Why do civil servants have designations with the word ‘secretary’ in them? It is more than a British legacy. It is a legacy we adopted readily. The Latin root is ‘secretus’, meaning to set apart and keep withdrawn or hidden. ‘Secret’, ‘secretary’ and ‘secretariat’ have the same etymology. A civil servant’s job is to keep a secret, not part with it. In mid-1990s a friend of mine used to be a joint secretary (JS) in North Block and when he glanced through pink papers in the morning, he read the equivalent of the gossip column on the op-ed page first. That was the only way, he claimed, he got to know what other joint secretaries (and those above them) in North Block were contemplating as policy changes. Also in the mid-1990s, a Moynihan Commission on ‘Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy’ was set up in the US and a report was submitted in 1997. That report found, at the top-level alone, 400,000 new ‘secrets’ were created in the US every year. Civil servants also kept these secrets from politicians. The Commission’s conclusions were: secrecy is a form of government regulation; excessive secrecy is against national interest, because policy-makers have incomplete information; government is not accountable; and the public cannot debate policy matters because their information is also incomplete.

The Moynihan Commission quoted from Max Weber’s Essays in Sociology. “Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret... Bureaucracy naturally welcomes a poorly informed and hence a powerless parliament — at least in so far as ignorance somehow agrees with the bureaucracy’s interests.” Had the Moynihan Commission been British, it might also have quoted Sir Humphrey Appleby from Yes Prime Minister. “The Official Secrets Act is not there to protect secrets. It’s there to protect officials.” Information is power, don’t part with information. And if you part with information, you may become accountable and reveal how stupid you have been. How does one reconcile our Official Secrets Act (OSA) of 1923 with initiatives like right to information and citizens’ charters? We do have colonial legacies in our laws, and some of them are anachronistic because they were meant to suppress ignorant natives. While the OSA is anachronistic, it is not quite colonial in that sense. There is a triple problem with the OSA.

... contd.