Firstpost:
Shimala: Saturday, 11 July 2015.
The Himachal
Pradesh High Court on 7 July 2015 gave a stay on the state information
commission's order mandating disclosure of details of Priyanka Gandhi Vadra's
(daughter of Congress president Sonia Gandhi) property acquisition in the
state. To be sure, it is only a stay but stays can be granted only if among
other things a prima facie case is made out. The court while granting the stay
has apparently been moved by the argument made by Priyanka that her life could
be in danger if the details were divulged.
While the fig
leaf of threat to life is laughable, the RTI applicant is equally at fault. He
should have hotfooted to the sub-registrar of properties' office of the
district, and made an inspection. Of course, strictly speaking he wasn't at
fault because he was only exercising his right under the RTI Act which in its
current form does not stop one from making an RTI query even if he could have
gotten the same information by doing some legwork.
An analogy
can be drawn between RTI Act and the regime of writ petitions. Courts have made
it clear that writ being an extraordinary legal step should be entertained only
if the applicant had exhausted his appellate remedies before being driven to
file a writ petition. To wit, if a manufacturer doesn't file an appeal under
the Central excise law but instead jumps the gun and moves the high court
against the perceived high-handedness of the excise officer, his writ petition
would be thrown out in limine with a direction to exhaust his statutory rights
given by the Central excise law.
Similarly,
there is no reason why the RTI Act, 2005 should allow untrammeled access to
information from the comfort of the home of the querist. The case considered by
the Himachal Pradesh High Court is a case in point -- while it is all right for
an inquisitive RTI activist to seek information on the nation's powerful woman
politician's daughter's property acquisitions, he ought not to be allowed to
throw the official RTI machinery pell-mell. Government departments are reeling
under the relentless onslaught of deluge of RTI queries. To be sure, it is not
a thankless job because the law itself is in public interest but at the same
time Parliament ought to consider the disruptive effect such queries has on the
functioning of government departments. If the same information is not in the
public domain, then RTI must be entertained but if a bone lazy person does not
access from public domain with some legwork, he should not be given a leg up.
That said it must be conceded that the sub-registrar's office is not conducive
to inspection what with papers piling up for months pending filing. In fact
important papers can get lost by design or by accident. In addition, the
functionaries there are not impervious to overtures and threats. Considering
these inefficiencies and dangers, one could plump for RTI but nevertheless the
government's attempt must be to render RTI query redundant by mandating
publication of all information relating to public servants and their relatives
on official websites.
A few months
ago, the Madras High Court held that the RTI querist has to state the reason
for making the application even though the RTI Act in terms prohibits the
information officer from asking for the reasons. In other words, his motives
may be ignoble, mischievous but the officer should not sit in judgment. The
Madras High Court's concern was busybodies would otherwise have a field day but
then if reasons are asked the applicant would be bogged down permanently in
legalese and hairsplitting. The information he is seeking would then never see
the light of the day. In any case an RTI is invariably followed up with a PIL
if the matter is weighty enough. If it appears to the court hearing the PIL
that the petition is frivolous and as aptly put by the apex court private
interest litigation, then he would be suitably punished in any case.
While the
Madras High Court was worried about frivolous queries and official machinery
getting clogged, its view ran counter to the very rationale of the law as the
officialdom knows how to stall work.
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