Govt leaks selective: Cong

The Congress on Friday accused the Narendra Modi government of “selectively” leaking classified information about Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose to “denigrate” the image of the nation’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his successors.

The party, however, did not dispute the surveillance.  It demanded the government to declassify all other documents associated with the matter to place the “complete truth” before the public, saying the “diabolical design” of the BJP had also “maligned” the image of other national leaders and icons like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Gulzarilal Nanda with the selective leak of file-notings about Netaji.

“A systematic and sinister propaganda of selective leaks and half truths has been unleashed by the current BJP government to malign national icons, who reshaped India’s destiny, rewrote its history and made it a great nation today,” said Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi.

This comes after revelations that Netaji’s relatives were put under surveillance between 1948 and 1968 by the erstwhile governments.  Singhvi underlined that India’s prime ministers and home ministers were the tallest leaders and national icons between 1948 to 1968, including C Rajagopalachari, Govind Ballabh Pant, Kailash Nath Katju, Yashwantrao Chavan and Indira Gandhi, besides Nehru, Patel and Shastri.

“Why is the BJP trying to malign the great home ministers and veteran freedom fighters like Patel, Rajagopalachari, Shastri, Pant, Nanda and others?” he said, adding that India’s history and achievements can never be segregated or looked at separately from the achievements of these “great men”.

The prime minister and home minister must explain why only “file notings” of the two declassified files have been released and the “correspondence portion of these files were withheld,” Singhvi said.

“Does the correspondence portion contain some inconvenient truth that the Prime Minister's Office has chosen to withhold?” he added.

Demanding the Modi government to make a statement and place “full facts in the public domain”, the Congress leader said it was necessary as the Prime Minister’s Office had still kept 58 files related to ‘Netaji’ as classified and the Home Ministry 29. Singhvi noted that all the successive governments so far had refused to declassify these 87 files.