:: Inder Malhotra

Babus and their top-secret fetish

Inder Malhotra

April.1 : Last week the Central chief information commissioner (CIC), in keeping with the traditionally perverse official mindset, rejected colleague Kuldip Nayar’s appeal against the defence ministry’s persistent refusal to declassify the 46-year-old Henderson-Brooks report on the military debacle in the 1962 border war with China. If it were possible to be shocked without being surprised that would just about sum up my reaction. But my later dismay was greater for, during the days that followed, there was hardly any protest against the CIC’s decision that is based on his magisterial pronouncement that the document is still "too sensitive" to be made public. There is complete silence even within the academic community and proliferating think tanks that often moan and groan against the government’s secrecy mania or craze for classification.

It is futile to blame only the Congress for this sorry state of affairs even though it has ruled at the Centre the longest. Between 1977 and 1980, and especially since 1996, every political party of any consequence has shared power in New Delhi under one coalition or the other and each one of them is equally culpable. The politicians would certainly have bothered had their appalling archival policy lost them some votes. But there seems to be no danger of that because we Indians have no interest in history. Consequently, the world’s largest democracy has the dubious distinction of also being the worst offender against the 30-year rule for declassification of secret papers.

In heaven’s name what is so sensitive or secret about this "weighty" report even four-and-a-half decades later? (General J.N. Chaudhury, the then Army Chief, had told me that on receiving the four-volume document the first thing he did was to put it on the weighing machine.) The super-secretive Israelis had no hesitation in publishing the inquiry report into their 2006 war with the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon less than two years after the event even though this clash of arms had finally blasted the myth of Israeli invincibility and the inquiry committee had blamed an array of generals for incompetence. The record of the United States, the United Kingdom and other democracies is equally shining in this respect.

The irony is that while even a glimpse of the Henderson-Brooks report is denied to Indians, it is no secret to foreigners. Every discerning reader of Neville Maxwell’s highly tendentious and partisan 1970 book, India’s China War, could guess that this Englishman, a former India correspondent of the Times, had access to the report, apparently under heavy wraps then. Many years later he chose to remove the veil by writing a paper that quoted extensively from the report. With all due respect to Lt. Gen. T.B. Henderson-Brooks, it might be added that he migrated to Australia and took a copy of the report he had authored. Sources not at all inimical to him have alleged that this enabled intelligence agencies of some western countries to acquire the report’s copies. What secrets are the MoD and the CIC trying to protect?

In any case, the official reluctance to declassify the report under discussion is not the issue. The disease afflicting successive Indian governments is deeper and more debilitating. It can only be described as mule-headed refusal to share with the people what must eventually be put in the public domain under both, international conventions and the Indian law. Sadly, the highly welcome Right to Information Act, under which the office of CIC has come into being, hasn’t proved an antidote to the malady.

Of the countless examples of what has gone wrong let me quote a few. Way back in 1987, while researching in Britain’s public records office, I was startled to come across Jawaharlal Nehru’s top-secret note on his 1954 visit to China and Vietnam. He had sent a copy to his British counterpart, Winston Churchill, and the British had scrupulously sent it to the PRO after 30 years. I promptly published a summary of it in my column. The next year this note formed part of the fourth volume of Nehru’s Letters to Chief Ministers, edited by the late G. Parathasarthi, and much later in the second series of Selected Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru.

While writing his memoirs after retirement, Kewal Singh, a former foreign secretary and high commissioner to Pakistan, needed to look at some of his own dispatches from Karachi (where the Pakistani foreign office was then located) and a few related notes. His request to the government was refused. How he got around this obstruction is best left unstated.

Even more scandalous is the government’s refusal to publish the official histories, written by the defence ministry’s historians, of the 1962, 1965 and 1971 wars. High-powered official committees have recommended their publications but abominable "no-men" of ministries of home affairs and external affairs have blocked this.

In 2005, the centenary year of Lal Bahadur Shastri, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was willing to declassify all documents relating to the short-lived Shastri era so that a definitive biography of Shastriji could be written. All his efforts got lost in the politico-bureaucratic labyrinth. What happened to similar attempts by Rajiv Gandhi cannot be described in available space. What must take the cake, however, is that the 1914 file on MacMahon Line is open to anyone in London’s India Office Library. Here it has the highest classification!

Against this bleak backdrop, it is remarkable that Natwar Singh, in his latest and eminently readable book My China Diary (1956-88) — it covers his years at the Indian embassy in Beijing, his experience as liaison officer with Zhou Enlai during the latter’s 1960 failed talks with Nehru in Delhi and Rajiv Gandhi’s path-breaking 1988 visit to China when he was minister of state in the MEA — has published, for the first time, the verbatim record of the somewhat tense Nehru-Zhou conversation on April 25, 1960.

Rather excitedly, I asked him whether he had the government’s permission to publish this document and, if so, why hadn’t he included the rest of the talks between the two Prime Ministers. The former foreign affairs minister replied that he had no such permission; he had found the document in the P.N. Haksar Papers in the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.