam Lal Jain testified before the Khosla Commission as witness 21, and the wording of his recollection as quoted in a 1996 letter on a PMO file.

REPORTED (credible press report of a record we could not open): - The 1948–1968 span of surveillance (India Today, 9 April 2015) and the two Special Branch files of about 50 pages declassified by the Home Ministry to the National Archives (India Today, 19 September 2015). - The 64 files and 12,744 pages released by West Bengal and Mamata Banerjee's words (India Today, 19 September 2015). - The PMO's RTI reply of 2 February 2015 (India Today, 9 April 2015). - B.N. Mullick's memoir on Nehru's "moral aversion" to espionage, and V. Balachandran's explanation (India Today, 9 April 2015). - The tabling of the Sahai report in December 2019 and the Allahabad High Court order of 31 January 2013 (Hindustan Times, 19 December 2019). - The September 2016 publication of the Japanese 1956 report by the UK website bosefiles.info (press reports; the text itself is DOCUMENTED in Indian files).

ALLEGED (by a commission, not proved): - That the crash story was "engineered by the Japanese army authorities" with Habibur Rahman, and that the body cremated in Taipei was Ichiro Okura's (Mukherjee Commission, 2005; rejected by the Government of India, 2006).

CLAIMED (by a party, politician, author or witness, and whose): - That Nehru instructed the surveillance (Chandra Kumar Bose, 10 April 2015: "under instructions from Pandit Nehru"); and that Nehru's responsibility for the IB is the explanation (M.J. Akbar, 9 April 2015: "only one reasonable explanation for this long surveillance on the Bose family by IB, which reported directly to Nehru"). - That Bose reached the Soviet Union (deponents before the Mukherjee Commission; Pradip Bose's note on a PMO file; Samar Guha). - That Gumnami Baba was Bose (witnesses before both commissions, as the Mukherjee and Sahai reports record them). - That Nehru wrote to Attlee calling Bose "your war criminal" (Shyam Lal Jain, 1970–71). - That the Renkoji ashes are Netaji's (S.A. Ayer, in his 1951 report to Nehru, as quoted by the Home Ministry).

NOT CLAIMED BY THIS FILE: - That Nehru ordered the surveillance of the Bose family. - That Nehru knew Bose was alive after August 1945. - That Bose survived August 1945, went to the Soviet Union, or lived in Faizabad. - That the Renkoji ashes are, or are not, Bose's. - That any living member of the Bose family, any researcher or any politician named here did anything wrong.

The whole file on one page

One. From at least 1949 to 1965, police and intelligence officers in Calcutta watched the Bose family: they opened its letters (interception records survive for 1949, 1952 and 1953), recorded its correspondence in informants' reports, and sent copies to the Union Intelligence Bureau. (West Bengal file 62)

Two. The orders cited for the interceptions are government orders of 20 September 1948 and 14 September 1949, numbered like the Bengal Home (Political) Department's interception orders. No document we read shows Nehru ordering them. (file 62, pp. 42, 67; file 11, p. 152)

Three. In the one Nehru note we found on the subject, in November 1957, he asked what a Bose nephew had done in Tokyo. The ambassador said: nothing "undesirable". (MEA 25/4/NGO Vol. II, pp. 38, 151–152)

Four. In 2000 the Home Ministry told a commission the IB reportedly had no Netaji papers. In 2015 a BJP minister asked for an inquiry into the snooping; the BJP government told Parliament there was none. (Mukherjee report para 2.4.1; LS Q. 556, 5 May 2015)

Five. The 2015–16 releases hold no government record that Bose survived 1945. They do hold destroyed files, missing exhibits and a Prime Minister's 1978 claim nobody could back. (Mukherjee report ch. 2)

Six. Two inquiries found he died after the Taihoku crash; the third said he did not but could not say how he died; the government rejected the third. (1956; 1974; 2005; Cabinet 9 May 2006)

Seven. A DNA test excluded Bose as the source of the Faizabad sadhu's teeth; the 2005 commission held it unproved that he was Bose, and the 2017 commission called the claim "not correct". (Mukherjee 2005; Sahai 2017)

Eight. We found no record that anyone has ever tested the Tokyo urn. No government has had it done. (MEA notes 1955–1995; Mukherjee para 2.8.10)

Nine. Russia's archives, including its security service's, told India they had nothing on Bose in the USSR. (note verbale, 27 October 1995)

Ten. The "your war criminal" letter has not been found in any record we read. No record shows Bose on a war-criminal list; Indian and British officials said he was on none. (Khosla para 5.34; UK MoD, 1998)

That is the file. The watch on the family is proved. The conspiracy built on top of it is not.

What we could not prove

• Who signed Government Orders No. 1735 P.S. of 20 September 1948 and No. 719 P.S. of 14 September 1949, and why. The orders are cited on the intercept copies but are not in the pages we read. The West Bengal Home (Political) records for 1948 would show who signed it and the reasons given.
• The two Home Ministry files India Today reported in April 2015. We did not see them. They are said to cover 1948–1968 and to include a 1968 "Top Secret" note on Amiya Bose. They are at the National Archives of India; its portal abhilekh-patal.in returned empty responses to our requests in this session, and we did not try to get round that.
• The West Bengal files in the original. We read the West Bengal release only in an unofficial Internet Archive mirror (item "Netaji_RRG", uploaded January 2016), page images checked for every passage we quote. We have not compared it with the copies held by Kolkata Police.
• netajipapers.gov.in itself. The government site did not respond from our location during this session. We read the released files in Wikimedia Commons copies, which credit netajipapers.gov.in as their source, and in an Internet Archive mirror of all 300; we matched them by page count and file size.
• Shyam Lal Jain's original deposition. The Khosla Commission's evidence volumes (Vol. IV, pp. 1299–1400) are not public in any copy we found. We quote his words as transcribed in Pradip Bose's note on a PMO file. Cross-examination, if any, would show how his account was tested. We also did not search Nehru's papers at the Nehru Memorial Museum, the Attlee papers, or The National Archives at Kew for the letter, and for the surveillance we read two of the 64 West Bengal files (11 and 62), not Nehru's Selected Works or Letters to Chief Ministers; "no file we found" means exactly that.
• The Khosla Commission's 202 exhibits. The Mukherjee Commission received authenticated copies of 26 and plain photocopies of 63; its officer was shown a list of the exhibits at the Home Ministry, but none of the documents.
• The full Action Taken Report of May 2006 as laid. We read the Cabinet's direction, the Home Ministry's draft statements and an MP's quotation of the ATR in the Rajya Sabha, not the laid document itself.
• The Lok Sabha debates of 28 August 1978 and the 1956 and 1963 answers on war criminals in the original. We quote them as reproduced in the Mukherjee and Khosla reports.
• Whether the IB's own copies of the family reports survive. The 1965 forwarding memos show copies sent to it. The 2000 affidavit says it reportedly had no Netaji papers. Both cannot be complete.

Questions this file leaves open

1. To the Government of West Bengal: who signed Government Orders No. 1735 P.S. of 20 September 1948 and No. 719 P.S. of 14 September 1949, and what reason did they give for intercepting the Bose family's mail?
2. To the Ministry of Home Affairs: when did the interception of the Bose family's letters end, and on whose order?
3. To the Intelligence Bureau, through the Home Ministry: were the copies sent to its Joint Assistant Director in 1965 destroyed, transferred, or kept, and why did its 2000 affidavit say it had no Netaji papers?
4. To the Prime Minister's Office: what did file 12(226)/56-PM contain, who ordered its destruction in 1972, and does any copy survive in the Cabinet Secretariat?
5. To the Union government: having rejected the Mukherjee Commission's finding on the ashes, will it ask Japan and the temple for a DNA test of the Renkoji urn, with the family's consent?
6. To the Congress: its governments ran the Union and West Bengal when the interceptions began and for most of the years they continued. Will it say whether its leaders knew?
7. To the BJP: a Union Minister called for a "thorough inquiry" in April 2015. Its government told Parliament on 5 May 2015 that no inquiry had been set up; has one been set up since?

The verdict

I have read every document in this file that could be read without a login. Here is where I land.

One. The surveillance is true, and it is worse than the slogan. Not because a Prime Minister is shown giving the order; no document shows that. It is worse because it was ordinary. A government order was issued, a post office opened the letters, informants reported, copies went to Delhi, and it ran on through Nehru's years and beyond. The interception ran under Congress governments. When asked, in 2000, a BJP-led government told a commission its intelligence bureau reportedly had no Netaji papers; in 2015 another told Parliament it had set up no inquiry. Neither party has explained it.

Two. "Nehru ordered it" is not proved. The one Nehru note we found asked the Foreign Office three short questions about one trip, and got back a reply that reported nothing against Bose's nephew. A file that is honest with you says so, even when the slogan is more exciting.

Three. The Netaji files do not contain a living Netaji. They contain three inquiries, a rejected report, destroyed and missing papers, a Prime Minister's 1978 doubt nobody could document, and fifty years of unresolved argument over an urn. That is a scandal of record-keeping. It is not proof of survival.

Four. The great stories fail against the record. Russia's security archive told India it had nothing. The Faizabad sadhu's teeth did not match Bose's family. The "your war criminal" letter has never been found, and no record shows Bose on a war-criminal list. Each of these may have been believed honestly. None of them has been proved.

Five. One question can still be answered with a test tube. The urn in Tokyo has never been tested. Every government since 1995 has had the option on paper. None has had it done, and the files show reluctance in Delhi in 1995 and caution at the temple in 2005.

Indian officers read the Bose family's letters from at least 1949 and were still reporting on its correspondence in 1965. That is proved. Everything people have built on top of it is not.