Wikileaks.... But where are the leaks?

There is a humourous quote in Telugu that goes “Like the fart of an elephant”. The context of the quote goes thus: There was a time when a village elder was struck by a thought that when an elephant, being colossal, passes air, the sound would be the loudest that had ever been heard; the phenomenon was something he wanted to observe. Word went round and the entire village felt justifiably curious about the sound of an elephant relieving itself of intestinal pressure. After conferring together for a while, the temple elephant was brought to the panchayat. After feeding it till it refused to eat, the villagers got around the elephant, holding their breath (literally and figuratively) for the glorious "breaking wind". The elephant grandly raised its tail and ..... “pssst”, it relieved its flatulence – a grand being whose turgidity releasing mechanism was as silent as a pin drop.

You may be wondering why I, an epitome of good graces, have brought up such a distasteful discussion – the Wikileaks episode draws to itself an imagery that is distinctly similar. Here we are, the peoples of all nations, waiting with a bated breath for muck behind all the grandiloquent statements to be exposed. Two lakh fifty thousand documents, we were told, a thousand years of everyday expose even if one document was released everyday. But what do you have – a measly 2000 documents later, the Wikileaks is sealed tighter than ever. Makes me wonder what kind of a deal went on in the background…

I always had a thing or two against Wikileaks. Don’t get me wrong, I loved them for their expose of Afgan and Iraq war, the video of brutal murder of a set of civilians and journos in Iraq had me rooting for Wikileaks. Those leaks made sense, they could be justified as fight for justice and against crimes perpetuated by an aggressive occupier. The latest round however had me wondering about the justification of the leak. The leaks didn’t serve any purpose, except for self aggrandizement of Wikileaks (and more specifically, Mr. Assange) and embarrassment of various world governments. There was no new information in the leaks; we already knew that diplomats were quasi spies and that honest evaluation of various actors in the world stage is not what is stated in official communiqués. So what did this batch of Wikileaks releases achieve?

I have another qualm, this one relating to the manner of release. Why is it that the releases have been done one document per day? Do not give me the reason that it takes that much time to make the documents comprehensible by the civil society, we all know that its an excuse. It somehow seemed that Wikileaks was out to con governments, and was using this strategy to determine the going price of the information. If that’s not the case, why don’t they release the entire set of documents now and leave it to the public to sift through the material? And the fact that the document release has stopped after the arrest and consequent release of Mr. Assange reinforces the suspicions.

And according to Mr. Assange, there is an internal committee within Wikileaks that determines what to release and what not to release. Questions galore here – Who constituted the committee? What is the jurisprudence and is its jurisprudence proven? What are the criteria based on which decisions are made? As far as I recollect, the documents are a property of the respective governments, Wikileaks being just an accidental receptacle of the documents. How did it acquire the right to filter them and act as a regulator of public information?

Democracy is as much hurt by brazen openness as it is by total rein. There ought to be some things kept under wraps for the common good of all. And I prefer the people who determine what should be revealed and what should be concealed be those who I elected, not some conceited geek with heaven alone knows how many social problems.