The decision of the Prime Minister’s Office not to divulge the correspondence between the then President K.R. Narayanan and the Atal Behari Vajpayee government during the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 has resulted in the biggest test of the Right to Information (RTI) Act. A full bench of the Central Information Commission, comprising all five Commissioners, is to take up a citizen’s petition demanding that the correspondence be made public under RTI.
Twice the Manmohan Singh government has rejected pleas of the Nanavati Commission for copies of the correspondence to be made available to it. The Centre has said the correspondence was “highly confidential” and “sensitive” and refused to divulge the corespondence citing immunity under the Official Secrets Act. Narayanan, in his final interview, said he had said all he had to say on the subject.
Questions: Should the content of the letters be revealed? Or should they remain suppressed? Will revealing the contents under RTI help our democracy combat similar issues better or will they end up vitiating the atmosphere once again? If the correspondence shows the Narendra Modi government in poor light, why is the Congress-led UPA being so cagey? Will suppressing the letters deny justice to the victims of Gujarat?
The fact that the UPA doesn’t want to divulge papers that could cast the NDA in poor light tells it all. Politics has become a bit of a business, a closed club. When the papers of Hitler and Stalin, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, can be declassified and released, there can be no justification for the Gujarat papers to be kept behind lock and key. The papers may show the President in poor light or the central government or the State government, but that is the price they must pay for what they allowed to happen. There is no official secret involved here. The only secrecy is the bone-chilling silence that led to the most slaughter of the lambs. Somebody at the very top must be held accountable, not some poor Zaheera Shaikh who is sandwiched between those who want the truth to come out and those who are determined to prevent that.
I finally saw the much talked about documentary — The Final Solution on video.google.com. I did not find it any different than Star News’ daily broadcasts during that time.
A blog/news site had an article from a student of a journalism school(most probably Asian College of Journalism, Chennai) who had been to Gujarat during that time and it said that this pogrom was just like 1984’s, i.e., Hindu v. Muslims and not just Modi and co. against others; because many of the constituencies were represented by Congress MLAs and yet were badly hit(it is being hinted that Congress too had a role to play in this riot) … I am not able to get that web page now.
Maybe it shows Narayanan in poor light. We have to remember that he was as much an ideologue of the left as the BJP was of the right. Narayanan being a Congressman/Communist through and through, the PMO wouldn’t want one of their own looking bad.