A Life Immortal 319in quiry, lost the general election of 1977. The Janata party, after assum-
ing power in New Delhi, set aside Khosla’s find ings. More than two
de cades later, in 1999, yet another one- man commission was appointed
by the government to conduct a fresh in quiry. A retired Bengali judge
named Manoj Mukherjee held court for nearly six years, providing a
venue for increasingly fanciful stories about Netaji’s whereabouts since
August 1945. The judge himself harbored a preconceived notion, as he
confessed in 2010, that Bose was living as an ascetic in the north Indian
town of Faizabad de cades after 1945. In October 2002, he sent letters
to members of the Bose family asking them to donate one milliliter
of blood for a DNA match with “one Gumnami Baba,” who “some
persons” had claimed was “none other than Netaji Subhas Chandra
Bose.”^32 The evidence naturally did not support this bizarre theory. Yet
by entertaining the most preposterous claims, the judge managed to
add to the confusion in the public mind about the life and death of a
great leader of the in de pen dence movement.
The Mukherjee commission made no distinction between the highly
probable and the utterly impossible. In May 2006, after six long years, it
submitted a report stating that the air crash on August 18, 1945, had
not occurred at all. The basis for this find ing was a message from the
government of Taiwan saying that it did not possess any records of that
crash. It could not be expected to do so, since in August 1945 Taiwan
had been under Japanese military occupation. The Japanese had not
relinquished control over Taiwan until the spring of 1946, and the
Chiang Kai- shek government had consolidated itself on the island only
after the communist victory on the mainland of China in 1949. The
Manmohan Singh government, quite sensibly, rejected outright the
Mukherjee commission’s report, while submitting it to Parliament. Yet
the government of India has so far neglected to take steps to honor
Netaji’s mortal remains and to keep his ideals alive, as the Shah Nawaz
Khan committee had advocated in 1956.^33
The mass psychological phenomenon of an initial refusal to accept
Netaji’s death in the early de cades after in de pen dence, and the hope
that he would one day return as the deliverer of his country, were per-
fectly understandable in that time of crisis. The recurrent attempts to