Family members of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose today appealed to West Bengal Governor K N Tripathi to urge Prime Minister Narendra Modi to release the secret files on the disappearance of the freedom fighter.
A delegation of the "Open Platform", a forum on Netaji led by his family members, met the Governor and submitted a memorandum on the issue.
"We would request you to kindly support us in raising this matter with the Government of India and West Bengal, calling for the immediate release of long-held classified files on Netaji. After almost seven decades, citizens of our country are still waiting to know the truth about the disappearance of one of its greatest sons, whose contribution to the Indian freedom struggle was immense and indeed in many ways unparallelled," their memorandum said.
The Prime Minister's Office, in a recent RTI reply, has accepted that there were 41 files related to Netaji, of which two had been declassified, but refused to disclose the others, arguing that the "disclosure would prejudicially affect relation with foreign countries".
Netaji's family also called for setting up of a Special Investigation Team under the guidance of a leading judge of the Supreme Court to investigate into Netaji's disappearance mystery.
Chandra Kumar Bose, a spokesperson for the Bose family, said that the Governor had assured them that the proposal submitted by them would be forwarded to the Prime Minister with his recommendation.
When under house arrest by the British in then Calcutta, Netaji had escaped in 1941 to seek international support for his efforts to free his country and formed the Indian National Army with Japanese help. He went missing in 1945.
The Mukherjee Commission had rejected the opinion that he had died in a plane crash at Taihoku airport in Taiwan on August 18, 1945.
