New Delhi, Dec. 7: Transparency warrior Subhash Chandra Agrawal had hoped he finally had an ally in Narendra Modi when he petitioned the Prime Minister's Office for information on namesake Subhas Chandra Bose's death.

Modi had won a once-in-a-generation mandate on the back of several promises including one of greater transparency, even over elements of India's foreign policy and strategic history that have remained veiled for decades.

But Agrawal, who had badgered the Manmohan Singh government almost every day using the Right to Information (RTI) Act over the past decade, has come up against a stonewalling of information by the NDA that he says is unusual even by UPA standards.

He isn't alone. Petitioners seeking information from India's foreign office under the RTI Act have received unsatisfactory responses over three times more frequently since Modi came to power than in the first five months of the year, data accessed by The Telegraph show.

Between June and October, eight in every 100 RTI applicants to the external affairs ministry have had to follow up their petitions with appeals. Only 2.5 per cent of applicants between January and May had felt the need to appeal against the foreign office's responses. ( See chart)

'I don't find the replies as transparency-oriented as earlier,' Agrawal, appointed an adviser to the Delhi government by the lieutenant governor earlier this year, told this newspaper.

He was speaking about his own experiences with RTI applications, not necessarily restricted to the foreign office, over the past five months.

It's a sentiment that is fast enveloping many who supported Modi and the BJP, trusting their promise to deliver a more transparent government even in the traditionally secretive areas of strategic affairs and foreign policy.

Home minister Rajnath Singh had on January 23, this year, demanded - he was then in the Opposition - that the government reveal documents relating to Bose's death, officially attributed to a plane crash over Taiwan in 1945 but still considered a mystery by many.

'Netaji's death is still a mystery for most of us,' Singh had said in a statement issued by the BJP. 'The mystery behind his death should be unveiled by the Union government to let the people know the truth.'

On March 19, finance minister Arun Jaitley - also in the Opposition at the time - had blogged about successive governments' refusal to reveal the contents of the Henderson-Brooks report that analysed the reasons for India's defeat to China in the 1962 war.

'To keep these documents 'top secret' indefinitely may not be in larger public interest,' Jaitley had written.

'Any nation is entitled to learn from the mistakes of the past. The security relevance of a document loses its relevance in the long-term future. With the wisdom of hindsight I am of the opinion that the report's contents could have been made public some decades ago.'

But in July, Jaitley rose in Parliament to insist that the Henderson Brooks report couldn't be made public.

Author and RTI activist Anuj Dhar, who has campaigned for years seeking clarity on the circumstances of Bose's death, has only received the same perfunctory response under Modi that he did from the UPA.

Like Agrawal, Dhar had sought details of documents relating to Bose's death, counting on - as he mentioned in his petition to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) - 'the Prime Minister's personal commitment to transparency, (and) his admiration for Netaji'.

But he received a response suggesting that any disclosure of details could hurt ties with a third country - the reply the UPA government had given him back in 2006.

The Modi government's struggles so far to live up to its promises of transparency in strategic and foreign policy matters have triggered cautionary protests from at least one commentator and a publication considered sympathetic to the BJP.

'PM must review decision to keep Netaji files secret even after 75 years,' columnist Swapan Dasgupta tweeted earlier this week. 'Culture of permanent non-transparency....'

In the recently re-launched online avatar of Swarajya magazine, Dhar wrote this week that he had had few expectations from a Congress-led government but the BJP now risked muddying its nationalist credentials.

'The party's nationalistic image is going to take a big hit if they renege on their promise to settle the Netaji case,' Dhar wrote. 'Not only that, the BJP now runs the risk of filling the boots of the Congress as the main villain in the story.'