Calcutta Telegraph: New
Delhi: Sunday, June 09, 2013.
Right to
Information activists have accused political parties of making a mountain out
of a molehill in their opposition to the Central Information Commission order
bringing six parties under the RTI Act’s ambit.
They say the
act has enough provisions to block queries on sensitive subjects such as
campaign strategy or political discussions at meetings.
“We moved the
plea (before the CIC) to bring political parties under the RTI Act mainly
because we wanted financial transparency from them,” said RTI activist Anil
Bairwal.
Co-petitioner
Subhash Agarwal said: “Any apprehension about being forced to disclose
strategic deliberations is baseless since there seems to be no practice of
recording discussions at inner-party meetings.”
Under the RTI
Act, an applicant can only seek information that has been recorded in some
form, and cannot ask “why” questions beyond what the documents themselves
explain. (See chart)
Agarwal said
his main intention was to seek file notings relating to meetings on drafting
poll manifestos “which often involve gimmicks”. He said parties maintain
records of these meetings so they can draft the manifesto later.
On Monday,
the CIC held that the Congress, BJP, CPM, CPI, NCP and the BSP are “public
authorities” and gave them six weeks to set up a machinery to answer RTI
queries.
The order is
being seen mainly as a way to get the parties to open up their books. But the
parties, which cannot afford to be seen as opposing financial transparency,
have couched their criticism in other arguments.
Apart from
raising questions of jurisdiction and ambiguity, they have claimed the ruling
would “harm democratic institutions”, hobble political parties’ functioning and
leave them open to moves at destabilisation.
“The act has
enough safeguards. It does not give blanket power to the citizenry to secure
any type of information,” Agarwal said.
For instance,
Section 8(1) of the act has 10 sub-clauses spelling out exemptions from
disclosure. Section 7(9) empowers public authorities to deny voluminous
information if doing so would “divert resources of (the) public authorities
disproportionately”, that is, use up too much manpower.
This is a
plea many parties used in 2010 when the Association for Democratic Reforms took
a chance and filed an RTI plea asking 20 political parties to reveal the
donations they had received and the names of the major donors.
Bairwal
explained what he hoped to gain from the CIC order. “When a political party now
declares a wealth of Rs 400 crore to the income-tax department or the Election
Commission, it doesn’t have to provide a break-up (apart from disclosing
donations above Rs 20,000 to the poll panel),” he said.
“If they show
that only 10 per cent of the money came through these donations, they do not
now have to reveal the sources of their remaining income. We want to use RTI
queries to get them to reveal the other sources.”
However, RTI
activist Afroz Alam Sahil was sceptical. “The political parties would have
welcomed the CIC order if they knew the history of RTI pleas in India. Queries
get routinely denied and complaints to the CIC take years to come to the
hearing stage,” Sahil said.
“Like
government departments, political parties too will use one or the other
provision to withhold information. Tell me, which political party keeps
documentary evidence of funds or meetings?”
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