The rumours have never stopped since the day that Subhas Chandra Bose, one of India's greatest freedom fighters, supposedly died in a plane crash in Taiwan in 1945.
In the intervening seven decades, three high-powered committees have failed to spell out in black and white whether Netaji -- the Hindi honorific meaning "respected leader" by which Bose was known -- escaped the crash and lived incognito in Russia and India to avoid being prosecuted as a war criminal by the Congress government.
From time to time new claims would surface to the effect that Netaji never died in the crash and had been seen afterward in Russia, India and Burma.
A file declassified by the Narendra Modi government last month makes reference to an affidavit sworn by Narendranath Sindkar, an Indian who worked as a radio journalist in Russia between 1966 and 1991. It claims that Netaji was alive at least until 1968 and seen in Omsk, a Siberian city.
In the affidavit filed in 2000 before the commission chaired by Justice MK Mukherjee, Sindkar said he had been told that Netaji was forced to live in exile in Soviet Russia after arriving there via Manchuria.
The Mukherjee commission was the third to look into the mystery behind Netaji's whereabouts. Its report in November 2005 could not say conclusively whether and where Netaji lived after 1945. However, its members did visit Taipei where Taiwanese government officials testified that no plane crash took place on Aug 18, 1945.
Shakti Singh, a social worker in Ayodhya, owned the house in which Gumnami Baba was a tenant in the 1980s. Narendra Kaushik
Before the Mukherjee Commission, committees headed by Shah Nawaz Khan (1956) and GD Khosla (1970) investigated the issue. Both declared on the basis of oral evidence that Bose perished in the 1945 crash. However, the conclusion of the Shah Nawaz committee was not unanimous. Bose's elder brother and a member of the committee, Suresh Chandra Bose, strongly contested the premise that there was a crash in Taiwan.
The mystery has deepened with revelations by Shakti Singh, a social worker from Ayodhya, who claims that Netaji lived in his house as a sannyasi or renunciant named "Gumnami Baba" for about two years before his death in September 1985.
"I got to know a year after Gumnami Baba moved into my house as a tenant that he was Subhas Chandra Bose," he told Asia Focus. Singh refers to 2,760 articles that were found in Gumnami Baba's 26 trunks as a proof of his identity.
Items found among the belongings of "Gumnami Baba" after his death in 1985 include photos of Subhas Chandra Bose's parents and family, and a letter to Suresh Chandra Bose seeking his testimony in an inquiry into his brother's disappearance. The eyeglasses also are the same as those Bose used to wear. Narendra Kaushik
"He had photographs of Netaji's entire family, papers related to inquiries and newspaper reports about him, spoke many languages, and would celebrate Netaji's birthday (Jan 23) with friends from Kolkata. He was an extraordinary man," he recalls.
Singh also said that Lalita Bose, a niece of Subhas Chandra Bose visited Ayodhya in January 1986, a few months after Gumnami Baba's death to have a look at the latter's belongings. "When she saw her family photographs and papers, she broke down and conceded that the baba was indeed her uncle," he remembers. Lalita Bose has since died.
Singh said that before moving into his house, Gumnami Baba had lived with a man known as Dr RP Mishra for a few years. Prior to that he was also believed to have lived in Sitapur and Basti, two other cities in Uttar Pradesh state. The baba spent all his time behind closed doors and never showed his face, even to his landlord.
Last month, the Uttar Pradesh state government instituted a new commission of inquiry headed by Justice Vishnu Sahay, a retired High Court judge, to ascertain the identity of Gumnami Baba. The commission has been given six months to submit its report.
Chandra Kumar Bose, a grand-nephew of Subhas Chandra Bose and a politician with the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), welcomed the new inquiry and said he hoped it would bring closure to the old mystery. In an interview with Asia Focus, he also claimed that there was no air crash in Taiwan. "Nehru knew there was no crash. He kept our family under surveillance for 25 years."
Chandra said he hoped that the Sahay Commission would do scientific research and not rely only on oral evidence. He wanted the inquiry to go beyond the Mukherjee Commission, which tried to match DNA and handwriting samples and got conflicting reports.
"On the handwriting, two experts said it did not match. One said it matched. The DNA done on a tooth recovered from baba's rented accommodation turned out to be negative. We heard there was some manipulation. But can CFSL (Central Forensic Science Laboratory) in Hyderabad be manipulated? The crash theory was based on eyewitness accounts. There are no photographs. Can we have a final outcome now?" he asked.
Items found among the belongings of "Gumnami Baba" after his death in 1985 include photos of Subhas Chandra Bose's parents and family, and a letter to Suresh Chandra Bose seeking his testimony in an inquiry into his brother's disappearance. The eyeglasses also are the same as those Bose used to wear. Narendra Kaushik
The Modi government since January this year has released 260 previously secret government files on Bose. They contain information related to his disappearance, his foreign wife Emilie Schenkl-Bose, daughter Anita Martin Praff, funds deposited by Netaji's Indian National Army (INA) in foreign bank accounts, and correspondence between Indian government officials on the subject. The Indian government has also requested the Russian government to declassify its KGB files on Netaji.
Previous Congress governments from Jawaharlal Nehru to Manmohan Singh had refused to make the files public, saying that doing so could jeopardise India's foreign relations.
The files on the INA funds disclose that Bose's organisation had deposits in several countries including Singapore and Thailand.
In Bangkok, the INA and the Indian Independence League (IIL), an organisation of Indian expatriates based in Southeast Asia which was later merged with the INA, held around 80,000 rupees (the equivalent of 4.2 million rupees or US$63,000 today) which the Nehru government arranged to transfer to a branch of Indian Overseas Bank in 1953. The interest on the bank deposit was used to send an Indian scholar to Chulalongkorn University each year to deliver lectures on Indo-Thai relations.
The first Indian Scholar was TN Ramachandran, a joint director-general of archaeology, who visited Lop Buri, the seat of Dvaravati art which has marked Indian influence, and Ayutthaya, the seat of the Sukhothai kingdom which witnessed a golden age of Buddhist art.
Bose, born on Jan 23, 1897, resigned from the Indian Civil Service to join the freedom movement then led by the Congress party. He was president of the party twice, between 1937 and 1939. In 1939, he had to resign from the presidency after his differences with Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel became irreconcilable. Bose had come to believe that working with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan would be the most effective way to rid India of British rule.
After resigning from the Congress, Bose travelled to Germany, Russia, Japan, Singapore, Burma and other countries to garner support for the Indian freedom movement. He formed the INA and attacked British forces in Eastern India during World War II but had to withdraw after Japan surrendered. As a result of his involvement with the Axis powers, Bose left a troubled legacy, but he is still highly revered in West Bengal state.
A visitor looks at a picture of Subhas Chandra Bose at a museum in Kolkata. There are many who believe that the aged ascetic known as Gumnami Baba (inset) was in fact the former Indian freedom fighter. Photos: Reuters and Narendra Kaushik
Items found among the belongings of "Gumnami Baba" after his death in 1985 include photos of Subhas Chandra Bose's parents and family, and a letter to Suresh Chandra Bose seeking his testimony in an inquiry into his brother's disappearance. The eyeglasses also are the same as those Bose used to wear. Narendra Kaushik
Items found among the belongings of "Gumnami Baba" after his death in 1985 include photos of Subhas Chandra Bose's parents and family, and a letter to Suresh Chandra Bose seeking his testimony in an inquiry into his brother's disappearance. The eyeglasses also are the same as those Bose used to wear. Narendra Kaushik