Losing history

Failure to transfer files to National Archives is unfortunate

At a recent workshop organised by the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances on the occasion of Good Governance Day, the Director-General of the National Archives of India (NAI) revealed that most government departments were not complying with the requirement to submit their files and records to the archivists after 25 years had passed. This is a mandate under the Public Records Act of 1993 — but, like many other such mandates, there is a national-security exemption that is clearly being overused by ministries and departments. The NAI’s Director-General pointed out there were no records in the archives of the wars that India has fought — even though six decades have passed since the 1962 clashes with China, for example. There can hardly be any meaningful national-security reasons to keep most of these records classified after all this time.

Even when military issues are set aside, the archives are bereft of crucial information about economic policy shifts that have changed the direction of the Indian economy, be it the Green Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, or the liberalisation process that began more than 25 years ago. Historians have to rely on other archives to achieve a proper study of how such pivotal moments occurred. The United States’ national archives and presidential libraries, for example, have revealed such facts in recent times as the Indian appeal to the US for air support in 1962 and that the food procurement system was pushed as an income support for Indian farmers, alongside fertiliser subsidies, by the Lyndon B Johnson administration during the famines of the 1960s. Many such relevant pieces of information can and should emerge from the Indian archives, but unfortunately the government’s bias towards secrecy is preventing the proper study of India’s history.

It is to be hoped that there is no conscious intent to control the narrative and warp the telling of Indian history lying behind this failure to comply with transparency requirements. Certainly, the tendency to keep matters classified unless pushed can be explained by the general desire for control that has been a characteristic of the Indian bureaucracy for all recorded history. But open and transparent archives are necessary for a reason. Democracies must come to their own conclusion about their past, and such informed conclusions are necessary for mature political and policy choices in the present. This is why freedom of information laws and archiving and record-keeping requirements are so large a part of other democracies’ regulatory structure.

A sign of how seriously this is taken is that the US is currently going through a political scandal about former President Donald Trump’s failure to follow archiving regulations that may well lead to his indictment. Files are not the property of the bureaucrat who signs them or the politician who is named in them — they are the property of posterity, and should be treated as such. The 25-year period under the Public Records Act is more than enough for any need for secrecy to be obviated. If not, let it be increased by an appropriate margin. What matters is that the files are transferred by ministries and departments to the archives where they belong.