Still under wraps

So,GP,when has the foreign office told you Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai? Dont you believe it. I dont trust the Chinese one bit,despite Panchsheel and all that. Generations in India that have grown up believing in Nehrus woolly trust in China might have to re-examine their ideas after reading the diaries of G. Parthasarathi,then ambassador to China.

Just weeks back,when our unfortunate junior minister for external affairs mentioned Nehru in a manner that deviated from the ironclad Congress narrative,the sky almost fell on his head. But how can we pretend to have any accurate picture of Nehru,the man and his motivations,when most of the jigsaw pieces are deliberately made unavailable? No matter where it falls between deification and dismissal,our sense of Nehru is constructed from woefully inadequate material. Recently,Chandrashekhar Guptas War and Diplomacy in Kashmir,which excavated so-far classified material about the British diplomatic calculus in the 1947-48 Indo-Pak tussle over Kashmir,revealed the complexities that informed newly independent Indias strategic conduct. Srinath Raghavans book,War and Peace in Modern India also mines a rich lode of valuable sources to reveal new truths about the Nehru years. Unfortunately,much of such scholarship relies on documents preserved somewhere abroad,or on the resourcefulness of historians in ferreting out private material. The government gives away nothing. The Nehru Memorial Trust and National Film Archives are now digitising footage from the times thus far,stacked in dusty cans and stored in Teen Murti House,and fully expect it to throw up some surprises. Though some of the material even at Nehru Memorial cannot be accessed without appropriate sanction.

Historians have to rely on the authority of the archive but unfortunately there is no guaranteed access to official documents and papers from the time,and secrecy is the default mode in our official culture. The bureaucratic reflex to cover up embarrassment stretches back through the decades unlike standard declassification procedures followed in other democracies and ensures that the past is putty in the hands of those who want to deploy it for present purposes.