Daily Mirror: Sri Lanka: Thursday,
March 30, 2017.
Sri Lankan
activists who rushed precipitously to file Right to Information (RTI) requests
for the Assets Declarations of the President and the Prime Minister may learn a
wise thing or two from their Indian counterparts.
Quite different to what is sought to be made
out in certain quarters, the now common practice for Indian politicians to
declare assets was not because of a single RTI petition expecting automatic
compliance. On the contrary, this was a result of sustained and hard activism
started in 2003 when the Indian Supreme Court ruled, on a public interest
petition filed by an activist organisation, that candidates standing for
elections must make their assets publicly known.
That countrywide campaign got a turbo boost
when India’s 2005 Right to Information (RTI) Law was later passed at national
level and the Right to Information Commission was established. Indian activists
then shrewdly built up the campaign for another five years before vigorously
filing RTI applications challenging politicians on their assets declarations.
Even so, when well-known RTI activist S.C.
Agarwal filed RTI requests to know the assets of members of the Lok Sabha and
the Rajya Sabha in 2010, the way ahead was not easy. The Indian RTI Commission
ordered the disclosure but ‘as a measure of caution’ also stated that
permission must be given by the leaders of both Houses of Parliament to release
the information under a confidentiality clause existent there. The Commission
was aware of the balance that must be struck between privacy and the public right
to information.
As it so happened, Parliament later said this
permission was not necessary. The Commission firmly insisted that India’s Prime
Minister must show his assets. Political leaders then did disclose after being
bombarded by varying pressure.
All these show the complications that come
with such challenges. That was so in a country which long had RTI activism in
remote villages and state level laws before a national level law was enacted.
Here, Sri Lanka had no widespread popular movement on RTI. Rather, it came
about because a few committed and dedicated editors, activist lawyers,
parliamentarians and social justice workers persisted. Even now, RTI has yet to
filter to the far flung corners of the South and the North though it is encouraging
to see early indications of that interest.
Speaker Karu Jayasuriya himself one of
those notable voices for RTI -- is on record as saying recently that the
people’s use of RTI after the Act was operationalised has surpassed all
expectations. No doubt, any citizen can file an RTI application for assets
declarations. But it is wiser to tread with caution in these early days.
Recently, some Cabinet Ministers against the very idea of RTI have used the
filing for assets declarations to argue that this was exactly the sort of
mischief that they warned RTI would lead to. Paving the way for
counter-productive pressure of this kind is unfortunate.
A lesson may be taken from Eastern Province
mothers who filed RTI applications at police stations asking for information on
the whereabouts of their loved ones. They have said that even if they met with
negative answers, they had decided to persist in that search through RTI by
ceaselessly bombarding the police with similar requests rather than challenge
them before the courts and the RTI Commission as an immediate reaction to
failure to respond. As they had explained, RTI was still an unfamiliar idea to
government officers and ‘they needed to be educated first before being
challenged.’
That attitude shows a remarkable level of
maturity and commonsense. RTI must be allowed to grow in the minds of the
people as a force for the good. It must not be subjected to premature body
blows due to a rush for publicity and attention-grabbing headlines.