Sahai Commission starts probe into Gumnami Baba

The judicial commission led by Justice Sahai reached Faizabad on Thursday and met people who had either seen Bhagwanji or had a close interaction with him. He personnally met Shakti Singh, the chairperson of Subhash Chandra Bose Rashtriya Vichar Kendra, Rita Banerjee, wife of Baba’s deceased doctor Dr P Banerjee, and Faizabad-based journalist Ashok Tandon on the first day of his visit.

The Commission later visited Guptar Ghat, where the last rites of Bhagwanji were performed, and Ram Katha Sangrahalaya where the museum would be set up to display the items recovered from the house where Bhagwanji stayed and breathed his last. Gumnami Baba is believed by a section of the society to be Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose in exile. Justice Sahai emphasised that the commission would go by pure facts and evidence and first visited Ram Bhawan, where Baba died on September 16, 1985. 

A notification about the commission was advertised on Friday in the city which stated that anyone interested in submitting evidence about Gumnami Baba would be able to do so over the next 30 days. The commission would visit Faizabad once again after 15 days. A similar notification would be published later in English and Bengali dailies of Delhi and Kolkata. 

The visit by Justice Sahai comes after more than three years of the High Court judgment which directed UP government to ascertain the identity of Gumnami Baba. This was the third commission to have been formed to probe the death of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose but this is the first commission formed to establish the identity of Gumnami Baba. 

Justice Sahai said if the need was felt, subject experts would be involved to decipher the identity of Gumnami Baba. The commission has a term of six months. It was its maiden visit to Faizabad after completion of two months. The commission has been allotted a camp office in the vicinity of Faizabad district collectorate. On 23 January this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had unveiled 100 digital files related to Subhash Chandra Bose to mark his 119th birth anniversary at the National Archives of India.

For a long time, Bose’s family members had been demanding declassification of files related to him to help clear the mystery shrouding his death. While two commissions of inquiry had concluded that Netaji had died in a plane crash in Taipei on 18 August, 1945, a third probe panel, headed by Justice MK Mukherjee, had contested it and suggested that Bose was alive.