Anuj Dhar
Indian conspiracy theorist
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Claims
Dhar has claimed that Bose had lived in the Uttar Pradesh state of India as Gumnami Baba or Bhagwanji a hermit till 1985. The claims were debunked by the Mukherjee Commission which rejected any linkage between the two, in light of a DNA profiling test. The Commission rejected the plane crash theory and stated that Netaji ‘did not die in the plane crash as alleged’ and that ‘the ashes in the Japanese temple are not of Netaji’. However Indian Government did not accept the findings of the commission.
He also believes that Bose escaped to Russia (then, Soviet Union) after the crash and has accused successive Congress governments of being a part of broader conspiracy to keep Netaji dead. The Mukherjee commission did not locate any relevant material in the KGB archives.
In 2005, the Taiwan government provided emails to Dhar that it has no records of a plane crash during the period of 14 August to 25 October 1945, at the old Matsuyama Airport (now Taipei Domestic Airport). These records played a major role in the final assertion of Mukherjee Commission about the implausibility of Bose dying from an air crash. Historian Sugata Bose has rejected the analysis in light of the fact that the region and the airport was under Japanese occupation until 1946 and it was around 1949 when the Taiwaniese government finally consolidated itself.
In the book No Secrets, Dhar states that, according to a newspaper article published by Bose's elder brother Sarat Chandra Bose in The Nation, Bose was in China in October 1949.
Dhar's 2008 book, CIA's Eye on South Asia, compiled declassified Central Intelligence Agency records on India and its neighbours.
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Criticism
Netaji biographer Leaonard A. Gordon also penned a critical note on Dhar in a postscript of his book Brothers Against the Raj. There Gordon alleged that Dhar misuses the Subhas Chandra Bose death mystery issue for contemporary Indian political purposes.
On August 18, 2019, Dhar shared a digitally altered photograph of Subhas Chandra Bose reading a newspaper with a headline announcing his own death. He captioned the image:"Original picture with some reimagination by @BiplabC2. #Netaji #DeathThatWasnt #TheBoseMystery #Gumnaami @prosenjitbumba @srijitspeaketh @chandrachurg @PanickarS @koushikzworld @SayakSen6 @Sayani_Pandit." The photo was shared on Twitter (Now X since June 23, 2023). Notably, Dhar had previously shared the original image on May 27, 2018 with the caption, "Subhas Chandra Bose reading Nippon Times (now The Japan Times), Japan's largest and oldest English-language daily newspaper @japantimes"