Amritsar, January 22
Even as the nation remembers Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose on his 113th birth anniversary tomorrow, very few people know that the great son of the soil had a brief stopover at the holy city before his ‘great escape’ to Kabul in early 1940s.

The Tribune team today visited Bara Makan, a small locality frequently visited by great revolutionaries, Gandhi Gali and Putlighar localities to unearth the details of Netaji’s Amritsar visit. Interestingly, Netaji’s Amritsar connection came to light only a few years back when Manmohan Chand Mohindru, son of freedom fighter Dr Karam Chand Mohindru, found an old photograph of his father and other revolutionaries with Bose.

Talking to this correspondent at his Putlighar residence, a septuagenarian Manmohan Chand said: “We were not much aware of Bose’s meeting with our father until we discovered this photograph while getting whitewash done in our house around five years back. We had an idea about ‘some old photo’ as Lala Dharampal Sangar, a freedom fighter friend of my father, had visited our house once and had asked for it, but we could not find it and my father too had passed away by then.”

According to him, Sangar had shifted his base to Mumbai and had come looking for the photograph, saying he had to show it to Shiv Sena chief Bala Saheb Thackeray. However, by the time they discovered the photograph Sangar had died. “The photograph was found in a badly damaged condition and we somehow managed to recover it through computer scanning,” he said, adding that they got three-four copies made of that photograph and gave it to some other families whose ancestors either featured in it or were freedom fighters. One of them was Ravi Chatrath whose grandfather Lala Gangaram Chatrath belonged to the group of freedom fighters Sangar and Mohindru.

Chandarpal Sangar, son of Lala Dharampal Sangar, who lives near Bara Makan in Amritsar, revealed that Bose had stayed at the residence of noted freedom fighter Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew in Beri Gate area of the city. “As the Britishers were looking for him, he was kept in a small room at Kitchlew’s house during his brief stay in the city before he headed to Kashmir and then to Kabul.”

Netaji interacted with the local leaders to put up a united front to oust the British and set up an Indian state. He said though his father had told him that he had met Bose, they had no proof of the meeting until he got this photo. He said they had moved to Mumbai in 1958 where his father had set up a factory by the name of Silk India. However, Chandarpal lived in Mumbai only for five years. He lived in different cities before shifting to Amritsar a few years back.

However, Mohindru said they haven’t got any recognition of being a freedom fighter’s family despite the fact that they approached the administration with the photograph. He claimed that Abdul Gani Dar, Amir Chand Gupta, Dr Satpal, Sheikh Sammaddin, Mohd Ali and Shaukat Ali were the other revolutionaries who met Netaji during his Amritsar visit and all of them feature in the photograph.