A double-edged sword

FinancialExpress;Jeevan Deol ; Fri, 15 Oct 2010

In Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward discloses that America’s ambassador to Afghanistan believes that Hamid Karzai is a manic depressive who is “on and off his meds”. The episode will almost certainly affect US relations with a key ally in a strategically important country, and the book’s revelations about infighting and indecision within the Obama administration have already begun to affect its public image.

The damage caused by the book is clear and wide-ranging, yet the Obama administration was so keen to cooperate that it encouraged a broad range of decision-makers and aides to speak to Woodward. At one level, the administration seems to have hoped to avoid the fate of the Bush presidency, whose tighter reins on Woodward’s access meant that squabbles and accusations of incompetence between a small number of heavyweights dominate the public image of its war-planning. At another level, the curious decision to offer Woodward such comprehensive access was an acknowledgement that America’s national politics is now dominated by leaks, counter-spin and ‘media-messaging’ for political advantage. The idea of open government has become subordinate to electoral politics and media agendas.

Even open government in its more benign forms can be a double-edged sword. Tony Blair recently lamented the effects of the Freedom of Information legislation his government passed in 2000, claiming that it has been used mainly by journalists keen on scoring political points and has inhibited the free discussion of contentious issues within government. India’s information commissioners and RTI activist groups criticise the right to information introduced in 2005, suggesting that it has been used to solve personal issues instead of encouraging transparency in government, addressing systemic corruption or facilitating good governance.

It is true that RTI has had more than its fair share of teething troubles. Only one-third of people in cities and 13% in rural areas are even aware of the Act, and many of the urban poor are dependent on activists and NGOs to fill in applications for them. State information commissions are underfunded and unable to pursue departments that default on time-limits for responses, and RTI activists in different parts of the country have been harassed, attacked and even killed. Meanwhile, some among the sharper-elbowed aspiring middle classes have sought to turn the Act into a mechanism for improving their children’s exam grades.

Despite all this, RTI has changed India for the better. The legislation’s roots in state-level activism and laws highlights the continuing power of civil society, and it has made financial transparency a requirement for the country’s judiciary. Some among the poor have deployed the Act’s provisions to find redress for exclusions perpetrated by local bureaucrats, and the Act is slowly making it less time-consuming for government offices to serve people than to ignore them. The Act’s provision that state agencies must respond to a request within 48 hours if life or liberty is at stake has the potential to change the rules of the game for human rights in India. Gone are the days when the parents of boys ‘disappeared’ by police or security agencies had to send telegrams to state governors or the President in a desperate search for help.

RTI is slowly helping to encourage good governance. The best next step is to free up all the different types of data that the government has collected at the people’s expense statistics, studies and even maps and make them available to innovators, researchers and entrepreneurs free of cost. ‘Mash ups’ of government data have transformed local transport in San Francisco, fisheries in the North Sea and social research on England’s towns and cities. The same could happen in India better information on roads and rail services for commuters and travellers, more detailed information on districts and villages for businesses and researchers, more useful real-time data on flood risks for farmers and local officials. The State should even relax one of its most deeply-held taboos and make detailed topographical maps available to the public most security concerns have already been rendered obsolete by GoogleEarth and the maps’ presence in research institutions abroad, but the people of India have yet to be able to unlock the tremendous potential of the information in the maps.

An even bolder move would be to embed transparency about decision-making into a deeper reshaping of the State’s self-image. A new set of strategic, climatic and security threats is slowly but surely encouraging Western nation-states to turn themselves from market-based providers of social services to power-brokers that defend against and manage risk-based on dialogue with their citizens on the balance between liberty and protection. In Britain, this process is being led by the country’s intelligence services, which have not only begun to talk more openly about threats facing the country but have also commissioned a series of ‘warts and all’ official histories that reveal their past successes, misjudgements, mistakes and blindspots. Honesty on this scale about how the State deals with risks and protects it population would have been a better answer to the anger triggered by the Mumbai attacks than a simple inquiry.

Will the State change its attitude to information on a scale as grand as this? I doubt it. But at least with RTI we can understand why not.