Netaji Is Part Of Our Folklore

Netaji Is Part Of Our Folklore

- Syed Badrul Ahsan

Seventy two years after he died or went missing, in the corporeal sense of the meaning, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose continues to exert tremendous influence on Bengali lives. It is therefore only natural that in this month of his end, at least from public view, we go back to him and try to understand the man and the politics he represented before he vanished for all time. And that word ‘vanished’ is at the core of much of our research on Netaji, for there are many of us who remain convinced that he did not die in August 1945 but may have been spirited away somewhere. Over the decades, students of the Netaji mystique have propagated the notion that he was abducted and taken away to Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union --- because of his unforgivable dealings with the likes of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo --- and never returned. There have been writers who have quoted people in the know about the reported plane crash in Taipei as suggesting that on the day in question nothing in the nature of a plane coming down or burning up in flames occurred.