For two decades, between 1948 and 1968, the government placed the Bose family members under intensive surveillance. The surveillance was exactly as it would be today on a wanted terrorist's family-rigorous, methodical yet unobtrusive. The revelations have shocked the Bose family. Sleuths intercepted, read and recorded letters of the family.

The IB seemed obsessed in knowing what the family was doing and who they were meeting. A series of handwritten messages show IB agents phoned in 'Security Control', as IB headquarters was called, to report on the family's movements. But it was in the intercepted family mail that the IB relied on to know what the family was thinking. Netaji figured heavily in their correspondence. The letters were mostly about mundane family matters. The IB annotated and underlined parts of the letters that had names of people meeting Emilie Schenkl to show what they were interested in. An IB comment on a 1953 letter describes her as "the alleged wife of Sri Subhash Chandra Bose".

The IB has been routinely used by ruling parties to snoop on political opponents and even on their own family members. Former IB chief M.K. Dhar revealed in his 2005 book Open Secrets that PM Indira Gandhi ordered the IB to spy on Maneka Gandhi and her family because she suspected their political ambitions.

The first family of Congress was very much worried about losing their prominence in the political arena, if their opponents are becoming strong and is getting public support. This has prompted Congress to misuse power and view their opponents, whether in the opposition or within the party, with an eye of suspicion. Whenever congress was in power, right from Nehru’s time, they used to snoop into other life and cry victims. Recently when a routine profiling was done for Rahul Gandhi, Congress was prompt to cry foul. This is because they fear whether their opponents are also doing the same what they have done with the opponents.

By Premji