By Shali Ittaman

Emilie Schenkl-Bose believed that her husband Subhas Bose was alive in the USSR. Yet, she was forced to contend with people who insisted that Renkoji Temple in Japan housed his ashes.

In her first-ever known reaction, her grand nephew Surya Kumar Bose says many times she had confided in him that the plane crash was fabricated and the 'Temple relics' were not her husband's remains. In fact, despite Indian leaders and officials pressing her, she had declined to claim the ashes. Emilie died in Vienna in 1996.

Emilie Schenkl had told Surya Bose in January 1973 that a "German journalist Raimund Schnabel, who had settled in East Berlin after World War II, had told her that Netaji was in Soviet Union after 1945".

Strange as it may seem, Indian governments have never really supported any probe to establish what really happened to Subhas Bose. On the contrary, they have always shown a nervous hurry in disposing of all matters relating to his disappearance.

The latest government attempt to stymie the probe is reflected in Home Secretary Kamal Pande's affidavit before the Mukherjee Commission, which incidentally is the third in the series of government probes into Subhas Bose's disappearance.

The Mukherjee Commission had directed the Ministry of Home Affairs to explain the privilege the government was claiming to refuse to Subhas Bose files long after the expiry of the mandatory period of classification of official secrets.

Kamal Pande, while citing Section 123 and 124 of the Evidence Act and Article 74(2) of the Constitution in his affidavit, said among other things that:

	The files are unpublished official records on affairs of State, and contain communications between public officers in official confidence.
	The disclosure of the files will harm public interest.
	It will evoke wide-spread reactions and may lower the image of Netaji Subhas Bose, and
	Diplomatic ties with friendly countries will be adversely affected

How and why public interest and ties with friendly countries will be impaired, and how indeed Bose's image will be lowered, are really subject matters for the most curious debate.

Such discouragement is quite in line with the stance of all governments of free India. In fact, in 1956, the Ministry of External Affairs refused to permit the Shah Nawaz Committee to visit Formosa Island, where the crash was supposed to have taken place. In a confidential letter to Shah Nawaz Khan, First Secretary A K Dar wrote: "…it would neither be advisable not practicable to visit Formosa. The Ministry feels strongly that any attempt to visit Formosa may well turn out to be embarrassing all round and lead to frustrating complications…"

Indeed, the then government was in no mood to institute a probe into Subhas Bose's disappearance. It was only when the Calcutta-based Netaji Smarak Samiti decided on October 6, 1955 to institute a non-official enquiry and send the team abroad to investigate, that the Nehru government set up the Shah Nawaz Committee. Of course, it is another matter that it came 10 years too late.

Even then, Shah Nawaz Khan Committee had a good chance to come upon valuable evidence in Formosa. Most of the witnesses were still alive and the records of War were still available for investigators to fish for and locate. The government order preventing the Formosa visit therefore killed the chance of any meaningful discovery.

By the time the G D Khosla Commission came into being in 1970, little remained of the 'traces of the accident' and the intent to get at the truth