Recently Anita Pfaff was in India and when asked about the disappearance of her father Subhash Chandra Bose she said that he could have perished in the air crash of 1945.
Anita Pfaff, 63, who is on a visit here, told IANS: “I don’t think he survived. Unless some fantastically new evidence comes up, if I look at the data available to me, he did not survive.
“I have been present at the interview of some of the survivors of the plane crash, including some Japanese officers, more than 20 years ago, and their story sounded quite consistent, credible and reasonable.”
She says: “Some speculation was also in the reports that the doctor who treated Netaji after the crash when interviewed this time had confusion about what he said earlier. He is 90 years old now and you can’t expect much from an interview unless it is done very carefully of a person of that age.
“Ultimately what he said many years ago made a lot more sense. You certainly have lapses in memory when you become old. Even if his new interview sort of raked up some controversy I would not place too much emphasis on it.” [My father did not survive the air crash: Netaji’s daughter]
She also seems to believe the statement of Brigadier Habib-ur-Rehman who was in the plane with Bose. If there was no plane crash in 1945, then where did the survivors come from? Why did Habib-ur-Rehman fabricate this story?
The Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry has submitted the report to the Parliament and it is supposed to be tabled along with an action taken report by the end of February. Already leaked news has provided some fascinating twists like the fact that there was no air crash and the ashes kept in Japan were not that of Subhash Bose. There is also some evidence that Nehru knew the truth and kept quiet.
Justice Mukherjee was unhappy with the way his visits to Russia and Japan were handled by the Govt. and Anita Pfaff has said that she does not expect anything terribly new to come out of the Mukherjee report. We need to wait till the end of February to see if she is right.
Offtopic:
There is some sort of blog competition going on, with surfers invited to vote the best “indiblog” etc. I went there expecting to vote for your blog, but do not find it in the “best blogs” category. So how do the entries get there? Who nominates them and on what criteria? Is it just some other stunt or is there any real meat to it?
RR,
There was a nomination process a few weeks back. My history blog, “The Palm Leaf” is listed in few categories.