Gandhi believed Bose was alive, and for good reasons

There has been an awakening. Have you felt it?

No, not the one in Star Wars! It has suddenly dawned on a grandnephew of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose that all the efforts to seek the declassification of files pertaining to his glorious ancestor are meaningless.

Ashis Ray, London-based grandson of Bose's elder brother Sarat, going by his pompous claims, possesses vital pieces of evidence to end modern India's longest running mystery.

And going by his tweets, Ray has a visceral hatred for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. More pertinently, he supports the Congress party.

Ray says that he has researched the matter for decades.

A question naturally arises: Where was Ashis hibernating when Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry was probing the matter in between 1999 and 2005? What prevented him from presenting his superlatives laden narrative, which he is serialising on his site, to the commission?

Take for example Ashis's latest volley that has been making news.

Mahatma Gandhi, he claims, "created confusion by appearing to disbelieve reports of the latter's death as a result of a plane crash, before correcting himself".

I cannot imagine a former senior journalist such as Ashis Ray imputing either naivety or skullduggery, or both, to Gandhi -- who was a most well-connected and well-informed politician.

When Gandhiji said he disbelieved the news of Bose's reported death, it was based on precise inputs, not any whim. An April 1946 intelligence report sourcing information to Congress party insiders revealed that Gandhi's claim about Bose being alive was not based on his "inner voice" as he had said, but "a secret information which he has received".

Ray's contention is that after displaying his initial display of disbelief in Bose's reported death, Gandhi came around to backing it. "I appeal to everyone to forget what I have said and, believing in the evidence before them, to reconcile themselves to the fact that Netaji (Bose) has left us," he quotes Gandhi as having written in March 1946.

But Ray has either ignored or is ignorant of fact that in July 1946 Gandhi relayed something so sensitive to an American contact of his that it even finds a mention in a classified Prime Minister's Office file.

It is in a letter written in July 1946 to American journalist and Gandhi's biographer Louis Fischer on Gandhi's behalf by his secretary Khurshed Naoroji. "If Bose comes with the help of Russia neither Gandhiji nor the Congress will be able to reason with the country" is what it reads.