Opinion No records of the wars of 1962, 1965 and 1971 in National Archives: By controlling Archives, government controls the narrative

In yet another example, the Official Secrets Act of 1923 grants the government sweeping powers to limit access to classified information — which successive governments have used quite liberally. In 2021, though, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh ordered his ministry to declassify and transfer pertinent war records older than 25 years to the archives. In 2022 alone, 20,000 files that go up to the year 1960 have been transferred. Before anyone gets swept away by this tip of the hat to transparency, it might do well to take a closer look at the finer details.

Under the new declassification policy, a committee will be formed under the aegis of the History Division of the ministry to study earlier wars and military operations, such as 1962, on a case-by-case basis. An “authoritative” compiled history will be produced — that is to say, the official narrative. Only then will the chosen records be transferred to the NAI. As for the compiled history itself, it will be available for “internal consumption” for five years before the committee takes a decision on whether to release all or parts of it, depending on the sensitivity of the subject.

Shorn of tedious detail, that means that the government remains in charge of shaping the public narrative with regard to the unfolding of past events. Add to this the Centre’s amendment of the Central Civil Services (Pension) Amendment Rules, 2020 — under which retired officials of security and intelligence organisations are prohibited from publishing anything pertaining to the organisation they worked for without prior clearance from the head of that organisation — and you have further potential for a dead-end in understanding our diplomatic, security and military past.

As far as the NAI is concerned, it is and will be the guardian of records deemed safe to release to the public. Even then, the release of these files — technically supposed to be carried out each quarter — is glacial to the point of apathy, something that the Director-General himself lamented this past week. If we lose sight of the paper trail that brought us to where we stand today, the result will only be a nation teetering on the brink of public and popular amnesia about its past. A country’s evolution is not just about bloodshed, protests and stirring public speeches. It is, at its heart, about paperwork.

I speak, in this case, not just about history and not just as a historian — but about politics, law, society, culture, economy and science. I speak about numerous clauses, drafted and redrafted to provide the fine points of political legitimacy; about dispatches, reports and telegrams that crafted a “strategic culture” at crucial flashpoints in India’s military history; about the correspondence between bureaucrats, ministers and policy-makers that laid the foundation for its agricultural and economic prowess. I speak also about the treasure troves of private papers — such as those of the venerable spymaster R N Kao, which are subject to 35-year embargoes and creaking declassification processes. All of these documents form part of the jigsaw puzzle that is modern India — its policies, policy-makers and political leaders.

In its most idealistic form, the NAI, as an institution, is representative of plural interests. It is not just historians who use the archive, but researchers from myriad fields and even private citizens. Citizens of any democratic society have the right to understand their past, as well as the right to learn the truths that governments may find uncomfortable. An archive holds the powerful accountable for their actions.

This is, of course, not to say that the final truth of a nation’s past rests purely in the archives. Oral histories, non-governmental papers and other empirical methodologies also inform archival research. But as a crucible of public memory and political resilience, the archive – the NAI in this case — is much more than a record-keeper. It is a custodian of national identity, of its history and of an understanding — dossier upon dossier — of its evolution as a polity. If history – across fields and centuries – is not preserved in a timely manner or made more accessible to those of us who seek to understand it, the tendency to use an imagined past or to repeat forgotten mistakes will be the only and rather disastrous way forward.

Basu is the author of VP Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India