India’s war histories must be made public, to lay ghosts to rest and to learn lessons for the future, says well-known military and strategic analyst Bharat Karnad in this interview with S. Raghotham

What did you make of the Brig. Devinder Singh controversy — one-off case of personal animosity or an inevitable ‘fog of post-war’?
The tragedy of the Brig. Devinder Singh episode is that then Army chief Gen. V.P. Malik, who had visited Brig. Singh’s brigade and congratulated him, had the powers to correct the wrong done to him. It was Gen. Malik’s prerogative to negate Lt. Gen. Kishan Pal’s report on Brig. Singh. He could have told Lt. Gen. Pal, “I know the man, I saw what he did. Your report does not gel with my assessment of him”. Gen. Malik didn’t exercise his prerogative, despite lauding Brig. Singh. Had he done that and cleared Brig. Singh for the next rank, he would have become a general. Mind you, Brig. Singh’s record until Kargil was excellent. Somebody should ask Gen. Malik why he didn’t.
War is necessarily a confused business. And it becomes a subjective thing for a formation commander to assess his officers. So, I wouldn’t make Lt. Gen. Kishan Pal out to be such a big villain as he is made out to be, but then I am not taking into account any personal bad blood that might have existed between him and Brig. Singh.

Are our wars well documented? Why does the government continue to hide war histories?

The culture of secrecy afflicts every department of our government, not just the MoD. The Official Secrets Act says that you will not reveal any secrets, and that holds for your entire life time. It is a draconian law dating from the 19th Century, last amended in 1923. What world are we living in! Today, you can google 1-metre resolution satellite imagery of any military formation. Secrecy is counterproductive.
The histories have been written, but they are not publicly released for the same reason that the government does not part with any information at all. The problem is that people who are involved in decision-making are loath to have their shortcomings revealed. In war, especially, nothing ever goes right, and so decision-makers do not want it to be known. But it only makes it all the more necessary for the country to know what happened.
Think about it. 1948, 1965, 1971 — these were wars in which the Indian military acquitted themselves well. Yet, government does not want to shed light on them. What would have happened if they had failed? Soldiers and citizens have every right to know what happened in war, and how the generals fared. Making war histories public makes the military more accountable.

What’s the practice in other countries such as US, UK, China?
In the West, documents are de-classified after 30 years. China, on the other hand, is a closed, authoritarian country. You could be living next to a disaster all your life without knowing it because the government will never tell you. That’s no comparison with us. We are a popular democracy. Yet, the fact that we hide secrets shows that we are not a particularly confident democracy. We are a diffident democracy. If we were confident, we would say, “OK, we messed it up. We will learn from it”.