Documents reveal British plan to kill Netaji

In one of the most startling revelations since independence, a historian from Trinity College has presented documentary evidence that the British Foreign Office had ordered the assassination of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose in 1941. Netaji's family in Kolkata briefed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh about the revelations before making the documents public on the eve of Independence Day.

The assassination was ordered on March 7, 1941 when Netaji was in hiding in Kabul after escaping virtual house arrest in Kolkata. The order was reconfirmed in June. The assassination was to be attempted in Turkey, a country Bose was expected to pass through on his way to Germany.

Evidence found
Professor Eunan O'Halpin of Trinity College, Dublin, found evidence of the assassination orders at the Public Records Office in London. "As far as I know, he was the only significant political leader in any colony fighting British colonization, who was explicitly targeted for assassination," said O'Halpin.

"Now the reason he was targeted is because of his intentions to not simply lead India out of the empire, but to do it by force and in conjunction with the Axis," the professor added. The professor disclosed his findings publicly for the first time at a lecture at Netaji Research Bureau in Kolkata on Sunday.

Rare find
Netaji's grand-nephew and Harvard historian Sugata Bose said that the papers are a rare find because most documents about Netaji are still classified and references to him are largely blanked out in the few papers that have been made public. "Part of the reason why we have found this dramatic revelation is that the assassination decision is actually listed under Turkey, because that was where the assassination was going to take place," said Sugata.

"Clearly whoever was reading through the Turkish papers did not see the enormity of what was being suggested in relation to an Indian political leader," he added. Netaji never went to Turkey. He reached Berlin via Moscow.

Not only do the documents reveal the Netaji assassination plot, they also suggest assassination was official British policy to quell rebellion in the colonies and that Netaji may not have been their only target.

Monideepa Banerjie
(source: NDTV.Com)