DNA: Mumbai: Sunday, June 24, 2018.
In a
country where collectives, issues and principles get their due, the small
granite slab in the market square at Beawar, Rajasthan, installed in 2016, was
for the longest time the only tribute to the Right to Information Act (RTI) of
its kind. Is The RTI Story (TRS)... going to change that?
The RTI Story
(TRS) only adds to the 60-80 lakh voices raised in tribute every year! Often
English-speaking, middle-class voices are the only ones amplified. Many who
struggle patiently, persistently and imaginatively are forgotten. These are
stories that live in a fast diminishing oral history, which, for the most part,
provided colour and inspiration for action and reflection. This book is an
attempt to collate such untold stories.
As unique
as the book and the RTI movement which inspired it have been the launches. Tell
us more.
I was always
asked, "Why don't you do something more creative?" I've tried to tell
people that creativity is not boxed into "art" alone. A
dharna/protest is creative, and has to be able to sustain energies and
communicate with multiple expressions, with seriousness and fun. The first
launch in Beawar was "Guru Dakshina," a tribute to the people in the
villages around Beawar and Bhim, and those in the town of Beawar, who lived the
dharna through for 40 days with us in 1996. The launch was a tribute to the
people of the city who watched , made tentative gestures and finally became a
part of the RTI struggle. Our editor said that she'd never been to such a book
launch before. "I've seen book launches with cocktails. But this beats
them all a launch with a dharna."
The launches
have created space to return to the history of the movement, to celebrate it,
and think of the "achche din" that were, and to discuss and reflect
on the current political climate, the challenges and the path ahead.
Do you see
TRS... primarily as course content for social work/ public administration
schools or as a template for other national movements to take a cue from?
TRS... could
be both or neither. The RTI movement is one movement in the rainbow of various
different people's movements fighting for social justice and equality. But some
people see it as a manual, because of the causality recorded, explained and
shared.
Was the
use of the third person deliberate in the way you chose to write the book?
The third
person is intended to make the narrator like the Indian sutradhar or the Greek
chorus, a narrator and no more; to focus on story tellers and the movement's
narrative. It was a device, politically and in form, to give
"correctness" to the perspective to the history of the RTI movement -
to highlight its collective and collaborative nature.
How long
have you been working on the book? Does its release in the current
socio-political climate make it more significant?
Work on the
book in this form has gone on for about three years. It became more and more
imperative to write the narrative. We are oral historians. Oral history had a
moral context. In contemporary India, narratives are manufactured with an eye
on power and electoral processes. The current political climate created the
need to write. To challenge the dominant narrative of sectarian politics and
centralised power. For instance in 2016, the history of the RTI Act, including
its emergence from the MKSS and the village of Devdungri, was erased and
removed from the textbooks in Rajasthan.
This book
presents peoples' history, in the living memory of many, which can't be erased
so easily, and which bears testimony to decentralisation in creating policy,
legislation and finally in a dialectic between implementation and law making.
It is a statement with source and context of the contribution of people; in
particular the rural people of Rajasthan and their interaction with many
others, to make one of its greatest laws. Centralised and unaccountable power
requires the creation of a dominant narrative in an attempt to control a people
and a nation. This book will hopefully be a small assertion of the opposite;
that contribution of peoples' struggles make decentralisation a creative
reality, and has depths of theory and policy built into it.
The RTI
movement led by you has had a very long and difficult journey. What were the
biggest challenges in putting the book together?
A huge
collection of old records and dusty files and gathering together the history of
the MKSS and the RTI struggle involved dozens of people. The biggest challenge
was condensing and transforming this wealth of information into a simple and
readable story that anyone could read.
Can you
give us a sense of how activism in rural Rajasthan centered around minimum
wages and land distribution paved the way for the RTI movement?
In the
pre-sanghathan days in Devdungri, one of the early protests was at Dadi Rapat,
over minimum wages for the villagers in a season of drought. People wanted work
in public works and were traditionally denied fair payment. Workers who chose
honesty were penalised. Lack of transparency led to questions, and the right to
seek records and proof. It grew into rallies and hunger strikes in Bhim a small
town. Strategies to get public space to voice the demand for justice,
culminated in a new tool which was the jan sunwai or people's hearings . In
these hearings, records obtained from government officials, were read out to
prople. The records revealed massive corruption in the works programmes and the
Right to Information movement began to gain momentum after the first public
hearing in Kukarkheda, 1994.
The movement
for a national Right to Information and for the Right to Work (enshrined in the
Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act) have always walked hand in hand,
as the initial demands for the RTI were embedded in the demand for work, wages
and livelihood.
The RTI
movement brought together many streams of thought. Was it difficult at times to
bring inherent contradictions/differences together on the same platform?
Any movement
contains multitudes of thought, philosophies, voices and people. The MKSS
solved this with locating the RTI within the Constitution and those who
cherished the promises we made to ourselves in its Preamble. Those who didn't
support those basic values got pushed out. Others learned to work with
dissent/differences, within the non-negotiable. Today there are still
multitudes who own, use and shape the RTI and our understanding of it; giving
it new meaning and depth every day.
While some
say RTI equally empowers and liberates bureaucrats from the stranglehold of
those in power, others see bureaucrats stonewalling attempts to access
information. Your view.
There are
different sides to this as you say. For many bureaucrats, RTI has become an
important way in which they themselves can legally and safely share information
with citizens and remain accountable to people they're bound to serve. There
are those still afraid though they are protected and in fact required to by the
law. And there are still others who see information as power, privilege and
control. RTI is a both personal and political tool. It retains individual
interpretations within the larger common good.
Many fear
the attempts afoot to water down the RTI...
Each
government, including the very government that passed the RTI Act has feared
it, and tried to amend/water down its provisions within six months. The RTI is
one of our only laws that directly, efficiently and simply decentralises power,
to place it in the hands of citizens themselves.
Some
criticism has come the way of RTI over its abuse in political and corporate
rivalries. How do we ensure that this doesn't happen?
Every year
40-60 lakh RTI applications are filed across the country. It is one of the most
widely used information laws in the world. Criticism of misuse for corporate
and political rivalries is a red herring. Two national studies carried out in
2008 and 2014 by Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS) and RaaG gave statistical proof
that less than 1% of the RTI applications analysed could be termed frivolous or
vexatious. The study analysed orders of the Supreme Court and of various High
Courts and information commissions. It also stated that the PMO acknowledged,
twice, in response to RTI applications, that it had no actual evidence of
misuse.
The
current sociopolitical climate has shut the voluntary sector out of all dialogue.
How does this affect public discourse?
The current
regime practices obfuscation and misinformation. It loves power over citizens
and can't allow something like an independent, dissenting civil society to
function. Public discourse has become overrun by the ideology of those in power
who can't bear to hear any voices other than their own.
If I ask
you to pick one success story close to your heart of how RTI has touched lives
which will it be?
The poor
person forcing the privileged to cower in front of the typical Indian
personified by RK Laxman's Common Man in a generic sense. There are so many
that a selection will betray the spirit of the book!