Shadow histories

All state documents are meant to be declassified after 30 years and made available in archives. But successive Indian governments have blithely ignored this rule. Snaking through various government departments is a trail of secret documents that should have been declassified decades ago. The Henderson-Brooks report on the border war with China in 1962 continues to be shrouded in secrecy. So are the B.S. Raghavan committee reports on intelligence failure during the 1965 war in Pakistan and the alleged ntelligence failure in Mizoram — the two reports are said to have contributed to the decision to create the R&AW in 1968. Meanwhile,documents on the Bangladesh war of 1971 were reportedly shredded just months after the conflict. Together,these documents form a shadow history of modern India,running alongside the known version. Without them,the public understanding of the past is incomplete.

For instance,did Bose die in a plane crash in 1945? Or did he escape to safety in Russia? After years of trying to stablish the plane crash story,the government set up the Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry in 2006,which appears to have found evidence to the contrary. While the government remains tight-lipped,the contesting histories of Subhas Chandra Bose continue to circulate and,long after it was defeated in the battlefields of Kohima,the INA has a troubled afterlife.