A day after a batch of 100 files on Subhas Chandra Bose was declassified, indicating that successive governments at the Centre were of the opinion that Netaji had died in an aircrash in August 1945, Ardhendu Bose, a nephew of the freedom fighter, has rubbished the plane crash “theory”, calling it a cover-up created by Japan to help him escape.

“There was no plane crash. The British government created the propaganda (of crash). It (the crash theory) was a cover-up created by Japan to help Netaji,” Ardhendu said. He said the Taiwanese government, and British and US intelligence reports have all stated that there was no plane crash on August 18, 1945.

Ardhendu’s father Sailesh Chandra Bose was Netaji’s younger brother.Talking about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s move to make documents on Netaji public, Ardhendu told The Indian Express Sunday that it was part of the Prime Minister’s wider plan to urge other countries to release their classified files on Netaji.

He said the papers declassified Saturday threw little light on Netaji’s mysterious disappearance, adding that the Bose family believes there is not much information even in the remaining files waiting to be made public in India. Specifying that the family believes Jawaharlal Nehru wanted to “wipe out the memory of Subhas Bose and INA” due to their “rivalry”, Ardhendu said, “I guess lot of files have been destroyed that implicate (Nehru), and that say he (Netaji) did not die in a plane crash.”

Source: The Indian Express