Secretiveness

One disturbing trend I have noticed of late is that people tend to be secretive and not transparent. Maybe it has got something to do with the break up of the joint family system. Or maybe the absurd behaviour of the government which revels on putting a lid on any transaction under the official secrets act has percolated down to the individuals in the society.

India is one of the few countries which has put every single scrap of information under the category of classified information thereby denying it to the public at large. Most of the developed countries declassify almost everything after a reasonable period of say 25 years by which time it has lost its value and the protagonists are long dead. This way, the average citizen gets to know the logic or lack of it behind the crucial decisions taken a while ago that had profound impact on the society at large. There is a past in present. Hence it is important for the Government of the day to come out in the open and be transparent on all aspects barring those of critical national importance. We live in an era of information explosion. Since the percolation of information, secrets or not, through blogs and other tools on the Internet is so fast, it is absurd to hold back anything as it shall lead to more gossips.

Take the case of the much publicized visit of Priyanka Gandhi with one of the convicted in the Rajiv Gandhi case, Nalini. The news media had a field day with someone even quoting Priyanka having said that she has come to terms now with her grief. I have no complaints on Priyanka meeting Nalini and getting some mileage out of it. The twist in the tail comes a month later, when the Jail Superintendant where Nalini is interned has given a written submission on a query filed under the RTI act that the meeting never took place and that the jail records did not show Priyanka having ever visited Nalini. Now this is strange. It can mean only two things, either Priyanka is lying or the Vellore Jail allowed Priyanka to visit a life term convict without any records and thereby violating all the rules. I suspect it is the later, in which case both Priyanka and the Jail authorities have a lot to explain. Why should be make a mess of such a simple issue?