On August 18, 1945, the world witnessed what would become one of history’s most enduring mysteries—the alleged death of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in a plane crash at Taipei, Taiwan. Seventy-nine years later, this date serves as a reminder of systematic campaign by the Indian National Congress to erase, diminish, and ultimately betray the revolutionary legacy that Netaji embodied through his Azad Hind movement. The Congress party’s post-independence handling of Netaji’s legacy represents perhaps the most calculated act of historical vandalism in modern Indian politics.
What emerges from declassified files, testimonies of INA veterans, and scholarly research is a damning portrait of institutional betrayal that began even before independence and continued well into the Nehruvian era, effectively airbrushing one of India’s greatest freedom fighters from the national narrative.
The seeds of Congress’s systematic undermining of Netaji were sown at the 1939 Tripuri session, when Subhas Chandra Bose defeated Gandhi’s nominee Pattabhi Sitaramayya to secure the Congress presidency. This victory, achieved through democratic mandate, was immediately contested by the Gandhian old guard, who viewed Bose’s militant nationalism as a direct threat to their monopolistic control over the freedom movement. As historian Chandrachur Ghose meticulously documents in his seminal work “Bose: The Untold Story of an Inconvenient Nationalist,” the Congress Working Committee’s response was swift and vindictive. Rather than accepting the democratic verdict, Gandhi publicly declared Sitaramayya’s defeat as his own defeat, effectively delegitimizing Bose’s presidency before it could take root. The subsequent non-cooperation by Congress leaders forced Bose to resign within months, marking the beginning of what would become a decades-long campaign to marginalize his contribution to India’s freedom struggle.
The declassified Shah Nawaz Committee files reveal the extent of this institutional hostility. Dwijendra Nath Bose, Netaji’s nephew and himself a freedom fighter who suffered torture for helping in Netaji’s escape, testified in 1956 about Nehru’s “betrayal of Netaji after having promised to help him after Netaji had resigned from the Congress Presidentship in 1939.” This testimony, buried in classified files for over six decades, provides damning evidence of Congress leadership’s duplicitous behavior toward one of India’s most charismatic leaders. Perhaps no statement better encapsulates Congress’s betrayal of Netaji than Jawaharlal Nehru’s shocking declaration in June 1942: “Hitler and Japan can go to hell. I shall fight them to the end and this is my policy. I shall also fight Mr. Subhas Bose and his party along with Japan if he comes to India.” This wasn’t mere rhetoric—it represented a fundamental policy position that would define Congress’s approach to the INA throughout the war and beyond.
As documented in testimonies before various inquiry commissions, Nehru maintained this hostile stance even after learning of the INA’s remarkable achievements. In mid-1945, he declared: “I am still of the opinion that the leaders and others of this INA had been misguided in many ways and had failed to appreciate the larger consequences of their unfortunate association with the Japanese… Therefore, whatever the motive of these people, they had to be resisted in India or outside.” This ideological antipathy toward armed resistance placed Congress in the paradoxical position of opposing India’s first genuinely secular, pan-Indian army—an army that had Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, and Parsi soldiers fighting under a unified command for a common cause. The INA’s diversity and nationalist fervor represented everything that Congress claimed to champion, yet the party’s leadership remained implacably opposed to Bose’s methods.
The testimony of various INA veterans, as recorded by military historian Major General GD Bakshi, reveals the extent of this betrayal: “The pity is that the Nehruvian dispensation treated these men as traitors. There is no memorial for the 26,000 martyrs” who died fighting for India’s freedom under Netaji’s leadership.
The British decision to conduct public trials of INA officers at the Red Fort in 1945-46 presented Congress with both an opportunity and a dilemma. The trials had ignited unprecedented public sympathy for the INA across religious and regional lines—exactly the kind of unified nationalist sentiment that Netaji had always sought to mobilize. Faced with this groundswell of support, Congress leaders pragmatically decided to defend the accused officers while carefully avoiding any endorsement of their leader or cause. This calculated opportunism is laid bare in Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s secret instructions to Congress leaders: defend the INA soldiers without eulogizing their leader. The strategy was brilliant in its cynicism—extract maximum political capital from public sentiment while ensuring that credit never reached the man who had inspired the INA’s creation.
Academic research by historians studying the INA trials reveals what scholar Mithi Mukherjee termed “a key moment in the elaboration of an anticolonial critique of international law in India.” Yet Congress’s appropriation of this legacy was purely tactical. As the classified documents show, once the immediate political utility of the INA support was exhausted, the party swiftly abandoned both the cause and its veterans. The evidence for this abandonment is overwhelming. Despite the public rhetoric during the trials, Congress systematically denied INA veterans integration into the Indian Army after independence. These soldiers, who had fought courageously for India’s freedom, were deemed unfit to serve in free India’s armed forces—a decision that can only be understood as ideological punishment for their association with Netaji.
The Congress party’s betrayal of Netaji’s legacy reached its nadir in the post-independence era. Despite Clement Attlee’s acknowledgment to Chief Justice Phani Bhushan Chakravarti in 1956 that the INA’s activities under Netaji were among the “most important” factors forcing Britain to quit India, the Nehruvian establishment systematically marginalized this contribution from official histories. The treatment of INA funds provides a particularly sordid example of this betrayal.
Correspondence between former Indian Ambassador to Japan KK Chettur and Commonwealth Relations Secretary BN Chakravarty in 1951 reveals serious allegations of misappropriation of INA funds and Netaji’s personal treasure by former INA officials SA Ayer and Munga Ramamurti. Instead of investigating these allegations, the Nehru government granted prominent positions to the very individuals suspected of embezzling Netaji’s legacy. The declassified files show that considerable quantities of diamonds, jewelry, gold, and other valuables belonging to Netaji mysteriously disappeared, with only “300 gms of gold and about 260 rupees worth of cash” eventually handed over to the Indian government. This represents not just financial fraud but a symbolic theft of the material resources that Netaji had accumulated for India’s freedom struggle.
The Congress betrayal of Netaji was significantly amplified by the Communist Party of India’s sustained vilification campaign against the INA leader. As documented in testimonies from former revolutionaries, the CPI’s opposition to Netaji stemmed from both ideological differences and opportunistic calculations. M.N. Roy, the prominent communist leader who had once been associated with revolutionary activities, exemplified this betrayal. After embracing communist ideology, Roy and his followers consistently opposed nationalist movements that didn’t align with their international communist agenda. Their criticism of Netaji’s alliance with Axis powers conveniently ignored the pragmatic necessity that drove a colonized nation to seek support from any available source against imperial oppression. The communist opposition to Netaji wasn’t merely theoretical—it actively undermined recruitment and support for the INA within India. As Netaji himself wrote in Forward magazine about the communists: “In 1930 those who had gone for National Struggle, were condemned as counter revolutionaries.” This ideological rigidity contributed significantly to the marginalization of armed resistance in favor of the Gandhian path, ultimately serving Congress interests while weakening genuinely revolutionary alternatives.
The systematic betrayal of Netaji’s legacy by Congress, had profound consequences for independent India’s political culture. By marginalizing armed resistance and revolutionary nationalism, these betrayals ensured that India’s independence narrative would be dominated by Gandhian non-violence, effectively erasing the contributions of those who chose to fight rather than petition for freedom. This erasure had material consequences for INA veterans and their families. Denied integration into the Indian Army, stripped of recognition for their service, and left without adequate pensions or honors, these freedom fighters became the forgotten soldiers of India’s independence struggle. Their treatment stands in stark contrast to the reverence accorded to political leaders who achieved independence through negotiation rather than sacrifice. The intellectual consequences were equally severe. By suppressing the INA’s legacy, Congress ensured that subsequent generations of Indians would grow up believing that non-violence alone achieved independence. This mythification of the freedom struggle not only distorted historical truth but also weakened India’s strategic culture, fostering an intellectual environment that was suspicious of military solutions and prone to strategic passivity.
Contemporary scholars like Sanjeev Sanyal have highlighted how this Nehruvian distortion of history created long-term strategic vulnerabilities. In his analysis of India’s economic and strategic culture, Sanyal argues that the systematic marginalization of figures like Netaji was part of a broader pattern of colonial-era thinking that persisted well into the post-independence period.
The hologram statue of Netaji at India Gate, whatever its symbolic value, cannot compensate for seven decades of systematic marginalization. True honor for Netaji lies not in ceremonial gestures but in embracing the revolutionary nationalism that he embodied—a nationalism that Congress found too inconvenient to acknowledge, too threatening to accommodate, and too authentic to co-opt.
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