INDIA: Britain ordered its secret agents to assassinate Indian independence hero Subhas Chandra Bose but they failed, Irish historian Prof Eunan O'Halpin of Trinity College Dublin said yesterday, quoting official documents.
Bose, popularly known as "Netaji" or leader, remains an iconic figure at home in the eastern state of West Bengal - and his role in India's freedom movement is taught in schools across India where statues to him have been erected.
The plot to kill Bose was formed after he fled house arrest in Kolkata - formerly known as Calcutta - in 1941, to seek help from Britain's wartime enemies, Germany and Japan, to build an army to end British colonial rule in India.
"It was after he fled Kolkata and was on his way to Germany that London ordered his assassination," Prof O'Halpin explained in Kolkata, quoting from British intelligence documents declassified in 2004.
Prof O'Halpin is on a lecture tour of India at the invitation of the Netaji Research Bureau, run by Bose's descendants. An expert on British intelligence, he said Britain's Special Operations (SO) group's documents show Bose's killing was ordered on March 7th, 1941, when British authorities thought he was on his way to meet Adolf Hitler through the Middle East.
"Special Operations agents in Istanbul and Cairo were asked to trace Bose and kill him," Prof O'Halpin said, adding they couldn't. Bose eventually reached Germany through Russia on April 2nd, 1941. He then met Hitler in Berlin.
He took help from Axis powers, particularly Japan, to get Indian prisoners of war to turn against their former masters in the British Indian army and join his Indian National Army (INA).
In doing so, he earned the adoration of millions of his nationalist followers and the tag of traitor from the British.
The circumstances of Bose's reported death are highly contested and a sensitive political issue in West Bengal, where a federal government inquiry is trying to pin down how he disappeared from public view in 1945 and when he died.
Earlier official reports said Bose died in a Japanese air crash in Taiwan in August 1945 at the age of 48 and his cremated remains were sent to Japan.
But Taiwan authorities denied this, saying there was no record of an air crash at the time and boosting the claim that Bose faked the crash to escape secretly to the former Soviet Union.
This particular school of thought said he returned to India from the Soviet Union after the second World War and then lived in his homeland under the guise of a Hindu monk, dying eventually in 1985.
It is a claim being investigated by the government panel in West Bengal.
Paul Walsh, British High Commission spokesman in Kolkata, said the revelation about Britain's assassination plot against Bose would not damage ties between the two countries.
"This document is an interesting piece of history. But we don't think this will make any impact on the modern dynamic relations between Britain and India," Mr Walsh said.
In 1944, Netaji's INA tried to overrun India's remote northeast and head towards neighbouring Bengal, his home state, where he was convinced people would rise up to fight with him.
But, in the end, his troops were driven back by the British Indian army into Burma, now Myanmar, many dying of dysentery, malnutrition or malaria.
The British left India three years later, a departure traditionally attributed mainly due to the non-violent campaign led by Mahatma Gandhi.