Disclose 'each' record on Bose's death: CIC to MHA

As he relinquished the post of Chief Information Commissioner, the mild-mannered Wajahat Habibullah gave his parting gift to all declassification enthusiasts. Brushing aside the protestations of the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Central Information Commission has asked it to release 290 records exhibited before Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry which probed the death of Subhas Chandra Bose between 2000-20004.

The Ministry has been plainly told to release the records sought "within twenty working days of the date of receipt of this Decision Notice" -- which would mean roughly a month from now. Included in these records are several secret files originating from different ministries. The CIC has left it to the ministry to hold back records whose release the Ministry thinks can affect national interest. But it will have to justify any such step under the Section 8(1) of the RTI act.

This seminal order follows a 33-month long tug of war between Endthesecrecy.com’s Chandrachur Ghose and the Ministry of Home, which continues to be overtly sensitive about a case the Government of India and the intelligentsia think got closed 60 years ago.

It has always been an another matter that no one from the public side ever wondered why dozens of files about the Subhas Bose mystery remained secret decades after the matter ceased to be politically hot issue. Perhaps some people did, but the right questions were not thrown at those at the helm of affairs.

A start was made in 2003 by the people who now run this site. Sayantan Dasgupta sought the exhibits used by a previous commission of inquiry into Bose’s death. The Home Ministry stalled off the matter as long as they could till they were told by the entire CIC Commissioners’ Bench to release the papers. Eventually, they released a few papers, not parting with the most sensitive ones. But even those gave away enough information to reinforce the long-held belief that the commission appointed by the Indira Gandhi government had taken recourse to fraudulent means to prove that Netaji had died in an air crash.

Mukherjee Commission overturned that finding but the UPA government had better of it when they arbitrarily rejected its report.

The saga of present RTI case began in 2006 when Chandrachur Ghose sought the copies of the exhibits used by the Mukherjee Commission. For a start, the MHA sought 3-6 months' time to examine the security implications of some the documents. Then the ministry suddenly informed Ghose after a year that it had decided to transfer the documents to the National Archives. The Ministry did not, however, mention whether it would transfer all documents to the National Archives or only selected ones.

A year and a half later, the process of transfering the record was still in the works. An agitated Ghose took the matter to Chief Information Commissioner.

On 4 September 2009 a hearing took place in the chamber Wajahat Habibullah. It was attended by a MHA team headed by a Joint Secretary and Chandrachur Ghose and Anuj Dhar of EndTheSecrecy.

Ghose brought on record recent RTI responses from PMO and MoD to punch holes in the MHA's declassification claims. The fact of the matter is that in India there is no declassification to speak of and the National Archives usually doesn't get the custody of even the declassified records. Dhar dubbed as "a red herring" the Ministry's move to send the Mukherjee Commission records to the National Archives. The officials from MHA's Internal Security Division submitted that while they could release the records created by them, those originating from other ministries could not be released by them without others concurrence.

Taking the Ministry to task, Habibullah pressed that declassification process could not go on indefinitely. He also cited relevant clauses of the RTI Act stating that although documents might belong to different ministries, the Act is applicable to the 'holder' of the documents. The MHA is the nodal ministry in the Subhas Bose mystery matter.

The Chief Information Commissioner reserved his formal order, which has now been released and can be seen on the CIC website.

Endthesecrecy.com’s estimate is that the MHA will release unclassified records, holding back classified one. As such, a close to this chapter is still far off.