The Echo of India: Mumbai: Wednesday, July 12, 2017.
A division
bench of the Supreme Court has favoured bringing the Chief Justice of India
(CJI) within the ambit of Right to Information Act. The two judges pointed out
that CJI has nothing to hide because he has no secretive business to hide. The
bench held the same view about governors also. They rejected the specious
argument of the Solicitor-General that constitutional authorities discharge
sovereign functions and they should be exempted from the purview of the RTI
Act. The bench went a step further and held that not only the CJI and the
governors but ‘all constitutional functionaries’ should be brought under the
RTI to bring transparency and accountability in their functioning.
Coming as the
decision does from the apex court, it will be a shot in the arms for RTI
activists all over the country. The RTI Act was passed by the UPA Government in
2005 after a prolonged and sustained demand from RTI activists to enact such a
law to bring transparency in government functioning. But from the beginning the
attitude of the Government was to frustrate the objective of the law and deny
information on any pretext, mostly for reasons of security. When Manmohan Singh
was Prime Minister the Government even refused to respond to an RTI query in
which the questioner wanted to know the expenses incurred in connection with
Sonia Gandhi’s foreign trips. Manmohan Singh’s logic was that nothing
concerning a private citizen can be made public.
More and more
rules were made, making it more and more difficult to get information. Even when RTI queries were answered, usually
it took an inordinately long time to get the information. The attitude of the
Government was, first, to dissuade activists from asking inconvenient questions and to either refuse to divulge information
or to delay giving an answer as long as possible. Both the politicians and the
bureaucrats were equally unwilling to put any information in the public domain
especially if it was something sensitive concerning a big shot. This obdurate
attitude was a hangover of the colonial days and quite out of sync with the
spirit of democracy which demanded that the rulers hide nothing from the
people.
The Supreme
Court’s latest decision should be welcomed by all. If the functionaries in the
higher echelons of the judiciary and the governors are brought within the ambit
of the RTI Act, it will be difficult for the Government to avoid answering RTI
questions about the high and the mighty. Indirectly, it may dissuade those in
power not to fall into temptations that may cause embarrassment later.