Secrecy in democracy
by
AJ Philip |
Let a whiff of fresh air pass through the archives
On the night of June 9, 2012, trucks carrying 88 boxes of letters, photographs, manuscripts, paintings and books belonging to one of India’s great writers, Mulk Raj Anand, were unloaded at the National Archives of India (NAI), the repository of all non-current records of the government. They contain letters he had exchanged with Mahatma Gandhi and a drawing of former prime minister Indira Gandhi he had done four days before her assassination in 1984.
Chief of National Archives and eminent historian Mushirul Hasan has announced that the papers would be stocked in a special room. The Archives got these papers virtually free as the family members of the writer, who died in 2004 after a writing career of 75 years, wanted to hand them over to it. A few days earlier, it received another set of papers that belonged to Hermann Kallenbach, an architect of German origin with whom Mahatma Gandhi had an abiding friendship when they were in South Africa.
The Gandhi-Kallenbach papers were to be auctioned by Sotheby’s when the Indian government intervened. It negotiated with the heirs of Kallenbach, who initially demanded $5 million. The deal was finally settled for $1.28 million. Before the collection was taken off Sotheby’s auction process, Mushirul Hasan, fellow historian Ramachandra Guha and writer Sunil Khilnani had visited London and certified its authenticity.
Last year, Gandhi’s friendship with Kallenbach became a matter of speculation when Pulitzer-winning writer Joseph Lelyveld, who once reported from South Africa, published a highly readable and well-researched biographical book, “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India” (Alfred A. Knopf). The government of Gujarat, Gandhi’s native state, imposed a ban on the book, now freely available in India.
Gandhi wanted all the letters they had exchanged to be destroyed but Kallenbach did not pay heed to his advice and stored them away for their archival value. The papers will throw light on their relationship and help understand the Gandhi phenomenon better. But there is a catch in all this. Mere acquisition of the papers will not serve any purpose, unless they are made available to researchers, historians, scholars and biographers of Gandhi.
The National Archives, set up as the Imperial Record Department at Kolkata in 1891, is one of the oldest in the world. Yet, the government does not have a clear-cut national archive policy. Take the case of the enquiry report that dealt with the 1962 war with China, which has not been declassified so far.
For starters, Lieutenant-General Henderson Brooks, an Australian who stayed on in the Indian Army even after Independence, and Brigadier PS Bhagat, the first Indian officer to be conferred the Victoria Cross during World War II for bravery, were asked by then defence minister YB Chavan to inquire into the factors that led to the ignominious defeat in 1962.
The report never saw the light of the day, probably because it did not show then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in a good light. The government reasoned that the report would compromise the nation’s security as it would also reveal the army’s command structure and forward positions. Instead, a sanitised, condensed version was put out for public consumption, allowing those accused of “Himalayan blunders” to go scot-free.
As late as in 2008, Defence Minister AK Antony used the same old argument to tell Parliament that the report could not be declassified. To argue that the 45-year-old report would expose the Indian military positions is as untenable as it is illogical. Consequently, anyone interested in the subject will have to depend on Neville Maxwell’s interpretation of the report. A British journalist posted in New Delhi, he was one of the few who had read it before it was classified as top secret and sealed, probably for ever.
It does not redound to the credit of a democracy like India that a report of this nature is kept hidden from the public. Similarly, papers on India’s involvement in Sri Lanka in the eighties that led to the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi are kept under wraps with the result that scholars have to depend on anecdotal information and third party sources.
Merely acquiring Gandhi-Kallenbach and Mulk Raj Anand papers is not sufficient. They should be made available to scholars, for which a cogent national policy on archives needs to be formulated. In these days of WikiLeaks and the Right to Information Act, it will be counterproductive to sit tight on documents like the Henderson Brooks report. Needless to say, the taste of the pudding is in the eating.
Oman Tribune |
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