Calcutta
Telegraph: New Delhi: Monday, 08 December 2014.
Transparency
warrior Subhash Chandra Agrawal had hoped he finally had an ally in Narendra
Modi when he petitioned the Prime Minister's Office for information on namesake
Subhas Chandra Bose's death.
Modi had won
a once-in-a-generation mandate on the back of several promises including one of
greater transparency, even over elements of India's foreign policy and
strategic history that have remained veiled for decades.
But Agrawal,
who had badgered the Manmohan Singh government almost every day using the Right
to Information (RTI) Act over the past decade, has come up against a
stonewalling of information by the NDA that he says is unusual even by UPA
standards.
He isn't
alone. Petitioners seeking information from India's foreign office under the
RTI Act have received unsatisfactory responses over three times more frequently
since Modi came to power than in the first five months of the year, data
accessed by The Telegraph show.
Between June
and October, eight in every 100 RTI applicants to the external affairs ministry
have had to follow up their petitions with appeals. Only 2.5 per cent of
applicants between January and May had felt the need to appeal against the
foreign office's responses. ( See chart)
"I don't
find the replies as transparency-oriented as earlier," Agrawal, appointed
an adviser to the Delhi government by the lieutenant governor earlier this
year, told this newspaper.
He was
speaking about his own experiences with RTI applications, not necessarily
restricted to the foreign office, over the past five months.
It's a
sentiment that is fast enveloping many who supported Modi and the BJP, trusting
their promise to deliver a more transparent government even in the
traditionally secretive areas of strategic affairs and foreign policy.
Home minister
Rajnath Singh had on January 23, this year, demanded - he was then in the
Opposition - that the government reveal documents relating to Bose's death,
officially attributed to a plane crash over Taiwan in 1945 but still considered
a mystery by many.
"Netaji's
death is still a mystery for most of us," Singh had said in a statement
issued by the BJP. "The mystery behind his death should be unveiled by the
Union government to let the people know the truth."
On March 19,
finance minister Arun Jaitley - also in the Opposition at the time - had
blogged about successive governments' refusal to reveal the contents of the
Henderson-Brooks report that analysed the reasons for India's defeat to China
in the 1962 war.
"To keep
these documents 'top secret' indefinitely may not be in larger public
interest," Jaitley had written.
"Any
nation is entitled to learn from the mistakes of the past. The security
relevance of a document loses its relevance in the long-term future. With the
wisdom of hindsight I am of the opinion that the report's contents could have
been made public some decades ago."
But in July,
Jaitley rose in Parliament to insist that the Henderson Brooks report couldn't
be made public.
Author and
RTI activist Anuj Dhar, who has campaigned for years seeking clarity on the
circumstances of Bose's death, has only received the same perfunctory response
under Modi that he did from the UPA.
Like Agrawal,
Dhar had sought details of documents relating to Bose's death, counting on - as
he mentioned in his petition to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) - "the
Prime Minister's personal commitment to transparency, (and) his admiration for
Netaji".
But he
received a response suggesting that any disclosure of details could hurt ties
with a third country - the reply the UPA government had given him back in 2006.
The Modi
government's struggles so far to live up to its promises of transparency in
strategic and foreign policy matters have triggered cautionary protests from at
least one commentator and a publication considered sympathetic to the BJP.
"PM must
review decision to keep Netaji files secret even after 75 years,"
columnist Swapan Dasgupta tweeted earlier this week. "Culture of permanent
non-transparency...."
In the
recently re-launched online avatar of Swarajya magazine, Dhar wrote this week
that he had had few expectations from a Congress-led government but the BJP now
risked muddying its nationalist credentials.
"The
party's nationalistic image is going to take a big hit if they renege on their
promise to settle the Netaji case," Dhar wrote. "Not only that, the
BJP now runs the risk of filling the boots of the Congress as the main villain
in the story."
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