Hindustan Times: New Delhi: Thursday, August 03, 2017.
Chief
Information Commissioner RK Mathur has constituted a larger bench to hear
complaints against six national political parties not adhering to the CIC order
bringing them within the ambit of the RTI Act.
The bench
will replace a three-member panel headed by Sridhar Acharyulu which was hearing
the matter since July 22, 2016 until one of its members Bimal Julka decided to
recuse himself citing workload. After his recusal, Mathur had put the matter in
abeyance till further notice.
Surprisingly,
no member of the previous three-member bench headed by Acharyulu, which had
heard the matter for nearly five months, has found a place on the new panel.
Earlier,
Acharyulu was taken off cases pertaining to the Ministry of Human Resource
Development after he had ordered disclosure of academic records of the BA
course of Delhi University of 1978, the year when Prime Minister Narendra Modi
is understood to have passed the examination.
Besides
Mathur himself, the new Bench will have Information Commissioners Sharat
Sabharwal, Manjula Prasher and Divya Prakash Sinha.
The new Bench
will start hearing the matter from August 16, a notice issued by the commission
said.
The bench has
issued notices to the then heads of political parties Rajnath Singh of BJP,
Congress president Sonia Gandhi, BSP’s Mayawati, Sharad Pawar of NCP, Sudhakar
Reddy of CPI and CPI-M’s Prakash Karat.
The six
parties were brought under the ambit of the RTI Act by a full bench of the
commission on 3 June, 2013. These leaders headed their respective parties when
this was done and some of them like Sonia Gandhi, Sharad Pawar and Reddy still
helm their political organisations.
These notices
have been issued on the complaint filed by activist RK Jain who had also
approached the Delhi High Court after he did not get any response to his RTI
applications seeking to know the details of budget, constitution, elections in
these political parties.
In 2014, the
Delhi High Court had directed the CIC to complete the hearing in the matter
within six months.
The bench has
also clubbed cases of Subhash Agrawal, Biharilal Thawait, Pawan Kumar Pahwa,
Vikash Kotwal, Vinod Kumar Mishra, P C Sharma, Malkiat Singh Bajwa, Mujeeb
Ullah, Deepak Sethi, Rameshwar Sharma, Anil Kumar Sinha, Sant Ram, Aseem
Takyar, Sanjay Sharma among others.
The CIC’s
June 2013 order was neither challenged in a high court nor changed but the
political parties have refused to entertain the RTI applications sent them.
Jain used
section 18 of the RTI Act which allows a petitioner to file a case against a
public authority if his application is not responded to within 30 days or if
the public authority has not put in place mandatory infrastructure to handle
the applications.
Under this
mechanism, the commission can slap a penalty, not exceeding Rs 25,000, on the
public authority.