Times of India: New Delhi:
Sunday, March 23, 2014.
The outing of
the 'top secret' Henderson Brooks report online only underlines India's
obsession with secrecy. The colonial OSA is cited when it comes to matters of
security or intelligence even as the under-staffed National Archives is buried
in a 2,00,000-file backlog. Sunday Times looks at how the government has become
a black hole of Independent India's history.
In a
sprawling corner office on the first floor of South Block occupied by the
defence secretary, locked away in a vault lies the Henderson Brooks report on
the 1962 India-China war. Over the years, defence secretaries including the
BJP's have guarded the document as if it was the holy grail of Indian
statehood. Even after sections of the report were released online by Australian
journalist Neville Maxwell last week, there is no indication that the
government will make the report public now.
The
guardianship of national secrets is not the sole prerogative of the defence
secretary. Babus, too, act as custodians of files that could throw better light
on major incidents of the past and prove instructive on dealing with the next
crisis. Quite a few military experts have pointed out that the Henderson Brooks
report contained lessons that are as valid today as they were in 1962 such as
the need to build roads in the Daulat Beg Oldi sector to tackle Chinese
incursions.
The obsession
with secrecy has also meant that Indian scholars do not have access to records
of many developments since Independence (see box). With no definite records to
refer to, a large amount of work by Indian scholars in recent history has been
flawed. AG Noorani, lawyer, author and columnist, says this is because India
does not declassify records within a fixed term as in other countries.
"This spreads myths which shield the establishment and build a wall around
the lies. For example, outside India it is well known that the war in
Bangladesh began on November 21, 1971, when not only our army but also our air
force went into action. But we like to spread the message that the war began
with the Pakistan attack on December 3. Let me not blame the government alone.
Large sections of the media and even academia, which are supposed to pursue the
historical truth, are not really interested in it, says Noorani, who has
written a book on the India-China boundary problem.
The law of
omerta:
The colonial
Official Secrets Act of 1923 is at the heart of Indian government's obsession
with secrets. A relic of the British era, the government cites this act even
today to fend off demands for transparency, especially on issues regarding
security, military, intelligence etc. It continues to be the default position,
despite the enactment of revolutionary and modernist legislations such as the
Right to Information Act of 2005.
The RTI Act
has helped in pulling out several files and notings from the black hole of
governance. However, it has its own limitations almost two dozen key
organizations including the Intelligence Bureau, R&AW, and NTRO are
exempted from the act. A broad category of information exempted from being
disclosed under RTI relates to documents that would "prejudicially affect
the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security, strategic, scientific or
economic interests of the State, relation with foreign State or lead to
incitement of an offence."
Perpetuating
myths:
It is not the
absence of a law, but its effective implementation that has resulted in the
government becoming a black hole of Independent India's history. Under the
Public Records Act
1993, all
records more than 30 years old are to be transferred to the National Archives,
or to the state archives. But that is never implemented in spirit.
Declassification
is not an issue that is limited to the military alone, says Anit Mukherjee,
military researcher currently based in Singapore. "There is no one office/
officer whose job it is to declassify in any of the departments. Therefore the
first rule of bureaucracy applies If it is no one's job, the job does not get
done. Why is this so? For three reasons. Firstly, bureaucracies are afraid they
may come across looking bad. Secondly, the existing historical myths suit them
and revisiting the past may throw up uncomfortable facts. Third, the most
charitable view, is that they don't do it because they don't think it is
important. Hence, officials are not convinced that they have anything to learn
from revisiting the past."
This is in
stark contrast to a country like the UK where there was a huge uproar recently
after it emerged that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office hoarded over 1.2
million files, dating back to 1840s when the British Empire ran most of the
world. In India, there is no such sense of outrage when the defence ministry
cites "current operational value" to keep the HBR under wraps.
It is only in
the last few years that the government has made public instruments of accession
signed by princely states to join free India in 1947. It is another matter that
these documents are now being used in the court to settle property disputes
between warring members of former royal families.
The Shah
Commission report on Emergency became public only in recent years, though the
proceedings were a public spectacle when they took place. In November 2011,
when this reporter wrote about some newly declassified files of the Ministry of
External Affairs, showing how the ministry completely misread the intentions of
General Zia-ul-Haq in 1977, a senior official landed up at the National
Archives to demand that the files be returned to the ministry.
On rare occasions,
when the bureaucratic stranglehold relents and declassifies files, the National
Archives is not equipped to handle them. Today, almost 2,00,000 government
files are dumped in the under-staffed National Archives with no one to sift
through them. Symbolic of the state of affairs is the fact that the centralized
air-conditioning at the National Archives complex was defunct for almost two
years (2012-2013 ), exposing these precious documents to Delhi's scorching
summer.
Mukherjee
points out that not having a systemic procedure for declassification arises
from lack of a culture of proper archiving and preservation of documents.
"Anecdotally, a walk through South Block with its mountains of cupboards
stacked with dusty files indicates as much. But it became even clearer to me
when the defence secretary's response to an RTI filed by me was that the MoD
could not locate critical documents like the Arun Singh-led Committee on
Defence Expenditure 1990," he says.
Still
hush-hush:
Except a few
hundred inconsequential files from Nehru's PMO, almost no other file has been
declassified.
Operational
reviews of conflicts, court of inquiries on alleged human rights abuses by
military, files on crisis management such as the 1989 kidnapping of Mufti
Mohammed Sayeed's daughter and the hijack of IC 814 etc have not yet been made
public.
No files on
security inputs during communal riots and communications at the highest levels
during such disturbances are public
Almost no
official files are available on major insurgencies such as the one in Kashmir
and northeast faced by India
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