My take on the Bose papers that are yet to be declassified
In
a voluminous text that he wrote in 1992, when the Soviet Union and the
Socialist bloc had turned into history, Francis Fukuyama, held that the world
has come to settle down and that there was no further movement of history
beyond the capitalist system. Rooted firmly in Hegelian scheme, Fukuyama’s
arguments were found to have been made in haste. Antonio Negri and Michael
Hardt, in 2000, also Hegelian, argued that things have not settled down and
that history was bound to move beyond the present; they took this further in
their two other publications in 2004 and 2009 to establish that man continues
to make history and that the circumstances in which he lives determines the course
of history. [1]
Alhough Negri and Hardt
argued just the opposite of what Fukuyama did, there is something that binds
them (apart from their Hegelian premise) and that is their approach to
history. Neither Fukuyama nor the
Negri-Hardt duo were willing to treat history the way Leopold van Ranke or Lord
Acton sought to do: as merely the quest for the absolute truth. Instead, both
Fukuyama and the Negri-Hardt duo considered history as ``a continuous process
of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue
between the present and the past’’ as held by E.H.Carr.[2]
The point is that events in history are understood differently by different
historians, whether from the same generation or by historians of different
generations and this indeed is what makes history an interesting discipline and
not merely a compilation of facts. Carr, however, went on to espouse the
importance of facts for a historian. ``The
duty of the historian’’ he stressed, ``to respect his facts is not exhausted by
the obligation to see that his facts are accurate. He must seek to bring into
the picture all known or knowable facts relevant, in one sense or another, to
the theme on which he is engaged and to the interpretation proposed.’’[3]
With this espousal of
history -- as a continuous dialogue between the past and the present and that
facts are to be held sacrosanct in this exercise – it is then imperative that
the classified documents in the vaults of the various departments of the
Government are declassified and thrown open to historians. Where the law
sanctions those documents older than 30 years do not warrant to be held as
secret, it is baffling that the Netaji papers should have become the basis for investigative
journalism in 2015!
Such expose’ in the
media and the debates on television have taken the usual course: Anchors
screaming against snooping and such conclusions drawn that Nehru was threatened
by Netaji still alive and to such absurd extents that one journalist concluding
that if Netaji was there we would have had the first non-Congress government in
New Delhi in 1962 (and would not have had to wait for it until 1977)! The
challenge to Nehru in 1962 came from the Swatantra Party, perhaps the first
ever in our short political history to have spoken against the socialist
pattern and favoured the market economy, winning 18 seats in the Lok Sabha
securing 7.9 per cent of the votes polled. However, it is necessary to stress
that Netaji certainly was as much socialist (or even more) as Nehru was and it
is absurd to presume that he would have teamed up with the Swatantra Party in
1962.
Netaji’s approach to
the struggle for independence, which was best enunciated in his two volumes
titled Indian Struggle[4] should
serve as evidence against concluding that Netaji would have teamed up with the
Swatantra party, the Jan Sangh and such others in 1962. Similarly, his
differences with Netaji and his activities post-1942 did not prevent Nehru from
donning the robes (that he had hanged as early as in 1920 in response to the
call for non-cooperation and boycott of British courts) in defence of the INA
prisoners.[5] It
is also a fact that Netaji’s close aides in the INA went on to join the
Congress and the Communist Party while many others went on to rebuild the
Forward Bloc as a political party leaning to the Left. There is no evidence of
any substantial movement of those in the INA moving towards the Bharathiya Jan
Sangh.
The developments in the
past few weeks: A news story in a magazine that Netaji’s kin were spied by the
Intelligence Branch personnel; excerpts from those files, yet to be
declassified being meshed with speculations on why such a thing was done; all
these being debated from TV studios; and conclusions drawn that all these will
change the way we as a nation perceived Nehru; and the Government setting up a
committee consisting of officers from the RAW, IB and such other agencies to
take a call on declassifying these papers, are all reflective of a certain
disrespect to the practice of the discipline called history. Diplomatics now
an essential part of the historian’s craft warrants that these documents are
thrown open for the historian (rather than depend on what the investigative
journalist passes on) and is also made available to any other historian to
verify.[6]
This is what it takes for a document to be treated as a source for a historian.
In other words, we have
such documents as the Fortnightly Reports by the Director Intelligence Bureau
for all the years when India was under British rule in the National Archives of
India (NAI); these are compilation of the reports from the IB from each of the
districts in British India and apart from the NAI a scholar of history has
access to these in the various State Archives. We have such IB reports on the
underground resistance that Jayaprakash Narayan, Achyut Patwardhan and Yusuf
Mehrali organized after 1942 in the Saran and the Satara divisions in British
India; we have reports by the IB on the strikes across India since the early 20th
Century or on the RIN mutiny, available to historians in the NAI. The
list is only indicative and not exhaustive and historians worth their names
have published works that are critical of Nehru as much as they have lauded
him. Hence, it is not as if all hitherto existing works on the history of
modern India have only praised Nehru. Marxist scholars have found holes in
Nehru’s personality and gaps in his precept and practice. But then, this was
possible because of the access they had to the Private Papers, the IB reports
and such other sources and they did not give up the rigours of diplomatics
when they went about their work.
The debate over the
Netaji papers and the need for their declassification will have to be raised
from this context. The records, particularly of the Home Ministry, are not
available in the NAI for the period since independence. Notwithstanding the 30
years rule[7]
what we have, for the period between 1947 and 1985 (going by the 30 years rule
as in 2015) are documents that are absolutely innocuous. As for instance, we do
not have the notes, correspondence and records of meetings that led to the
listing of the ban on the RSS and some other organizations, imposed as they
were in the aftermath of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi on January 30,
1948; nor do we have such documents pertaining to the lifting of the ban
(imposed in the aftermath of the Calcutta thesis) on the Communist Party of
India in 1951, ahead of the first general elections. This has led to historians
holding all these to Nehru’s unflinching commitment to liberalism. Throwing
open of the papers may help us understand things better as we do, now, with the
prisoners in the cellular jail in the Andamans.[8]
In the same way,
writing a history of such events as the dismissal of the elected governments in
Kerala (1959) the rise and the fall of many non-Congress governments in the
various States across the country between 1967 and 1970, the IB reports on the
Navnirman movement in Gujarat and the students movement in Bihar in the early
1970s, the secret reports involving the trade unions in the Railways and on the
historic general strike of 1974 (on which the National Archives has only such
files that are innocuous and useless at the moment), the IB reports on Justice
Jagmohan Lal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court and such reports on individual
leaders of the opposition political parties before the imposition of the
Emergency and all those files in the Home Ministry including the IB reports,
that are still in the realm of speculations that Indira Gandhi was informed by
her sleuths that she stood a chance to win elections if they were held soon and
that it led to her decision to hold the general elections in March 1977 are
declassified. It will also help in writing history if the records that explain
why some leaders were released by the emergency regime sooner than others and
as to whether some of those in detention had written apology letters to her
from jail.
It will also help in
the writing of our history if the IB reports on the agitations in Assam, Punjab
and elsewhere are declassified in the same way as we have the secret
correspondence between the Viceroy and the Secretary of State to India before
independence. It will help history writing, in the way E.H.Carr stressed and as
the business of diplomatics demands to know whether the IB had reported
anything on the events that preceded the opening of the locks of the Babri
Masjid in February 1986; it may be that we should wait for another year before
the 30 years rule is applied to this. And a decade later we should know all
that was recorded by the IB and such other agencies on the events that led to
the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992.
In the end, it is not
only important that records are declassified, as a matter of routine and this
is done without getting paranoid about national security and such concerns.
Such nations as Germany and Italy have not crumbled because historians across
the world were given access to secret papers that belonged to the times of
Hitler and Musolini. After all, when the Soviet Union crumbled and the secret
papers were thrown open, one of our own eminent historians, Suranjan Das Gupta
could access them and would unravel material that certainly should be of use
for the communists. Likewise, knowing what was reported about Netaji Subhash
Chandra Bose and his kin will only help in the writing of history.
It is another matter
that we as a people will also come to know the intensity with which the state
was watching its people and no party was innocent of this. Michel Foucault
helps us understand why the state does this: pan optican is the concept
he uses by which the mere knowledge that one is being watched is bad enough to
create a sense of scare in the people and thus make them conform. The ethics
and the rightness of snooping and the state doing that is another matter for
another debate. Meanwhile, where it is known that anyone and everyone has been
snooped by the state should leave us with one demand. That such reports are
declassified as a matter of routine, after 30 years or even before that. This
is necessary In Defence of History, to borrow the title of his seminal text
from Richard J Evans.
(EOM)
[1] Francis Fukuyama, The End of
History and the Last Man, Free Press, 1992. The book was an expansion of his
1989 essay, with the same title. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt Empire (2000),
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004) and Commonwealth
(2009) are part of a trilogy by the two authors.
[2] E.H.Carr, What is History?
Penguin, 1961. p 30. Carr’s book was based on a set of five lectures he had
delivered as part of the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures at the University
of Cambridge between January and March 1961 and is held a basic text for all
students of history.
[3] Ibid. p 28
[4] Indian Struggle, was a trenchant
criticism of Gandhi and his economic ideas as well as political and was written
in the early 1930s, banned by the British administration, and first published
in 1948, when Nehru was India’s Prime Minister. Netaji had handed over a copy
of his proscribed book to Benitto Musolini when he visited Italy in 1935.
Netaji’s differences with Nehru lay in the approach to fascism; while Netaji
held it good to ally with the fascists against British imperialism (and this
approach took him to Japan after escaping the British police and the revival of
the INA with Japanese and German support) Nehru was firm that the struggle
against British imperialism shall not be pursued in alliance with the fascist
forces. This difference was not a secret and the debate was carried out in the
open in their times.
[5] It is a recorded fact that the
Defence Committee for the INA soldiers, charged of treson and for court martial
by the British Indian Government was constituted by the Indian National Congress
and this included Jawaharlal Nehru, Bhulabhai Desai and Asaf Ali taking the
brief for the defence of the soldiers. Historians have argued that Nehru and
the Congress were guided by political expediency in doing this but this was
possible only because the documents are available for historians to research
into.
[6]
Diplomatics is the branch of paleography that deals with the study of old
official documents and determines their age and authenticity. Historians do
apply this to the study of documents and its use is no longer restricted to
paleography in modern times.
[7]
There is a certain lack of clarity here in the sense that it is not mandatory
for documents to be declassified after 30 years; nor is there any bar on such
declassification before 30 years. There is a large grey area in this and it
emanates from the discretion given to the government of the day to either
declassify a certain record or not; and governments in independent India have
pulled all the stops to keep them classified.
[8] Penal
Settlement in Andamans, a collection of documents pertaining to each and
every prisoner in the cellular jail, including details of why some were
released prematurely, was put together by R.C.Mazumdar and published by the
Government of India in 1975. This was possible only because the records were
made available to the historian; and all those records are available, to this
day, for any other person to read through and verify.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home