A panel agonises over a 58-yr-old mystery

After four years of work, 22 sittings, hearing over 100 witnesses and two trips abroad, Mukherjee is as close to the truth as when he started out.

Facing official apathy, Russian documents that can’t be translated and dodgy depositions — one witness called Netaji ‘‘an idea, a concept, a Mahakal who will live on forever’’ — and with the commission’s term running out in July, the truth is likely to remain somewhere out there.

‘‘I don’t know how to tackle this. I don’t know what to do!’’, Mukherjee, normally a mild man, exploded while talking to The Sunday Express recently.

A lawyer had drawn his attention to the Union government’s failure to comply with the commission’s orders, prompting the outburst.

‘‘I will not call it silence — it is inaction. And after all this, we will have to justify why the Commission is seeking a one-year extension of its term’’, Mukherjee said over the sound of a clerk hammering away at a typewriter. His answer? A ‘‘Kolkata Chalo’’ scenario, as Mukherjee will be seeking to bring officials from Delhi to his commission.

‘‘Since they (bureaucrats) have failed to respond in the past three years, the best option now would be to have them in person here before the Commission’’, the chairman fumed. ‘‘They’’ implied the secretaries of the ministries of external affairs, Home, Defence, Information & Broadcasting, and even the Prime Minister’s Office and Cabinet Secretariat.

Asked if the Commission has been able to make any breakthrough in gathering relevant evidence in the past three years, Mukherjee stonewalls: ‘‘At this stage, it is difficult to make a statement on the appreciation of evidence.’’

He is careful, though, not to appear too defeatist. When asked if he was hopeful about winding up the inquiry within the one-year extension, he said: ‘‘It is really difficult to give a timeframe with the kind of response the Commission is getting from the quarters concerned.’’

But there has been some progress on the case. For the first time, Mukherjee said, steps have been taken for DNA testing of the ashes at Renkoji; three of Netaji’s relatives in Kolkata have also agreed to have their DNA samples taken.

The commission has also sought DNA profiling of body tissue from ‘Gumnami Baba’ of Faizabad, the last in the line of sadhus whom the faithful identified as Netaji.

The baba, who died in 1985, was identified by none other than Netaji’s niece Lalita — daughter of his brother Suresh.

For those of you who think Netaji’s ‘disappearance’ is a dead issue, consider this: when a TV channel drew a parallel earlier this week between Saddam’s fate and Netaji’s, protests were raised in Rajya Sabha.

Indeed, Netaji’s fate has always been an emotive issue in parts of India, especially West Bengal, since the air crash in Taiwan in 1945 in which some believe he died. His death was announced at the time by the Japanese military, with whom he was collaborating, and they installed his ‘ashes’ at the Renkoji temple in Japan but his associates in the Azad Hind Fauj have held that he survived.

Two inquiry commissions — including one comprising Netaji’s brother Suresh and close aide Shahnawaz Khan — upheld the crash-death theory. But frequent reports of ‘sightings’ across India, usually of sadhus, prompted the Centre — on the Kolkata High Court’s directive — to set up the Mukherjee Commission in May 1999.

However, having got the hearings under way at Mahajati Sadan — someone has a sense of humour: the institution was built by Netaji — Delhi apparently forgot about Mukherjee.