Claude Arpi
The Pioneer
17th July 2014
If India is to ever know the full story about itself, and to share it with the rest of the world, the Government has to make official records and documents accessible to the people
The Henderson Brooks-Bhagat report is in the news again; for the wrong reason this time. The Rajya Sabha was informed by Minister for Defence Arun Jaitley that “the Henderson Brooks report on 1962 Indo-China war is a ‘top secret document’ and disclosure of any information about it would not be in the national interest.” Strange, I thought, since the old Australian journalist Neville Maxwell had ‘released’ most of it in March.
At that time, Mr Jaitley had rightly written on his blog that it was not in the larger public interest to keep documents ‘top secret’ indefinitely. “Any society is entitled to learn from the past mistakes and take remedial action. With the wisdom of hindsight, I am of the opinion that the report’s content could have been made public some decades ago,” he wrote.
It is irrelevant why the Defence Minister has changed his mind; he probably realised that in the annexure, some maps would have shown that in 1962 India had set up posts in areas which were not in all certainty part of Indian territory. The Defence Ministry could have easily released the report keeping some annexure and maps as ‘classified’; that would have avoided a new controversy. Was Mr Jaitley’s mind possibly too much on the Budget?
A debate is nevertheless healthy because the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat report is only the tip of an iceberg. At a time when the Prime Minister speaks of good governance, transparency and accountability, the fact that there is no proper professional declassification policy in India, is quite appalling. As a result, for decades, the history of modern India, has been hijacked by one party. Very few today realise the extent to which history has been confiscated. One could ask, why is it so important for a nation to know its past. Mr Jaitley was right when he said a society is entitled to learn from its past mistakes, but for this, history has to be based on the nation’s own archival sources.
To give an example, recently two known scholars of the University of Cambridge, Ms Lezlee Brown Halper and Mr Stepan Halper, wrote a book titled, Tibet — an Unfinished Story. The book is mainly based on American documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, which ensures public access to all US Government records. The FOIA legally carries a presumption of disclosure; the burden is on the Government — not the public —to substantiate why information should not be released.
After receiving a written demand, any US agency is required to disclose the requested records, unless it can be lawfully withheld from disclosure under one of nine specific exemptions in the FOIA. If not satisfied, an appellant is entitled to appeal to a federal court.
As a result, one has a detailed American account of what happened to Tibet from the end of the 1940s till the Chinese invasion and during the following years. On the British side (at least till India’s independence), documents are in the India Office Records, which is open to the general public for consultation and research.
The Chinese version of this period is also available through the memoirs of several of the main actors who served in Lhasa such as General Zhang Jingwu, General Tan Guansan, Yang Gongsu, the head of the Foreign Bureau in Lhasa, etc. Further, some selected foreigners have been given access to the Communist Party’s archives.
The tragedy is that India does not have its own version of the same historical facts. Why? Because the relevant files remain sealed in the almirahs of the Ministry of External Affairs or the Nehru Library. Consequently, one gets a well-documented version of India-Tibet relations, from the Western and Chinese points of view only.
Apart from a recent move by the MEA to declassify some 70,000 odd files and send them to the National Archives of India, New Delhi has been conveniently sleeping. Should India not take a leaf from the book of the US or the UK, in this field at least? It is not that there is no rule in India, but the babus and politicians have never shown much interest to implement the law.
The Public Record Rules, 1997, state that records that are 25 years or more must be preserved in the NAI and that no record can be destroyed without being recorded or reviewed. It’s mandatory for each department to prepare a half-yearly report on reviewing and weeding of records and submit it to the NAI. The rules also stipulate that no public record which is more than 25 years old can be destroyed by any agency unless it is appraised. This is valid for all the Ministries including External Affairs, Home Affairs and Defence.
In 2009, an article saying “PMO has 28,685 secret files, none made public this year” appeared in The Times of India. It said: “What steps does the Government follow while deciding to declassify its old secret documents? You may never get to know since the manual that details the declassification process in the country is itself marked confidential.” Is this the sign of a mature and transparent democracy? The report continued: “The Indian Government’s arbitrariness and complete lack of transparency regarding classified material is in sharp contrast to the international practice of making secret files public after 25-30 years.”
In response to a Right To Information query, the Prime Minister’s Office admitted it had declassified only 37 files in 2007, 25 files in 2008 and none in 2009. Mr Chandrachur Ghose, who filed the RTI application, got this answer from the PMO: “Declassification of files is done as per the manual of departmental security instructions issued by the ministry of home affairs. The ministry has marked this manual as confidential and has declined to provide it.”
What needs to be done today? Proper procedures should be set up, the public should be informed about them and thereafter rules should be strictly implemented. While the personnel declassifying historical documents (fully or partially) should make sure that the security of the country is not jeopardisd, at the same time, this should not be a pretext to block the due process of declassification.
One genuine problem is the lack of ‘professionals’ to do the job. But there is certainly enough young talent in India, who could be trained and later assigned to work on the declassification in a proper fixed time-frame, under the supervision of senior historian. The Finance Minister should have allotted Rs100 crore to the scheme! Today, documents end up being lost (or misplaced) in the ministries, this has been the case for the Himmatsinghji report on the North-East Frontier Agency (1951), misplaced by the Ministry of Defence. One last thing: The Nehru Papers should be the first to be declassified; it will be a great service to the nation.
