| Saturday , April 11 , 2015 |
Snoop from past bares ugly secret- Nehru govt scan on Bose family | |||||
| Our Special Correspondent | |||||
1 WOODBURN PARK  38/2 ELGIN ROAD  The two files declassified late last year reveal regular surveillance of these two Bose family homes in Calcutta between 1948 and 1968 The documents, now with the National Archives, mostly consist of reports Calcutta spooks sent to the IB in New Delhi on the travel, meetings and political work of the two sons of Sarat Chandra Bose, the elder brother of Subhas, from 1948 till at least 1968. But some of the despatches reveal that even private letters exchanged between Subhas Bose's wife Emilie Schenkl and Sarat Bose's younger son Sisir were opened, read and reported on by IB spies. "The most disgraceful part of the surveillance is that even private letters between an aunt and her nephew were spied on," historian Sugata Bose, the son of Sisir Bose, told The Telegraph . "It's a very serious invasion of privacy." The two files containing these documents were declassified late last year, and reveal regular surveillance at two family homes in Calcutta - 1 Woodburn Park and 38/2 Elgin Road. A document dated May 17, 1948, seeks information from the deputy commissioner of Calcutta police on "anything adverse on record" against Amiya Bose, Sarat Bose's elder son, who had applied for a passport to travel to the UK, France, Switzerland and Turkey. In the latter half of the 1950s, when Sisir started the Netaji Research Bureau to build a repository of works and artefacts linked to Subhas Bose from across the world, the surveillance on the younger of the sons of Sarat - also a prominent freedom fighter - grew intense. His letters to people in different countries were opened and read. One IB document reports on a letter Sisir wrote to author Tatsuo Hayashida, who had received a note from an aide of Subhas Bose confirming the freedom fighter's death. In the letter, Sisir asked Hayashida when and how he came to know of Bose's death, and whether he had seen the body and witnessed the cremation. Simultaneously, surveillance continued against Amiya Bose. On October 18, 1957, the IB reported Amiya's departure to Tokyo on an Air India flight that left at 9.25pm from Calcutta. "His family members saw him off at the airport," the note reads. In May 1968, the IB in Calcutta wrote to headquarters in New Delhi about a new political front Amiya - then a member of the Forward Bloc - was trying to establish. "The subject is now reportedly taking keen initiative in the matter of formation of the Azad Hind Dal with the ex-INA men," the report says, referring to the Indian National Army that Subhas Bose had built. "It is reported that he has succeeded in influencing some prominent persons both in the state and in Delhi to join the Azad Hind Dal." The revelation that the Nehru government spied on Bose's family triggered protests from the BJP, which, though in power, has so far refused to declassify the majority of 87 files on the freedom fighter. Several BJP leaders had stated in public ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections that they were in favour of a more robust declassification policy. "This shows that spying is in the DNA of the Congress," commerce minister Nirmala Sitharaman said at a media briefing. The Congress demanded that the BJP first declassify all files related to Bose. Sugata, who has scanned all the documents in the declassified files, said there was no direct evidence that Nehru himself ordered the spying. The revelations, he said, were surprising because Nehru had a rapport with his father Sisir, and always invited him to the Prime Minister's residence when he was in Delhi for breakfast. "The surveillance is hard to square with the extremely warm personal relationship Nehru shared with my father," Sugata said. But paranoia about the possibility of a political threat from Sisir or Amiya may have nudged the Nehru government to spy on them, he suggested. "The government seems to have been under a misapprehension that he was planning a political challenge," Sugata said. "There was nothing of that sort." While US President Richard Nixon had to resign in 1974 after it was established he had ordered spying on the Democratic National Convention, the IB surveillance on the Boses represents only the latest chapter in the long history of political surveillance in India. Former IB joint director Malay Dhar, in his 2005 book Open Secrets, detailed how Indira Gandhi ordered the agency to snoop on her estranged daughter-in-law Maneka Gandhi, now a cabinet minister in the Modi government. Contacted on the phone today, Maneka said she did not want to speak on the fresh revelations. Reports in 2011 suggested that the office of then finance minister and now President Pranab Mukherjee was bugged, though home minister P. Chidambaram denied the allegations. In February 2013, a Delhi police cop was arrested for listening in on the then leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha - and current finance minister - Arun Jaitley. According to R.N. Kulkarni, a former IB officer who served in the agency for over three decades, political spying has been particularly intense with single party governments, or governments barely dependent on smaller parties. "Till the formation of the central government with a coalition of political parties, political spying by the ruling party was vigorous and unrelenting," Kulkarni wrote in his 2004 bookSin of National Conscience. "In a way, it was its helpless obsession." During Indira Gandhi's tenure as Prime Minister, Kulkarni wrote, almost 90 per cent of IB resources were used for political espionage. But the revelations of spying on the Bose family have also sparked afresh a demand some of India's leading academicians and researchers have long made - that files that assist the country through scholarship should be declassified regularly. In the UK, all classified government files must be reviewed after 30 years to determine whether they still need to be kept secret. The US has a three-tier system. All files must be automatically declassified after 25 years except in nine circumstances. The reasons for continuing classification shrink to just two after 50 years, and every file needs a specific permission to be kept secret after 75 years. India's Right to Information Act requires confidential documents to be made public after 20 years - but allows the government to withhold any file or note it deems as necessary to keep hidden under the British-era Official Secrets Act. Unlike the UK and the US, India also does not have a system for an automatic review of all classified documents after a fixed period. "For historians and researchers, it's a nightmare to try and access archived material in India, even if it is more than 30 years old," Sreemati Chakrabarti, the dean of the faculty of social sciences at Delhi University and a researcher on China, said. "It's got to do with the mindset of controlling all information." Indian researchers are often left with little option but to travel to London for archived material from the 1940s and earlier, far more easily available to scholars there, Chakrabarti said. In the case of files related to Bose, successive Indian governments have so far argued that revealing documents could hurt India's ties with foreign allies. But Sugata called the government argument "ludicrous," and cited his own research that quotes British documents to show Winston Churchill had ordered the assassination of Bose in 1941. "It's like saying that we're going to hold (current British Prime Minister) David Cameron responsible for what Churchill did," Sugata said. "That's how absurd this is." http://www.telegraphindia.com/1150411/jsp/frontpage/story_13995.jsp#.VSjOWNyUeSo
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