In the heydays of desi perestroika, the Narasimha Rao Government made a bid to pull out the thorn of Bose mystery in their side. Top Secret documents accessed by Mission Netaji lay bare the never-seen-before details of an abortive ploy to bring the Renkoji ashes to India and foist them on the Indians as the remains of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.

A disturbing angle to the tale was the role of Anita Pfaff in the machinations to establish Subhas Bose's death following the alleged plane crash in Taipei, even though the evidence was the other way around.

In 1995, a crisis arose with some Japanese war veterans delivering a stern message to the Indian Government to take the Renkoji ashes to India. Official line had been that Bose's ashes were enshrined in suburban Tokyo's Renkoji temple. Obviously, the Government hadn't told the unsuspecting veterans that the "ashes and the other remains" of Subhas Bose had been clandestinely brought to India during Jawaharlal Nehru's time. The unenlightened Japanese, like the poor Indians, were perhaps also not aware that the Government of India had also been secretly paying up the Renkoji temple authorities for maintaining whatever was being kept by them.

The war veterans' demand was discussed by the highest echelons of power in India, including Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, Home Minister SB Chavan, Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee and the all-important Committee of Secretaries (CoS) headed by the Cabinet Secretary. The Intelligence Bureau cautioned that heeding to the Japanese wasn't a good idea. "If the ashes are brought to India, the people of West Bengal are likely to construe it as an imposition on them of the official version of Netaji's death," they warned.

But it was Pranab Mukherjee's External Affairs Ministry that stuck out the opposite view. "The ashes should be brought back to India." The Ministry even suggested a "preparatory action" to create a "consensus in favour of burying the controversy" under which "respected public figures" were to be "discreetly encouraged to make statements, including in Parliament, requesting the Government to bring back the ashes".

Prime Minister Rao ordered Home Ministry to place the matter before the Union Cabinet for a decision. Accordingly, Home Secretary K Padmanabhaiah in February 1995 prepared a detailed note enumerating the case, as the Government viewed it. According to a Top Secret memo of April 1998 by PP Shukla, then a Joint Secretary in Atal Bihari Vajpayee's PMO, Rao's Cabinet decided on February 8, 1995 that "the ashes would not be brought back to India for the present but that the dependability of the arrangement in Japan should be examined". The memo noted that "this was done and it was felt that we (the Government) could raise our annual upkeep contribution (to the Renkoji temple) from ¥ 600,000 to ¥ 1 million". In other words, the Renkoji authorities were dangled a monetary carrot to dissuade them from disposing off the ashes they thought were of Bose's.

Strangely, the Cabinet's decision did not deter Pranab Mukherjee from making an another go and inviting a rebuff. Mukherjee hopped across the world in later part of 1995 in his quest to bury the controversy. After meeting the Japanese Foreign Minister in Tokyo, he flew to Germany. The details of Mukherjee's inglorious experience there were sanitised in the official papers. It was recorded that the Minister met Anita Pfaff, who, against the wishes of her family, was eager to help the Government in burying the ghost of the Netaji mystery.

But what really happened was that Pranab Mukherjee met Anita's mother, Emile Schenkl, and sought from her in writing a go-ahead to take the Renkoji ashes to India and get rid of the controversy forever. The inside story of the drama that ensued in Anita Pfaff's home in Augsburg was revealed to the Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry (JMCI) by Netaji's grand nephew Surya Kumar Bose.

"On 21 October 1995 Anita and her husband Dr Martin Pfaff had to take Mr Pranab Mukherjee out for lunch as Auntie (Emile) could not tolerate any discussion on the so-called 'ashes' in her presence. Auntie told Pranab Mukherjee quite clearly that she did not believe that Netaji had died in a plane crash in Taihoku (Taipei) and that those 'ashes' in the Renkoji temple had nothing to do with Subhas."

Surya Bose also affirmed that subsequently an Indian daily carried a newsitem which quoted Pranab Mukherjee as saying that Emile "had given her approval to the Government of India's plans for bringing the 'ashes' to India, and that he (Mukherjee) had a document to prove it".

"I spoke to Auntie as soon as I heard about this report," Surya Bose informed the Commission, "and she reiterated that she had signed no such document and had approved of nothing. Mr Pranab Mukherjee was propagating an untruth for reasons best known to him and the Government of India."

After Emile's death in 1996, Anita swung into action and as Shukla's memo shows, she visited India "twice in order to build up a consensus in favour of the return of the ashes". In January 1998 she met Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujaral and "expressed the hope that the new Government would take account of her wishes and bring back the ashes to India". Thumbing her nose on the inquiry of Justice MK Mukherjee, she told the same to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajapyee during their meeting in 2003.