The West Bengal Government on September 18 declassified a cache of 64 documents relating to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, some 70 years after he disappeared and left behind many larger-than-life myths. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee followed that up with the release of confidential Cabinet meeting papers from the period from 1938 to 1947. How should one look at these decisions? As something that should have happened a long time ago, or as a signal of things to come in the future? Government documents, papers, personal memoirs, correspondence, Cabinet notes, virtually anything can have a classified tag put on them in India, rendering them beyond scrutiny for an indefinite period, to be accessed only by those who are authorised to do so as set down in the Manual of Departmental Security Instructions that categorise classified documents as Top Secret, Secret and Confidential. Any breach could attract the draconian provisions of the Official Secrets Act, a legacy of the colonial period. The Right to Information Act seemed to offer some hope of transparency being ushered in, and of a willingness on the part of governments to take citizens along in the process of governance. But Section 8 of the Act continues to provide the means to hold documents in official custody. The U.S. has a strong de-classification tradition, though it retains the right to keep some documents away from the public gaze. The U.K., over the years, has declassified documents after a lock-in period. Now Germany has opened up its archives to scholars. So what do classified documents mean for the world’s largest democracy?
Ideally, the disclosures on Bose — although what has been released is only a small part of the collection, with a substantial portion remaining in the custody of the Central government — should open the floodgates on several documented events from the past. Journalist and historian Neville Maxwell put online a year ago a telling account of India’s debacle in the 1962 war from the Henderson-Brooks Report that had been marked Top Secret. There is now a clamour to make public documents relating to the sudden and rather mysterious death of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, some 50 years ago in Tashkent. Other documents that ought to be made public include those on the misuse of the intelligence agencies and other questionable actions during the period of the Emergency, the run-up to Operation Bluestar and the Indian Peace Keeping Force operations in Sri Lanka. The way to aid informed public discussion is by making authentic information on the past accessible — without of course forgetting that not everything can be put out in the public domain.
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