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“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.” Thus wrote George Orwell in his dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-four, published in 1949, set in Airstrip One, a province of Oceania, the super-state.
Around the same time, something similar was being played out in Calcutta, as Kolkata was called then. Subhas Chandra Bose’s houses on 38/2 Elgin Road and 1 Woodburn Park were put under surveillance by the colonial administration. At any point, at least 14 officers would keep an eye on the houses: some took position at the corner of the road so that they could survey both the houses, and a few blended in with the regular crowds at Netaji’s houses.
Grandnephews Sugata (son of Sisir Kumar Bose, he is a historian and a Trinamool Congress MP), Surya and Chandra (sons of Amiya Nath Bose) narrate such stories of snooping with pride and relish. But there is no relish when you ask them about the revelations made in two declassified files that between 1948 and 1968, the Indian government had kept Sisir and Amiya (sons of Netaji’s older brother, Sarat Chandra Bose) under surveillance through the Intelligence Bureau, which included reading private letters.
For Sugata, some missing pieces of the jigsaw are falling in place now. In 1958, Sisir was to travel to the United States with wife Krishna on a Rockefeller Fellowship to the Harvard Medical School to do some work in pediatric radiology.
“Mother’s passport came in the normal course but Father’s passport was delayed inordinately. As the day of the departure was approaching, the Institute of Child Health in Calcutta had to write a stiff letter. Eventually, the passport was delivered. The explanation given was that his name was on the blacklist from the British days and had not been removed inadvertently,” says Sugata who has authored a book on his illustrious granduncle, His Majesty’s Opponent - Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire. Was it really inadvertent, Sugata wonders now?
“We now know that IB was tracking his travel arrangements. They had opened Father’s letters to Aunt Emilie (Schenkl, Netaji’s wife). In one of the letters, he had mentioned that he was going to the US and would go to Vienna (where Schenkl was based) as well. So it wasn’t just continuity since the pre-1947 days, they were actually following him,” infers Sugata.
“In the British days, Father always felt that he was followed when he would go to the medical college from his Woodburn Park residence. That was corroborated when one day he was picked up while going to college. He was first taken to the intelligence headquarters on 13, Lord Sinha Road, where he was kept for one night and then flown to Delhi, kept in the Red Fort and then taken by train to Lahore where he was kept in solitary confinement in the Lahore Fort,” says Sugata.
Surveillance touched most members of the Bose family in the days of the Raj. Amiya returned to India in December 1944 after seven years in England. His father, Sarat, was in detention in Coonoor and Netaji was on the Indo-Burmese front in the final stages of the war. With the head of the family in detention, Amiya soon began his law practice at the Calcutta High Court.
“Father commuted to the Calcutta High Court by tram. In this daily routine, he began to notice a person loitering at the main gate of the Woodburn Park house. The fellow habitually followed him to the tram stop and jumped in behind him. After observing this for several days, Father accosted him and told him: ‘As you have been instructed to follow me, why don’t you be helpful and carry my briefcase?’ The unfortunate snooper after his initial embarrassment meekly agreed and did Father’s bidding,” Surya, director of Bose Information Technology, recounts stories he had heard from Amiya.
Ardhendu, the son of Netaji’s younger brother Sailesh Chandra Bose, was too small to recognise any snooping on the family but remembers that at the dinner table, his father would sometimes mention that he was being watched. “He could sense it the same way anyone who is being followed becomes suspicious. But it was nothing too aggressive. Not like a thriller with men in trench coats trailing you,” he says.
A friend of Sailesh in intelligence had warned that the phone at their Worli residence was being tapped. The apparent spying, however, changed nothing for the family, because “we knew nothing,” Ardhendu says. Sailesh was the only one among the Bose brothers to get into business, rather than pursue a career in law or medicine, which brought him to Mumbai. As a result, Ardhendu was far removed from Calcutta’s heady political atmosphere. He faced the cameras between 1975 and 1985 as a model for Bombay Dyeing and until 1990 as an actor in Hindi films.
In Calcutta, Sugata got a taste of snooping early — during his college days at Presidency College. “The debates I organised were reported by IB in the 1970s. We always knew there were IB officials lurking and we would deliberately feed them false information like a strike would be called tomorrow just to tease them. But these were public activities,” he says.
Perhaps he took the surveillance a little more seriously when he was travelling to Cambridge in 1978. “I saw the notebook of the police officer who came for verification and he had a complete list of all the debates I had organised and participated in. He was also aware that I had organised a “quij” (quiz) competition. I was doing all this publicly and if the government thought it important for an IB agent to be present where I spoke, it’s a different matter. But if they opened my private letters, it would be a different kind of intrusion,” Sugata adds.
Surya doesn’t think his generation was of any consequence to the Indian government as far as Netaji was concerned. Yet, whenever he gave a talk on Netaji in Germany, a Research & Analysis Wing representative from the Indian Embassy would attend most of the times.
“When Father (Amiya) went to Japan in 1957, he did have a strange feeling that his movements were being monitored — and he was quite sure that it could only be under instructions from the Indian government. But he could, of course, not be absolutely certain,” Surya recalls.
Who ordered this surveillance? Was it Jawaharlal Nehru? Members of the Bose family appear to be divided on this. Surya says it is quite clear that Nehru had personally asked the Indian Embassy in Tokyo to keep a close watch on Amiya’s movements.
“Father was always very upfront with Nehru and they would openly argue on issues such as socialism and laissez faire, but that was a part of their relationship. So, in 1957, when he was going to Japan, Nehru, who knew about the trip, could have simply called him up and asked, ‘Why are you going to Tokyo?’ Instead, what he did was order his foreign secretary (to keep a tab on Amiya’s movements). In Tokyo, Father was put under surveillance the moment he landed. He was trailed and tracked to see where he went and whom he met. I don’t think any minister would have had the guts to snoop on Bose’s family without Nehru’s consent,” says Chandra.
Amiya’s sons wonder if Nehru feared Netaji was still alive and hence Amiya was being tracked.
Ardhendu lends a dramatic touch to the issue. “Netaji was India’s man of destiny. His reputation was a threat to Nehru’s career. Nehru’s life was humdrum, in comparison with Netaji’s escapades, which included a submarine journey from Germany to Japan and travelling incognito in Afghanistan.” (Recent revelations suggest the colonial police had moles in the red network and were aware of Netaji’s movements in Kabul.)
Sugata plays down Nehru’s alleged paranoia. According to him, there is just one document to suggest that Nehru asked the Indian ambassador in Japan — through the foreign secretary — about the activities of his uncle in 1957 and even has an explanation for it: “That can possibly be explained by the fact that Nehru himself was in Japan around that time and he wanted to pay his respects to Netaji.”
Sugata finds it hard to reconcile Nehru’s personal attitude with what his government was doing. After all, he was right beside Nehru when he visited the Netaji Research Bureau in 1961.
“At one level, these files show that the government was opening letters regarding the work of the Netaji Research Bureau. On the other hand, Nehru visited the Netaji Research Bureau in 1961 and Father showed him the archives and the museum. He praised the work that Father was doing. In fact, whenever Father went to Delhi, Nehru would invite him for breakfast,” Sugata recalls.
There are several myths and legends associated with Netaji. Are the claims of snooping after Independence a product of the same rumour mills?
Mihir Bose, the London-based author of Raj, Secrets, Revolution: A Life of Subhas Chandra Bose, says he is not aware of Nehru's involvement in ordering any surveillance on the two Bose family members. “In my book, I dealt at length with Netaji’s death but did not come across any evidence of Nehru authorising the spying on the Bose family after India became independent. When I was writing, there was much talk of all files being declassified. But this was in relation to how Netaji had died, not what measures Nehru had taken in relation to his surviving. This is news as a result of files being declassified,” he says.
If not Nehru, then who in the government ordered the surveillance? “The surveillance began in the late 1940s when Vallabhbhai Patel was the home minister. There were other home ministers including Govind Bhallabh Pant during whose tenure the surveillance continued. It was on during Lal Bahadur Shastri’s prime minister-ship. And since the actual surveillance was being conducted from the intelligence headquarters on 13, Lord Sinha Road (in Calcutta) when Bidhan Chandra Roy was the chief minister for much of the time, they cannot be absolved of their responsibility,” Sugata points out. That Netaji had ideological differences with some of them is widely known.
The Bose family is unanimous that the government should announce who ordered the surveillance and all the Netaji files should be declassified. A government panel has been ordered to look into it. What’s topmost on the family’s mind is that the truth shouldn’t slip down the memory hole as in Oceania.
