Lessons from Bose dossiers

Declassifying official documents should be routine decisions

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision to declassify on January 23 next year 41 files on Subhas Chandra Bose held by the Centre ends a long-running controversy over a leader who disappeared 70 years ago in a plane crash over Taiwan. Though eminently sensible in itself, this decision, taken after a much publicised meeting at Race Course Road with 35 members of Bose's extended family, was the result of competitive politics with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. Last month, Ms Banerjee decided to declassify 64 files relating to Bose, putting pressure on the Centre to follow suit. This may sound like a strange issue on which the chief executives of Centre and state should expend time and energy, but Bose has been an emotive issue in Bengal politics - till recently, to suggest he was dead was to invite physical attacks to person and property from self-appointed guardians of his memory. More significantly, state elections are due in 2016. By pledging to declassify documents on Bose's 119th birth anniversary, Mr Modi no doubt hopes to strengthen the Bharatiya Janata Party's surging presence in the state.

This development, however, highlights the basic flaw in the approach to declassified documents by successive Indian governments since independence. Why should it require the attention of the highest political leadership at all? In the US and west Europe, documents are routinely released under the 30-year rule (after a due "scrubbing", it must be admitted) regardless of the regime in power. In India, the Public Records Act and Rules stipulate that files more than 25 years old are to be transferred to the National Archives. But frustrated scholars will confirm that this rule is observed more in its breach. This certainly prevents mature and discursive analyses of events that could well hold lessons for current politics. For instance, scholars are still waiting for documents on the India's 1962 war with China, which should have been in the public domain in 1987. They only have a version of the Henderson Brooks report leaked by the Australian journalist Neville Maxwell last year. Papers of the 1965 war with Pakistan and the enquiry into Lal Bahadur Shastri's death should have been accessible by 1990 but are still under wraps. As for the 1971 war with Pakistan, which was an unambiguous victory for India, it was declassified documents in the US that yielded a new perspective in Gary Bass's The Blood Telegram. Papers on the Emergency (1975) should have been opened in 2000. The 40th anniversary of one of the most critical developments in India's politics has just passed and bar the occasional memoir, scholars have little to rely on. The Right to Information Act has not changed things; many requests for documents are refused on grounds that they do not serve "public interest". Indian politicians take great pride in the country's democracy; but when it comes to opening declassified documents to public scrutiny, they display a reticence on a par with that seen in totalitarian regimes.