By Sitanshu Das

Subhas Chandra Bose 'died from third-degree burns he suffered in an air-crash on August 18, 1945 at Taipei, Formosa Island'. This was first reported by Japan. The report was subsequently upheld by the Government of India's Shah Nawaz enquiry committee in 1956 and by the Commission of inquiry headed by G D Khosla in 1974.

Successive governments and Prime Ministers of India, from Jawaharlal Nehru to P V Narasimha Rao, have accepted the Japanese version of the Indian leader's death.

The interim government, with Nehru as the Vice Chairman of the Viceroy's Executive Council, took office in September 1946, that is, a little longer than a year after Subhas reportedly perished in the air-crash of August 18, 1945 Conscious of the inadequacies of the enquiries conducted so far, Hindustan Times decided to undertake de novo a public and non-government probe into the reported death of Bose in the air-crash of August 18, 1945.

We decided to utilise the global reach of the internet for a multilateral exchange of views and information on the final phase of the life of an Indian leader whose disappearance at a crucial turn in modern India's history made an enormous, if not radical, difference to post-independence India.

We, in Hindustan Times, are amazed at the result this pioneering investigation has yielded.

We have discovered US and British documents which were clearely not available to the 1956 inquiry committee. We have the findings of one of the Indian scholars who had been sent to Russia to study Soviet documents of 1917-47 relating to India.

We are publishing these documents sequentially. To the best of our knowledge, these documents are genuine.

The US documents have been edited by the CIA for declassification under the Freedom of Information Act of the USA.

This archival documents come from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which after the Second World War reincarnated as the CIA, and the US State Department. The documents disclosed a deep interest the US secret services had taken in Subhas Bose as a leader of the Indian freedom struggle, his work as the supreme commander of the INA and his reported death in the air-crash of August 18, 1945.

Taken together, these documents would show that the American secret services, in spite of their global reach, was not convinced of the veracity of the official Japanese version of Bose's death.

As late as 1964, the CIA speculated if Subhas' return to India would destabilise Nehru's government.

The US as the occupying power in Japan had full access to all sources of Japanese information which could have shed light on what happened to Subhas Bose. These advantages, the US secret services enjoyed, lend significance to their documents.

If the air-crash of August 18, 1945 did not bring to an end the life of this indomitable leader, then how, where and when did he die?

We assume that death or physical restraint alone could have silenced this Indian leader in 1945-47.