Web India: New Delhi: Friday, June 09, 2017.
Did you know,
Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi never informed the Lok Sabha about their personal
foreign trips or even the PMO had no such information, that Sheila Dikshit had
tried to mislead the media once vis-a-vis files related to terrorist Afzal Guru
and that top civil servants often do vanishing act during their overseas
assignment or deputation? In each of these cases, there is one common thread
the Right to Information Act and this piece of law exposes some inside stories,
which went around in the corridors of power, in the recent past.
Further more
- thanks to the RTI activism yet again, it has come to light that with regard
to hosting of the Iftar parties a hyped annual feature of Lutyen's culture most
government offices including the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) and even the Lok
Sabha and Rajya Sabha Secretariats are neither consistent, nor clear on who
actually should foot the mega bills.According to a new book, 'Journalism
Through RTI' penned by journalist Shamlal Yadav, while "most curious"
foreign trips were undertaken by Congress President Sonia Gandhi and Vice
President Rahul Gandhi during the 10 years of UPA rule, "information of
none of the foreign trips except that of Sonia Gandhi's Bangkok trip was
available to the PMO, Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of External Affairs or
the National Advisory Council (NAC), as per their responses (to a series of RTI
queries)".
On queries
pertaining to foreign visits by the Members of Parliament, the Lok Sabha
Secretariat had said, "As per the convention, the members of Lok Sabha
inform the Honourable Speaker about their foreign visits private or official.
However, there is no rule available in the Rules of Procedure or Direction by
the Lok Sabha or any other document in the Lok Sabha Secretariat, whereby it
has been made mandatory for the members to give prior or subsequent information
about their foreign visits to the Speaker, Lok Sabha".
The book
further said the Lok Sabha Secretariat has also informed that both Ms Gandhi
and her son were never part of any Parliamentary delegation to foreign
countries from 2004 to 2012, therefore political clearance for them was never
sought from the Ministry of External Affairs.As to whether there was any
'exemption' for SPG protectees from getting MEA clearance, the Ministry of Home
Affairs for its part had forwarded the RTI application to the Cabinet
Secretariat and the National Security Guard (NSG) to provide the information,
if any.
Mr Yadav in
his book further refers to a response from the PMO on this - which had said,
information regarding overseas travel by the top Congress leaders "does
not form part of records held by the PMO". However, the PMO had said that
between July 14 to 17, 2004, Ms Gandhi had visited Bangkok to attend a
conference on AIDS.More UNI DEVN RJ 1038
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