Prime Minister releases 100 files of Subash Chandra Bose

The files were declassified and put on digital display at the National Archives of India (NAI) here by the PM, who pressed a button in the presence of Bose family and Union Ministers Mahesh Sharma and Babul Supriyo. Later, Modi and his ministerial colleagues went around glancing at the files, spending over half an hour at the National Archives. 

The NAI also plans to release digital copies of 25 declassified files on Bose in the public domain every month. In October last year, the PM had met the family members of Netaji and announced that the government would declassify the files relating to the leader whose disappearance 70 years ago remains a mystery. 

While two commissions of inquiry had concluded that Netaji had died in a plane crash in Taipei on Aug 18, 1945, a third panel, headed by Justice M K Mukherjee, had contested it and suggested that Bose was alive after that. The controversy had also split members of the Bose family too. 

The first lot of 33 files were declassified by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and handed over to the NAI on December 4, last year. 

Subsequently, the Ministries of Home Affairs and External Affairs too initiated the process of declassification of files relating to Bose in their respective collection which were then transferred over to the NAI, it added.