Congress today rejected reports that Jawaharlal Nehru's government had snooped on the family of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and accused the Narendra Modi dispensation of launching a "sinister propaganda of selective leaks and half truths" to malign national icons.
AICC said that since the Intelligence Bureau reports directly to the Home Minister, the ruling party was "attempting to malign the great Home Ministers between 1948 to 68 including Sardar Patel and Lal Bahadur Shastri".
"Why is BJP trying to malign the great Home Ministers and veteran freedom fighters like Shri Vallabhbhai Patel, Shri C. Rajagopalachari, Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri, Shri Govind Ballabh Pant, Shri Gulzarilal Nanda and others?" party spokesman Abhishek Singhvi told reporters.
He alleged "a systematic and sinister propaganda of selective leaks and half truths has been unleashed by current BJP government to malign national icons who reshaped India's destiny, rewrote its history and made it a great nation today."
The Prime Minister and the Home Minister must explain why only 'notings on file' of the two declassified files have been released while withholding the 'correspondence portion' of these files, he said.
"Does the correspondence portion contain some inconvenient truth that the Prime Minister's Office has chosen to withhold?" he added.
Congress' reaction came in the wake of reports that between 1948 and 1968, the family of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's family was spied upon in Calcutta by Intelligence Bureau (IB), much of it when Nehru was Prime Minister.
Singhvi alleged that BJP, in its "classic diabolical design", is seeking to malign not only Pt. Nehru but also other national leaders like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Gulzarilal Nanda, C. Rajagopalachari, Govind Ballabh Pant and Y B Chavan.
"India's history and achievements can never be segregated or looked at separately from the achievements of these great men who were Prime Ministers and Home ministers," he said.
He demanded that the Prime Minister and the Home Minister should have the courage to come out, make a statement and place full facts in public domain.
This, he said, was necessary as the PMO has still kept 58 related files as classified and the Home Ministry has kept 29 such files as classified -- a total of 87 files on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose that are still classified.
"We also demand that all such documents should be declassified so that complete truth is placed in public domain.", he said.
