The Government is quite right in deciding to declassify details of all of India’s wars
The Government has taken a welcome step in deciding to declassify, on a case-to-case basis, details of the wars fought by India. The new policy for archiving, declassifying, compiling and publishing such records is going to be put in place. The modalities for taking up declassification one by one are being worked out. For a country that has fought as many as six wars since Independence but has managed to declassify the operations of just the 1948 Jammu and Kashmir operations, this is a giant step in transparency. The new policy says records should ordinarily be declassified in 25 years and transferred to the National Archives of India once the war or operations histories have been compiled. The policy statement alone should mean that the official records of the 1962, 1965 and 1971 conflicts, Operation Pawar of the IPKF in Sri Lanka (1987-1990) be declassified right away. The Kargil affair still has over a couple of years of secrecy left. There are two issues with this policy. First, the implications of opening secret details of the past. In a country like India where political leaders and their actions are assessed not in terms of their times but by current political standards, the declassification can become a Pandora’s box. Take the Henderson-Brooks-Bhagat report on the 1962 India-China war, for instance. Technically, the report is yet to be made public though a foreign journalist did just that with part of the report he accessed. That section of the report has some startling revelations about India’s Forward Policy adopted by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
One can well imagine the implications of judging Nehru’s thinking at that time by today’s standards. The BJP, which till early 2014 was demanding release of the report, made a U-turn once it came to power. If much of any war report is to be kept hidden either on ground of military relevance or political sensitivity, the purpose of the new policy will be lost. Two, there is a clear case for the bull being taken by the horns and past war records being declassified at once. A Defence Ministry official rightly said: “Timely publication of war histories would give people an accurate account of the events, provide authentic material for academic research and counter unfounded rumours.” Even though the United States faced condemnation for its reasons for the war on Iraq, it did declassify records in 2013 to mark the 10th anniversary. The documents showed how ineptly it caused and handled the war, but the country did not hide the secrets from the American public. Secrecy is also redundant because it has no place today when technology has turned war into an algorithm and where every military moment can be recorded live and strategies assessed and analysed in real time. At best, old files can muddy the records of individuals — political or military — who made controversial decisions. Unclassified records can at best keep the past hurts buried.
