No, Prime Minister...
The UPA government, which claims credit for the RTI Act, now sees it as a monster and wants to kill it
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Every day, as the usual suspects from the government troop across television screens and dispense sound bites, there's a sense of déjà vu. The feeling grows stronger; and now we know where we've seen and read this, where our political masters (and mistresses) are getting this from: they're watching reruns of Yes, Prime Minister.
A favourite homily from a UPA panjandrum with a particularly smug mug is to say something like this: "Let me remind you that it was the UPA that gave the country the RTI Act".
There's a small problem with this fascinating statement. It's a lie. No government 'gives' laws to people. Laws are made by legislatures which have both government and opposition. Parliamentarians are only the representatives of citizens; it is we, the citizens, the people who have delegated to legislatures the authority to frame statutes, for us. That's a fundamental postulate of our democracy, one that the UPA's talking heads seem to forget. Passing a law is never a matter of benevolence or charity.
There's a small problem with this fascinating statement. It's a lie. No government 'gives' laws to people. Laws are made by legislatures which have both government and opposition. Parliamentarians are only the representatives of citizens; it is we, the citizens, the people who have delegated to legislatures the authority to frame statutes, for us. That's a fundamental postulate of our democracy, one that the UPA's talking heads seem to forget. Passing a law is never a matter of benevolence or charity.
An even greater lie is the government's suggestion that it conceived of this law all on its own. The government had very little choice in the matter. By the time the RTI Act was passed in 2005, the campaign for it, already several years old, was unstoppable. The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatna (under Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and Shankar Singh) pressed for something very like it in the early 1990s. Others rallied to the cause: Manubhai Shah of the Consumer Education and Research Council (CERC) in Ahmedabad put out an early draft in 1993; three years later, the Press Council (under Justice PB Sawant, a former judge of the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court) proposed another model. The National Campaign on People's Right to Information had the RTI as its principal agenda. Tamil Nadu came through with its act in 1997 — eight years before the UPA's act of socalled magnanimity — and others followed, including Rajasthan and Karnataka in 2000, Delhi a year later and Maharashtra in 2002. The Maharashtra act was largely the doing of Anna Hazare. The RTI Act's immediate precursor was the Freedom of Information Act 2002, and this was replaced by the 2005 RTI Act largely due to the efforts of activists. The RTI Act may not be a law of Manu, but it is also not a law of Manmohan.
It crystallises a right that has always existed in all citizens, one that courts recognised long before the act was passed; and it torpedoes that most vicious and undemocratic of laws, the Official Secrets Act. In less than six years, it has transformed the way the country functions, altered the face of our democracy and dramatically expanded the role of the judiciary in public affairs. Without the RTI Act, much of what the Supreme Court is considering in the telecom licensing scams would never have come to light. From the smallest local authority to the highest reaches of government, the RTI Act is the tightest rein on errant governments.
Today, the same government that claims credit for the RTI Act now sees it as Frankenstein's monster, and wants to kill it. The UPA's party members claim that it is affecting the "working" of the government. This is rank nonsense. Only a government that operates on deception and corruption fears disclosure. The criticism says more about the critic than the criticised.
The Act says that an applicant does not need to give reasons for seeking information; and this is at it should be. This is a variant of the legal concept of burden of proof, and it underlies most freedom of information statutes: it is not for the applicant to show why he needs the information, but for the person from whom it is sought to show, with reasons, why it should not be disclosed.
By a coincidence that is so happy for the UPA that it cannot be coincidence, on 2 September a Shiv Sena MP from Shirdi, Mr Bhausaheb Wakchaure, introduced a private member's bill that does nothing less than strike at the heart of the RTI Act. Mr Wakchaure proposes an inversion (and perversion) of the RTI Act: his amendment requires an applicant to give reasons, and allows the person from whom information is sought to withhold it if he feels the reasons are inadequate.
The bill is monstrous. It must be thrown out. It is nothing but a passport to greater corruption; and it can only be palatable to a government that believes it has the right to rule but no duty to govern.
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