Netaji died in India, not in aircrash; He, not Gandhi, made Britain leave
By T J S George 14th July 2012 11:26 PM A return to the theme of Subhas Chandra Bose is necessitated by the “discovery” of two books. Both are by Lt. Manwati Arya who was born in Burma and joined the INA’s women’s wing, the Rani Jhansi Regiment, in her early 20s. Patriot (2007) is a “personalised biography” of Netaji. It is flowery and exaggerated: Bose’s marriage to Emilie Schenkl is called “the divine wedlock”. Judgment: No Aircrash, No Death (2010) is a compendium of records and stories about Netaji’s widely reported death in Formosa in an aircrash. The burden of the book is that both the aircrash and the death were figments of Japan’s—and Netaji’s—imagination and that in fact Bose escaped to Russia, then made his way to India. (With Japan collapsing in the war, the British were planning to arrest Bose. Which would explain his eagerness to avoid landing in Japan). These are not books* in the modern idiom, with style and polish making for pleasurable reading. But they contain h
