Kalyani Shankar
Will the Modi government release the classified Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose documents and put an end to the debate that is going on? It is indeed good news that Prime Minister Modi has assured Netaji’s family that he will personally examine the case for the declassification of the secret Netaji files. The PM’s assurance in Berlin this week has given new hope to those who have pushed for a declassification of Bose documents. It is also good news for others who have been demanding easy access to the declassified documents.
It is a pity that the mystery of Netaji’s death has remained unsolved even after seventy years. Bose would have been 117 had he lived and it is high time that the government ends the decades-long anxiety of Bose’s family.
There have been many theories and commissions of inquiry but the final word has not been out so far about when, where and how he died. One theory was that he died in a plane crash on August 18, 1945 in Taiwan. The other was that he died in Siberia. The third was the intriguing death of a holy man in 1985 in U.P., which suggested that he was none other than Bose.
Netaji’s family as well as the Mukherji Commission report in 2006 do not agree with the plane crash theory. The Centre has always refused to declassify the documents pertaining to Netaji. Ironically, even Justice Mukherji was not given all the documents. There are 41 files in the PMO of which 20 are related to Netaji’s death. The Ministry Home Affairs is sitting with 100,000 documents while the Ministry of Extern Affairs has 29 files. Of this, only 10,000 pages have been declassified from the Home Ministry and sent to the National archives.
Ironically, while the BJP had been demanding the declassification of these documents before the 2014 polls, the Modi government has refused to release them on the ground they would adversely impact India’s ties with foreign friendly countries. This was the stand taken by the earlier UPA government also.
Obviously, the Netaji controversy has arisen on account of new information that Nehru had ordered surveillance of Netaji’s family for 20 years until 1968. The outraged Bose family feels that the government should declassify all the files relating to Bose, which alone could help solve the mystery.
While there can be no case for withholding the classified documents from the public, the demand for transparency is increasingly heard in public and political circles. The reason is simple. India leads the world in information technology. Following the information revolution the net users are flooded with all kinds of information – some wanted and mostly unwanted. Therefore in such a scenario withholding information on the arguments that it might affect India’s relations with friendly governments is indeed absurd.
Secondly, many democracies in the world have declassified even documents marked “for your eyes only” and “top secret”. The recently released Kissinger documents are one such. The US authorities did not feel that Nixon’s calling Indira Gandhi a “witch and a bitch” might derail Indo-US relations. The United States follows an interesting system where all files are routinely declassified after 25 years except in nine circumstances. The reasons for continuing to withhold is less after 50 years and after 75 years each one of the file needs a special permission. In Britain, all classified files must be reviewed after 30 years to determine whether they had to be kept confidential. However, in India despite the Right to information Act, there is no system to declassify these within a time frame as the government can withhold any file or noting it wants under the archaic Official Secret Act of the British days.
Thirdly, it is the mindset of the bureaucracy, which stops the free flow of information. For the babus everything is secret and they are reluctant to part with information even if it is harmless. If you want to get some sensitive papers like the Nehru papers, you have to apply to the Teen Murti Library first and from there the request will travel to Culture ministry where the minister will decide on a case by case basis whether permission should be given to the researches or not. That is why it is difficult to do research in India. I had done research for two books – one on Nixon and the other on Lyndon Johnson. I could get all the documents from the Lyndon Johnson Library in Austin and the National Archives in Washington.
Similarly, many travel to England for documents about the pre and post independence correspondence, which one can get from the British archives. This sad state of affairs must change sooner than later in this information age. What we need is a transparent policy and the automatic declassification after a fixed time period should be the aim. There should be a political will to do this.
The Bose controversy has taken a political angle too with the Congress defending its decision not to declassify the secret files. The Congress suspects that it is a ploy for the BJP to malign Nehru. The BJP is taunting the Congress for snooping against the Bose family for 20 years. All this politics leave a bad taste. The BJP wanted to confer Bharat Ratna on Netaji last year but his family members refused it saying first the documents should be released.
When the Congress Party has been in power it has always refused requests to return the ashes to India from Japan. The mystery of what happened to Netaji will remain until the Indian Government opens up the secret files and allows files in Russia and Britain to be opened also. The government has the responsibility to respond to the public demand or else history will be distorted. (IPA)
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