Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was oracular in his prophecy: “When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago”. Sixty-two years after the Sino-India border conflict, the Indian state remains obtusely paranoid about making the Henderson Brooks Report public.
The author of India’s China War, Neville Maxwell, in a blog dated February 7, 2014 and titled “My Henderson Brooks Albatross” — accessible on www.indiandefencereview.com — put out in the public domain the version of the report available with him. The version underscores that the Henderson Brooks Report was an operational review instituted by the then Chief of the Army Staff on December 14, 1962 “to go into the reverses suffered by the Army, particularly in the Kameng Frontier Division of NEFA (now Arunachal Pradesh)”.
The review was carried out by Lt. Gen. T.B. Henderson Brooks, assisted by Brig. P.S. Bhagat. The terms of reference of the review were ostensibly to inquire into what went wrong with training, equipment, system of command, physical fitness of the troops and capacity of commanders at all levels to influence the men under their command.
The review of the functioning of the Army Headquarters was purportedly not carried out on the advice of the Chief of the Army Staff. This precluded the examination of the relationship between the defence ministry and Army Headquarters and the directions given by the former to the latter.
The object perhaps being that Lt. Gen. Brooks could not have been expected to possibly evaluate the conduct of his superiors, eminently desirable, as it may have been.
A perusal of the report even with pages 112-157 and the annexures omitted only underlines the fact that it was a professional exercise done without any predetermined intent to absolve some and blame others for the operational lapses that happened.
Yet, 58 years later, on April 19, 2010, in a reply to a question tabled in the Lok Sabha by the writer on making the report public, the then defence minister stated: “Henderson Brooks Report is a top-secret document based on an internal study by the Indian Army, contents of which are not only extremely sensitive but are of current operational value.”
Four years later, on July 8, 2014, the current defence minister, Arun Jaitley, responding to a similar question in the Rajya Sabha, stated, “This is a top-secret document and has not been declassified so far. Further release of this report, fully or partially or disclosure of any information related to this report, would not be in national interest.”
Paradoxically, on March 19, 2014, Mr Jaitley, then the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, made a strong pitch for making the report public in an article available on www.bjp.org. He wrote: “Are archival records to be kept away from public gaze indefinitely? If the document pertains to internal security there may be some public interest served in keeping them a secret for some time. However, to keep these documents ‘top-secret’ indefinitely may not be in public interest… The security relevance of a document loses its relevance in the long-term future… With the wisdom of hindsight, I am of the opinion that the report’s contents could have been made public some decades ago.”
Yet, in four months, you see another about turn between the words and actions of the current dispensation. The core issue, however, is why is this hackneyed excuse of national security and strategic sacrosanctity trotted out by successive governments to deny access to archival material that can form the basis of informed analysis of our past actions?
India is not the only country that has national security forebodings. The United Kingdom has also evolved its position over the years. The Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires that information be disclosed unless there are sound reasons for confidentiality.
Even the 30-year thumb rule for withholding Cabinet papers has been relaxed. In the United States, an executive order establishes the procedure for declassification of documents with a default date of 10 years, which is followed up with an automatic declassification review after 25, 50 and 75 years, respectively, with the provisions for keeping a document classified becoming exceptionally rigorous at each stage. In Australia, the threshold for declassification is 20 years, while Israel for non-security related documents has brought it down to 15 years while raising the bar on some defence-related documents to 70 years.
In the case of India, though Section 8(3) of the Right to Information Act mandates that information pertaining to events which occurred 20 years ago must be provided, the overarching exception clauses trip the entire purport of the provision insofar it pertains to the strategic domain. Almost any or all information can either be denied or stonewalled.
Moreover, the Second Schedule of the Act puts a large number of intelligence and security organisations out of the purview of the Act. There is an urgent need to amend the Act, remove or narrow the exceptions to Section 8(3) and even fine-tune the kind of information that the organisations in the second schedule that are exempt from the purview of this Act can withhold.
There is a requirement to repeal the antediluvian Official Secrets Act, 1923, and set up a National Declassifica-tion Authority that can, across the government, identify material for release. Coming back to the Henderson Brooks Report, a lot of innuendo has been freely floating around for the past six decades with regard to the alleged accountability, culpability and malfeasance of certain individuals. Even Mr Jaitley in his critique makes an oblique insinuation: “It has been reported in the media that pages 112 to 157 are still not known. Is it because these pages contain material which can be embarrassing to those in power in 1962?”
This needs to stop. If at all errors of judgment were made, India as a nation has the maturity to locate them in the correct context.
It is, therefore, incumbent upon this government to walk the talk and put the Henderson Brooks Report with all the attendant material out in the public domain at the earliest. Don’t we have the nerve to face our past squarely?
The writer is a lawyer and a former Union minister. The views expressed are personal. Twitter handle @manishtewari
