In India, the closest that the country has come to such disclosures are a total of 225 declassified files relating to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.

The United States is currently gripped by the Epstein files and MLK files mania.

In the first case, a perceived lack of transparency over the US investigations into notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has carved a rare chasm between President Donald Trump and his typically loyal Republican base.

In the second instance, nearly six decades after the assassination of United States civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr (MLK) in 1968, the White House has released more than 230,000 pages of once-classified files relating to his murder. The records were put under a court-imposed seal in 1977 after the FBI compiled them and turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.

In India, the closest that the country has come to such disclosures are a total of 225 declassified files relating to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, which were released online, at different times in 2016. Mostly historical, the files did not reveal anything that was radically fresh material nor any evidence that could indict any of India's independence movement stalwarts, except for some granular details.

Put simply, declassification is the process that provides the public access to government documents that was once restricted. Unlike the MLK and the Epstein Files, India has no defined structure for declassification of files. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has been regularly declassifying documents after 25 years but those are restricted to missions carried out by Indian ambassadors posted at foreign locations.

But a first historic step was taken in 2021 - a stated change in the policy framework. Setting a clear timeline for compilation, publication, archiving and declassification of the histories of India’s wars and operations, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) came out with a new policy, which stipulates that events must be officially recorded within five years.

According to it, “records should ordinarily be declassified in 25 years” and “records older than 25 years should be appraised by archival experts and transferred to the National Archives of India once the war/operations histories have been compiled”.

Says defence analyst Bharat Karnad, "It is a good step forward. But let us see what is released in the public domain. We don’t know yet. Is it only the Nehru or Indira period or will it also include the Vajpayee years?’’

When it comes to defence, information is still tightly controlled and the tradition of understanding history through eyewitness accounts remains at a nascent stage.

Take the Henderson-Brooks-Bhagat report (or the Henderson Brooks report), a none-too-flattering review of the Indian Army operations during the Sino-Indian war of 1962, commissioned by General JN Chaudhuri, the Acting Army Chief at the time. Its authors were Lt. Gen. TB Henderson Brooks and Brig. Premindra Singh Bhagat, a former director of Military Intelligence.

Officially, it is still under wraps as 'confidential.’ But its vital parts were widely circulated on the internet by Neville Maxwell, the Australian English journalist who broke the story in 1970 with his classic book, India’s China War, the only journalist to have accessed the Henderson Brooks report. He uploaded it on his blog in 2014, five years before he passed away.

Books written by superannuated defence officers, which have classified content, are vetted by the government. The officials first review the report and make recommendations, which are then sent to the concerned official who approves it, following which they are archived in national records.

The latest in this genre is the case of former army chief, Gen. Manoj Mukund Navarane. The Indian Army is `reviewing’ his memoir, which discloses details of a conversation he had with Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on the night of August 31, 2020, following the movement of Chinese PLA tanks and troops in Rechin La on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh.

Excerpts from Naravane’s memoir, Four Stars of Destiny, were published by the PTI on December 18, 2024. Publisher Penguin Random House has been asked not to share excerpts or soft copies of the book until the review is over. The review is reportedly focused on potential national security concerns about the 2020 border clashes with China and the Agnipath scheme, as detailed in the book.

Says A Surya Prakash, author and former Prasar Bharti Chairman, “Every democracy must open up its public records to know why it went wrong at a certain time in history or what could have been done to improve things. In the immediacy of events, there is no need to reveal everything, but with the lapse of time, it is important to see how things happened the way they did. These are public records and not someone’s private papers.”

As President Trump struggles to quell his supporters' obsessions with the Epstein Files, the pathway for former BJP MP, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, is relatively less troublesome. Singh, the former head of India's wrestling federation, has been cleared in a sexual harassment case filed by a minor female wrestler.

A Delhi court last month accepted a Delhi Police report, recommending the cancellation of the case against Singh. This former MP still faces charges of sexual harassment and stalking in a separate case by six adult female wrestlers.

Apart from some irate media reports, Singh’s acquittal has not caused much of a furore, partly because political parties continue to give tickets to tainted candidates: the sloth in the criminal justice system coupled with the absence of political will, ensures that criminals continue to get away scot-free, and indeed prosper.

In January this year, the Supreme Court debated whether banning individuals charged with heinous crimes such as murder and rape from contesting elections could cause irreversible harm if they were later found innocent. A two-member bench also highlighted existing legal provisions that could address situations where elected individuals are later convicted.

While there isn't a complete absence of classification for criminal files in India, the culture surrounding it is fragmented and lacks a unified, standardized approach. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) collects data and classifies offenses, but there are gaps and inconsistencies in the methodology.

They particularly relate to crucial gaps in the data collected, such as the lack of detailed descriptions of categories for motives behind crimes. Socio-economic factors or reasons for crimes are not consistently captured and prison statistics, unlike crime statistics, do not provide offense-wise data on undertrials and convicts.

"We are a country of thick-skinned people,” says Jawahar Sircar, a former Rajya Sabha member and an ex-IAS officer. It is this insensitivity that marks the difference between countries that have arrived and those wanting to get there.