Is He reading this?

The Americans have JFK. The French have Napoleon. But Indians have it even better. The Camelot president and the diminutive monarch were both definitively dead when they started ruling over the collective imagination of their compatriots. The Americans or the French can only obsess about how their hero died. We have always had the delicious option of asking did Netaji die?

We have deployed three inquiry commissions8212;the latest headed by Justice Mukherjee8212;to ask this question. Given the Mukherjee Commission8217;s tantalising findings no Netaji, or Subhas Chandra Bose or even Chandra Bose in the Taihoku death registry, at least a couple more commissions seem to be in order. The Russians weren8217;t very cooperative about the Soviet archives, we are told. There is8212;you guessed it8212;the CIA connection. There8217;s, or there was, an ashram in north Bengal and, if we are not mistaken, something about someone on the beaches of Puri. Himalayan foothills have been mentioned with equal authority by Netaji-watchers as Siberian labour camps. Surely not every possibility has been explored? And let us not overlook some new lines of inquiry.

Consider this: Bengal gets a lot of Japanese FDI; Bose was Japan8217;s war time ally; if Bose hadn8217;t quite met the fate he was officially presumed to have, could Bengal have had a strictly unofficial envoy in Asia8217;s richest country all these years? Is the good word still being whispered in the right Japanese ears? The limits to our questions are set only by the timidity of our imagination. So, let us not ever be afraid of others8217; amusement. They can laugh all they want8212;but they never had three inquiry commissions and more than a few crores of taxpayers8217; money at their disposal, did they? They are denied the pleasure of pursuing those grand counterfactual questions: what if He had come back then, in 1945? What if He comes back now, in 2005 remember, people do live to be over 100? What if He is reading this? We have to stop now. It8217;s getting far too exciting.