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Journalism of Courage
Those who do not learn their lessons from history are condemned to repeat old mistakes. But what about people who are not even concerned about history? The ministry of defence has a full-fledged historical division, whose charter is to maintain official records and produce official histories. It produced an excellent set of volumes in the early years about the Indian armed forces in the Second World War. The official account of the 1947-48 war with Pakistan, euphemistically termed 8216;Operations in J038;K8217;, was completed in the 1960s but could only be published four decades after that war and that too after the direct intervention of then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi.
Rajiv Gandhi also ordered the setting up of a large editorial infrastructure to write the histories of the 1962, 1965 and 1971 wars. These accounts have not been published so far, at least not officially, although the minimum requirement of 30 years lapsing before the de-classification of documents has long gone past. Two of these, however, were put on its website by a newspaper some years ago! Last year the government set up another committee to see whether these could be officially released to the public; and we may see some action in the near future. But the problem is that, after decades, the context in which these events happened has altered. In fact far more relevant, even authoritative, information has appeared in the public domain abroad and in India, which makes these histories redundant.
