India to declassify files on Bangladesh

India has launched a process to declassify over two lakh more classified files on Bangladesh and other countries including the South Asian ones, a senior external affairs ministry official said.
"The ministry of external affairs (MEA) is in the process of finalising a major project to declassify another set of 220,000 files - records covering Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Pakistan, Iran and Sri Lanka, East Asia, Eurasia and the Americas," several Indian newspapers on Thursday quoted MEA Special Secretary Pinak Chakravarty as saying.
Chakravarty, who is a former Indian high commissioner in Dhaka, however, did not elaborate on the issue as he was addressing a seminar on nuclear cooperation and non-proliferation while officials familiar with the process earlier said India already declassified 70,000 such documents.
Commenting on the New Delhi's decision, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) Director Arvind Gupta said, "MEA's recent declassification of a large number of files pertaining to India's foreign policy is a step in the right direction".
Speaking at the same function, Nuclear Proliferation International History Project (NPIHP) co-director Christian Ostermann also welcomed the decision saying it "effectively ends an era in which India's role in the Cold War was researched and based on documents from other countries-from Russia, China or Hungary."