Why do we need so many secrets ?

When you look at the number of colonial era laws that still continue to govern India, one could wonder as to why India bothered to get its independence from the British. Supposedly the British were getting it all wrong, and the new independent India was supposed to be a different story all together. One of those laws is the World War II era Official Secrets Act primarily enacted to prevent Allied war plans being leaked to the enemy – basically the Japanese. A conviction under the Draconian law carries a minimum sentence of 7 years imprisonment. Sixty years after independence, the laws merrily continue on the statute books with the law providing a good fig leaf to protect the government’s embarrassments from the public eye.
It is under that law that Maj. Gen. V.K.Singh, the Joint Director India’s external intelligence agency – the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) was recently arrested for allegedly disclosing classified information in his book which was published over three months ago. Singh’s book –India’s External Intelligence: Secrets of RAW was published in June and has been widely available till now and extracts and reviews have been published in numerous Indian and foreign media. Considering that Singh did not publish the book in a hush hush way overseas but had it published by an Indian publisher based in Delhi, it is amazing that the intelligence machinery did not know of his intentions before hand and did not restrain the book from being published in the first place, even assuming that there was a case for it in the first place.
The manner of the arrest and then also the subsequent raids on his publisher is of course the best possible illustration of trying to bolt the stable doors after the horse has bolted no one knows as to ho many copies of the book have been already sold and assuming that any state secrets have been compromised, the damage control is already too late. In effect the manner, in which the stat agencies have conducted themselves in this rather slipshod fashion, seems to pretty well vindicate the author’s thesis that there are unsavory secrets in the intelligence community which are well shielded behind the immunity from Parliamentary scrutiny and the British drafted Official Secrets Act.

Occasions like this provide an opportunity to debate the question as to what constitutes an Official Secret. If there is inefficiency in the system, bickering, politicking and general sloth in an organization or even corruption as the author of the book alleges, can an out dated law be a cover to shield these things from the public eye? Most countries like the UK itself from where the colonial era Act has been adopted have moved from a state secret paradigm to a freedom of information paradigm where transparency is the norm and opacity is the exception.
Although India has made what may be considered a very modest beginning in this direction with the Right to Information Act, big chunks of information that pertain to National Security still remain out f bounds. So while under the RTI, one can ask for and obtain information bout drains and sewers and the number of hospital beds, it is not possible to ask questions regarding the functioning of the intelligence agencies and how they spend their annual budget the quantity of which is undisclosed and never audited, how they go about spending the money and whether any thing ever comes out of it.

Considering that it is the tax payer’s money that is spent and possibly wasted, there has to be some mechanism about ferreting out the information. Perhaps a beginning could be made by presenting these to parliament, if not to the general public. And may be if the government is so paranoid, parliament could meet in camera for this kind of scrutiny. But arresting a senior officer three months after he published his book in full public glare and charging him of disclosing official secrets when all that he has done is expose embarrassing gaffes from the past brings the Indian government no credit whatsoever.