The United States enacted legislation requiring disclosure of records tied to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, stripping officials of the discretion to suppress inconvenient truths. India’s information classification regime, which still permits secrecy on grounds of “embarrassment to government”, offers a stark contrast.
On the last day of November 2025, the United States Congress passed the Epstein Files Disclosure Act (EFDA), a law ordering the federal government to open its files on one of the most politically sensitive criminal investigations in recent American history. Within thirty days, every federal agency was required to release all documents, photographs, emails and video footage linked to Epstein, the convicted sex offender who ran a trafficking network that implicated some of the most powerful figures in the world, and who died in federal custody in 2019.
Within two months of the act coming into force, the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) had published more than three million pages of records. Each tranche of disclosures detonated fresh controversies, surfaced new names and compelled institutions, including the DoJ itself, to account for what they knew and when they knew it.
None of this happened because officials chose to be transparent. It happened because the law gave them no choice. That distinction matters, and it is one India has yet to seriously reckon with.
The EFDA is, by any legislative standard, a compact document. It runs to three sections. But within those three sections, it accomplishes something that India’s Right to Information Act, widely celebrated at home and abroad as a landmark transparency law, has never managed: it removes official discretion when public interest demands disclosure.
The act named its targets explicitly: Epstein and his convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, currently serving a twenty-year federal prison sentence for child sex trafficking. The statute listed, with forensic specificity, the categories of material subject to mandatory release: all investigation and prosecution records, travel logs, customs and immigration documents, financial records, files related to Epstein’s death in custody, and crucially, the names of all individuals, including government officials, “named or referenced” in connection with the trafficking network. Even records of the destruction or concealment of documents were brought within the ambit of compulsory disclosure.
“No record shall be withheld, delayed or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary”, mentioned section 2(b) of the act.
That clause is perhaps the most consequential sentence in the entire statute. It functions as a pre-emptive refusal to allow the machinery of state secrecy to shield the powerful. It forecloses the most common justification governments reach for when transparency becomes inconvenient: that disclosure would embarrass officials or damage reputations. The act treats that justification as insufficient, by design.
India’s information classification regime is governed by the Ministry of Home Affairs’ Manual of Departmental Security Instructions, 1994, the document that determines how government records are designated “top secret,” “secret,” “confidential” or “restricted,” and therefore whether citizens can ever access them.
There is, however, a foundational problem: the manual is itself classified. In 2009, an RTI application seeking access to the manual was filed before the Central Information Commission (CIC). The Commission dismissed the request, holding that disclosure of the classification system might enable “individuals hostile to the nation to know the security strategy.” The norms governing what the government may keep secret are, in other words, a secret.
What counts as “secret” can be gleaned from a 2014 document — the Ministry of Home Affairs’ Guidelines on National Information Security Policy. The document does not appear on the ministry’s own website; it surfaced instead on the website of a district police unit in Barnala, Punjab. Among the grounds it identifies for classifying a document as “secret” is that its disclosure could cause “embarrassment to government functioning.” The Ministry of Defence has replicated this language verbatim in its own security guidelines for private sector entities.
Observers working with India’s transparency framework have noted that “embarrassment to government” cannot constitute a national security threshold. It is a political one. In effect, it is a provision that allows any uncomfortable truth, a cover-up, a financial irregularity, a statement made to Parliament that later proved false, to be shielded from public scrutiny under the colour of law.
What makes this doubly significant is that India’s own Supreme Court addressed this precise issue over forty years ago. In S P Gupta vs President of India [AIR 1982 SC 149], a seven-judge constitution bench examined whether the government could withhold correspondence between the law minister and the chief justice of India concerning the appointment and transfer of high court judges. Justice P N Bhagwati, writing with the majority, laid down a principle that should have settled the matter: “…it is possible that the decision to withhold the document may be influenced by the apprehension that such disclosure may adversely affect the head of the department or the department itself or the minister or even the Government or that it may provoke public criticism or censure… it is essential that such considerations should be totally kept out.”
That judgment is now forty-four years old. In those four decades, governments of every political formation — Congress, BJP, and coalition variants of both — have continued to classify documents on grounds of official embarrassment, apparently undisturbed by the constitutional standard articulated by the court.
The Second Administrative Reforms Commission noted this contradiction in 2006 and recommended that the classification criteria be aligned with the RTI Act’s exemption clauses. The UPA government agreed in principle. Whether the recommended amendment was ever enacted remains, with a certain appropriateness, unclear.
India has the RTI Act. It has whistleblower protection laws of limited reach and even more limited enforcement. It has a Supreme Court that articulated the correct constitutional principle in 1981 and has watched it be disregarded ever since.
Observers note that what it does not have is a mechanism to compel structured disclosure when institutions act in concert to protect their own — no parliamentary override, no mandatory declassification timelines, no public register of redactions, no statutory prohibition on using secrecy as a shield against accountability. Where the EFDA anticipates and explicitly bars the abuse of classification, India’s framework offers no equivalent safeguard.
The Epstein disclosures in the United States are a reminder that the most consequential thing a democracy can do is make it structurally impossible for the state to hide from its own citizens. America enacted a law that removed official discretion from the equation. The files are now public, the names are now public and the institutions that failed are now on record.
India has the legal architecture, the constitutional precedent and the democratic mandate to do the same. What it has lacked, across successive governments, is the legislative will to make it happen.
(Venkatesh Nayak is Director, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, New Delhi)
