New Delhi: Government today
constituted a three-member bureaucratic committee to go into implications of
the Official Secrets Act and the RTI Act as demands mounted for
declassification of files related to Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose.
The first meeting of the
panel, which consists of Secretaries of Home, Law and Personnel, will take
place tomorrow, official sources said today.
Sources said the
constitution of the panel and the meeting tomorrow have nothing to do with the
controversy surrounding Bose.
However, the government’s
move came amidst growing demands for declassification of nearly 90 files which
are yet to be made public. Interestingly, a grandnephew of Bose, Surya Kumar
Bose, had met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Berlin yesterday and requested
him declassify all files related to events since his death or disappearance in
Taiwan on August 18, 1945.
The issue of Netaji related
files came to the fore last week when a controversy broke out following reports
that his family was kept under surveillance by the Intelligence Bureau for 20
years, much of it during the tenure of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
Sources said among nearly
90 classified files relating to Bose, around 27 are with the Ministry of
External Affairs while rest with the Prime Minister’s Office.
There is no file related
to the freedom fighter with the Home Ministry as all have already been
declassified and handed over to the National Archives.
The committee will
examine certain provisions of the Official Secret Act and the Right to
Information Act and whether and how much old official files could be
declassified, sources said.
PTI
