India, Feb. 12 -- It is not every day that an unpublished manuscript paralyses Parliament for a week, prevents the prime minister from responding to a debate for the first time in two decades, even precipitates a rare show of no-confidence by the Opposition against the speaker. Yet, all of that has transpired in the Lok Sabha over the past week-and-a-half, courtesy former Army chief General (retired) Manoj Mukund Naravane's unpublished memoir Four Stars of Destiny. The debate has played out at two levels. The first is where Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi used an excerpt from the manuscript, published in Caravan Magazine, to argue that the government's handling of China's aggression was botched, triggering a furious response from the treasury benches and prompting the Congress leader to brandish what he claimed was a copy of the book. The second is a controversy over how Gandhi accessed the unpublished manuscript, triggering a bizarre whodunnit that has featured a police first information report (FIR) over copies of the manuscript circulating on social media and now the invocation of the Official Secrets Act. A clarification by publisher Penguin that no copies were "published, distributed, sold or otherwise made available to the public" either in print or digital form and a cryptic seven-word post by the former Army chief on the status of the book - without commenting on either the controversy or the content that has been quoted, and leaving many questions unanswered - has done little to quell the firestorm. At the heart of the row is the two-year-delay by the Union ministry of defence in making a decision on Naravane's book, which was submitted for review in early 2024. This newspaper reported on Wednesday that the Army went through the book in detail, recorded its observations on the subjects covered in it, and sent it to the defence ministry to take the final call. Since then, the ministry has not announced its decision. This stance is unsustainable. The government should decide if the book is worth publication in toto or if certain portions need to be expunged in view of strategic concerns. Its delay has created a surreal situation where the police are probing the leak of an unpublished manuscript announced in 2023. The government often accuses the Opposition of being cavalier on matters of strategic importance. It must also understand that national security cannot be run by pocket veto....