West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee criticised the Centre on Tuesday for not declaring the birthday of freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose a national holiday. Tuesday marked Bose’s 121st birth anniversary.
“The birthday of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose has not yet been declared a national holiday,” Banerjee said, according to PTI. “Can’t we show this much respect to him? The state [West Bengal] had announced public holiday on January 23 years ago.”
She was also disappointed that the government has not yet declassified all files related to Bose, and details of his disappearance in 1945 are not yet known. “The people of the country want to know what happened to him,” she said. “There is a version which only a section believes.”
On January 20, Banerjee had said on Twitter that she had written to the Prime Minister’s Office, asking for the birthdays of Subhash Chandra Bose and Swami Vivekananda to be declared national holidays.
In May 2017, the Centre, in a Right to Information reply, said freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose had died in a plane crash in in Taiwan in 1945, as was widely believed but never confirmed. In 2015, the government had decided to declassify documents related to Bose in batches.
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