Opinion The same secrecy

When Neville Maxwell posted online a substantial chunk of the Henderson Brooks report earlier this year, the expected stir saw BJP leaders also demanding that the government immediately declassify it. The report, commissioned by the army chief to inquire into military operations preceding and during the 1962 India-China war, was submitted in April 1963 by Lt Gen Henderson Brooks and Brigadier P.S. Bhagat, and there has ever since been not a squeal from the defence establishment about its contents. Maxwell had for long been rumoured to have based his history of the border conflict on the report, something he at long last demonstrated this year. The fact that the report put big question marks on Nehru’s forward policy and its execution by the then defence minister and higher army leadership — and how — is public knowledge.

So what accounts for Defence Minister Arun Jaitley’s written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha that declassification “would not be in the national interest”? Given the political capital the BJP sought to make of Maxwell’s disclosure, dwelling on “a Nehruvian blunder” in its Lok Sabha campaign, it cannot expect the matter to rest with a terse statement without inviting the charge of hypocrisy. Of course, the development is a pointer to the necessary continuity in strategic policy that parties across the political spectrum must — and, in cases like this one, do — adhere to. The election campaign over, the BJP is basically iterating that the national interest must be privileged over political expediency, that it cannot reflexively be read as a debunking of its opponents’ record. But to strike a sincere note, the defence minister needs to explain this turnaround.

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That is not all. India’s civilian and defence establishment is caught in a bind of its making. That bind is evident from the failure of leadership — and this is as true, as we now see, of the Congress as of the BJP — to prepare the public for the uncomfortable questions and facts highlighted in the report. That’s the test of leadership, to articulate issues so that people absorb difficult truths, so that secrecy is limited to the greatest extent possible. The continued classification of the HB report is a reminder that India is being let down across party lines.