Everything’s a secret unless we say so.

I was stopped when I was clicking this picture of the QM’s Fort gate behind Khetarpal Parade Grounds, from where the cadets come marching out on their Passing out Parade day. I was intrigued by this and protested. I even showed the random DSC guard who was warning me pictures of this same structure from the last ten years! He relented and let me ‘get away’ with it finally.

But that got me wondering. What is our obsession over not allowing photographs? As an attendee of numerous NDA PoPs over the years, I’ve photographed this particular gate numerous times, the cadets themselves photograph various parts and send them to their families (who see it on Sundays and PoP days anyway), the media who visit the Academy (and is dutifully escorted everywhere by the helpful officers in charge of ‘PR’) photographs, videographs, and publishes this openly, Google Maps and Earth have detailed layouts and maps of the insides, and every coffee table book and magazine about the Academy, every YouTube and social media film (many of them officially shot) has these images of the Sudan Block, Bombay Stadium, Khetarpal Parade Ground, Habibullah Hall, Peacock Bay, and so on. There is neither anything secret nor secretive about this beautiful campus and the cradle of leadership for this nation’s future military leaders. In fact, NDA’s own website has enough and more photographs of these magnificient structures.

This whole ‘Restricted Area’, ‘No Photography Allowed’, ‘Photography Prohibited’, ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’, and similar bullshit is a colonial legacy where the imperial power needed to keep things from the ‘natives’. Now, in independent India of 2023, it only serves as an ego massage for the bureaucrats and brass. Of course, there are areas where we should restrict recording. But more often than not, most areas aren’t really a ‘secret’ anymore. Especially when, in practice, photographs and maps for those are openly available even through official channels (buy the official NDA coffee table book and you’ll get HD images of all these, for a price!).

The entire colonial approach to India was: Unless specifically spelt out otherwise, everything is classified, everything is restricted from the ‘natives’, everything is disallowed, everything is secret, and everyone is guilty. That is not how citizens in an independent sovereign democracy (and a republic to boot) should be treated. High time we let go of this and start trusting our own people, the very people who make up this ancient nation that is the young country of India.

But we’ll we do it? Politicians love to talk of ‘decolonisation’, especially nowadays with the right-wing nuts having taken over every institution of this country. Of course all of us who know know that this talk of getting rid of our colonial mindset and vestiges of the Raj is just that. Talk. Like most of what politicians do.