When Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to declassify documents in the government’s possession relating to Subhas Chandra Bose on January 23, 2016, Bose’s birth anniversary, and also send a request to Russia and other countries to share any documents in their custody, this newspaper welcomed the move in its editorial.
The editorial, “ > For a slice of history ” (October 17, 2015), urged India to join other countries that have a stated policy of declassifying official documents after a stipulated period. It read: “This opening up should be the norm, and it should not be confined to Bose. And this set of documents should be made accessible not only to scholars and students of history but all those who are interested in learning about the country’s past… In this age of assured transparency, Mr. Modi’s step, and especially his observation that ‘nations that forget history are bound to lose the power to create it’, must go beyond mere words.”
If journalism is the first draft of history, the National Archives is the first repository of recent historical material. Some of its critical contents are still out of bounds to scholars due to a complicated bureaucratic classification system. This undermines the spirit with which it was established as the Imperial Records Department (IRD) in March 1891. The British administrators appointed Professor G.W. Forrest as the officer-in-charge of the IRD. He was mandated to examine, transfer, arrange and catalogue records of all the departments and organise a Central Library in place of various Departmental Libraries. This institution, which became the National Archives after Independence, opened its records for research in 1939. By 1947, all pre-1902 records were made available for consultation.
Keeping records But how good is our national archiving system? Do we have all the records of post-Independent India in a properly catalogued manner? Have the ministries transferred the records in time? What is the status of the State archives? Journalists who have tried to access the records for some of the defining political and economic developments since 1947 are a disappointed lot. A report in The Business Standard , “Off the record”, detailed how records pertaining to the nationalisation of banks in July 1969 could not be found because the Ministry of Finance has transferred very few records to the National Archives on the subject.
According to the Public Records and Transfer Act of 1993 and Public Records Rules 1997, all records older than 25 years after declassification should be transferred to the National Archives. And after another five years, they should be thrown open to scholars — a rule that is observed more in its breach. Scholars, journalists and policymakers have demanded that people who have domain expertise in sifting through the documents be in the government panels that recommend the documents’ transfer to the archives. Bureaucratic imagination accords no importance to either accountability or transparency. So far, no Cabinet Secretary has pulled up any of the Central government secretaries for not transferring documents to the National Archives. There is not one instance of a Chief Secretary of any State asking the departmental secretaries about the status of transfer of files.
However, the most worrying part is the attitude of the government towards official documentation. A PTI report, “MHA junks 1.5 lakh files” (June 24, 2014), talked about how on acting on the direction of Prime Minister Modi, the Home Ministry was on a cleanliness drive and, in less than a month, destroyed nearly 1.5 lakh files that had gathered dust for years. The report talked about files that gave insights into some historic moments. One was about the presidential sanction given to pay Independent India’s first Governor-General, Lord Mountbatten, a princely sum of Rs. 64,000 as TA/DA allowance for moving back to his country. In an another, after former President Rajendra Prasad and former Prime MinisterLal Bahadur Shastri refused to take any pension, the amount was eventually sent to the government’s calamity fund. If 1.5 lakh was the number of destroyed documents in one ministry of the Union government, what would be the total number of documents that are either destroyed or not transferred to the National Archives? I am not even trying to look at the status of the archives of the various State governments where, irrespective of the party in power, the post of the Archive Commissioner is a punishment posting.
A decade ago, A.G. Noorani in his review article “Our secrets in others’ trunks” (Frontline, Jul 2-15, 2005) explained the difficulties in accessing our archival material: “An Indian scholar who wants to study the Simla Convention of 1914 and the drawing of the McMahon Line has to go to the British Library in London. In India, access is barred to records after 1913, despite the fact that there are nearly a dozen books, Indian and foreign, which have drawn on the records in London. The 30-years rule is on paper. Records of border areas are closed from January 1, 1914, while those relating to Jammu and Kashmir are open up to December 31, 1924, only.”
I am afraid we may not even have records of Independent India to do a proper evaluation of our recent history if we do not put pressure on our governments — both Union and States — to respect the documentation process and transfer the files to the archives in a systematic manner.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
