New Delhi: It is Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s 125th birth anniversary today. Not many of Odisha’s connection with a secret mission carried out by him in 1944.
Amrik Singh Gill, one of INA’s Secret Service officers on the mission has chronicled how he and his comrades reached Odisha’s Puri in 1944 on Netaji’s orders. “In March that year, a fully armed Japanese submarine left the secure base in Penang, carrying four INA Secret Service officers, destined for the Puri beach of the Bay of Bengal. In the submarine were Pabitra Mohan Roy (leader), Sardar Mohinder Singh (bomb expert), Tuhin Mukherjee (coding expert) and Amrik Singh Gill (radio expert). Just before departure came Netaji’s message to them directly: “Though few in number, your mission will strike a deadly blow at the entire British secret service. This base in Calcutta must be set up at all cost,” Gill wrote, as quoted by Hindustan Times (HT).
The submarine reached its destination and put the four on their mechanised dinghy. “Just before daybreak we could see the huge Konarak Sun Temple…” wrote Gill. Within minutes, Singh buried the bombs and power packs, 25 paces from the south-end wall of the temple. (Are they still there?). They dispersed hurriedly with vital radio parts camouflaged by Roy in a travelling gramophone of yore. They would rendezvous at the Metro Cinema in Calcutta on a Sunday at 10 am, quotes the report.
Then came the deadly mistake. Against orders, Mukherjee went to meet his in-laws. His father-in-law quickly handed him over to the Calcutta police and collected the considerable bounty on his head of ₹5,000 in 1944. Under torture, the vital radio code for transmissions to Netaji’s headquarters in Rangoon was revealed.
This case came to be known as the ‘Calcutta Conspiracy Case”.
Such sacrifices of hundreds of men of INA’s Secret Service who landed across the country from East Asia and were martyred at the altar of the freedom struggle have not been documented anywhere, the HT report adds.
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