Clanking skeletons

It is incumbent upon this government to walk the talk and put the Henderson Brooks Report out in the public domain at the earliest. Don’t we have the nerve to face our past squarely?

relevance of a document loses its relevance in the long- term future… With the wisdom of hindsight, I am of the opinion that the report’s contents could have been made public some decades ago.”

Yet, in four months, you see another about turn between the words and actions of the current dispensation.

The core issue, however, is why is this hackneyed excuse of national security and strategic sacrosanctity trotted out by successive governments to deny access to archival material that can form the basis of informed analysis of our past actions?

India is not the only country that has national security forebodings. The United Kingdom has also evolved its position over the years. The Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires that information be disclosed unless there are sound reasons for confidentiality. Even the 30- year thumb rule for withholding Cabinet papers has been relaxed. In the United States, an executive order establishes the procedure for declassification of documents with a default date of 10 years, which is followed up with an automatic declassification review after 25, 50 and 75 years, respectively, with the provisions for keeping a document classified becoming exceptionally rigorous at each stage. In Australia, the threshold for declassification is 20 years, while Israel for non- security related documents has brought it down to 15 years while raising the bar on some defence- related documents to 70 years.

In the case of India, though Section 8( 3) of the Right to Information Act mandates that information pertaining to events which occurred 20 years ago must be provided, the overarching exception clauses trip the entire purport of the provision insofar it pertains to the strategic domain. Almost any or all information can either be denied or stonewalled. Moreover, the Second Schedule of the Act puts a large number of intelligence and security organisations out of the purview of the Act. There is an urgent need to amend the Act, remove or narrow the exceptions to Section 8( 3) and even fine- tune the kind of information that the organisations in the second schedule that are exempt from the purview of this Act can withhold. There is a requirement to repeal the antediluvian Official Secrets Act, 1923, and set up a National Declassification Authority that can, across the government, identify material for release.

Coming back to the Henderson Brooks Report, a lot of innuendo has been freely floating around for the past six decades with regard to the alleged accountability, culpability and malfeasance of certain individuals. Even Mr Jaitley in his critique makes an oblique insinuation: “It has been reported in the media that pages 112 to 157 are still not known. Is it because these pages contain material which can be embarrassing to those in power in 1962?”

This needs to stop. If at all errors of judgment were made, India as a nation has the maturity to locate them in the correct context. It is, therefore, incumbent upon this government to walk the talk and put the Henderson Brooks Report with all the attendant material out in the public domain at the earliest. Don’t we have the nerve to face our past squarely? The writer is a lawyer and a former Union minister. The views expressed are personal. Twitter handle @manishtewari