DNA:
Mumbai: Tuesday, 24 November 2015.
Peoples'
movements in India have sufficient experience to assess the political
significance of social legislations. They have a long history of demanding the
governments to recognise the new rights through legislations.
The
experience in India is that the governments many a times over-legislate to
suppress the political energies of the people. The moment the governments
legislate on any particular aspiration, the healthy democratic debate that
influenced it disappears. But the legislations have to go a long way before
they become a part of governing culture and address the social concerns without
forcing people to spend enormous energies. Until then, the social debate should
continue to engage with the process of implementation of rights.
It has been
ten years since the RTI Act came into existence. It is perceived today that
users of RTI are trying to hold power to account and it has empowered the
citizens. It is also seen that individuals have become users and activists.
No doubt it
is one of the progressive legislations that brought out to public some of the
most uncomfortable facts of the rulers. Yet, equating RTI with accountability
of authority and social hope are farfetched claims. Even those who fought for
RTI, after coming to power, are not willing to pro-actively divulge to people
even as much information as restricted by the law. This has to force us to
think about the nature of power and capacity of legislations in democratization
of authority. All those who hail the legislation, dismiss the flaws in its
implementation as lack of accountability culture among the public servants. But
the legal process which provided the law of chasing minions for information has
a serious political purpose.
Ten years
ago, if a group of people felt that there was a problem with the way decisions
were made, say for instance about ration cards, by officials, they would
collectively meet them, raise questions, argue, demand, stage a protest,
express anger and shout slogans. They would remind the officers of their public
accountability. This politically loaded activism in practice creates tension
among indifferent officers. These activities released tremendous political
energy from people as a collective. This constantly kept the idea of
participatory democracy alive. Even if the officers refrained from providing
information, the escape was not easy. A barrage of excuses and explanations had
to be provided before the officers could wriggle themselves out. This process
invariably upheld the political sense of people over the legality of the
bureaucracy.
But under the
RTI, today people have become users as if they were the consumers of the
services provided by the State. Also, today most radical activities begin and
end with applications filed under the Act by individuals. The practice of
social activists as a group going to corridors of power and demanding
accountability has come to a halt. Not that they were successful in getting
information. Now officers take their own sweet time to refuse the information.
You are forced to go for appeal after appeal until you turn blue in your face.
To face this situation, now virtual groups of RTI activists are were formed.
Thus the arena of battle has been shifted to protecting the RTI Act, itself.
While RTI
petitions proxy protested on our behalf, we have not realized what we have lost
to it. Laws, especially like RTI, effectively tamed the political energy of the
people and has reduced the social groups into individuals and activists into
petitioners. This is what legal process reduced the political energies of the
collectives into. The regimes told us how obediently we should seek information
within the exceptions and the restrictions imposed by them. The political worth
of the information for people lies not in what government wants to happily give
us but in what it refuses to give. While it has given us very little, the State
has taken away a lot by making us apolitical. This happens when we don't
realize the political meanings of laws and their procedures. If we trade-off
our collective political energies to laws like RTI, then that is the worst
damage that RTI Act has inflicted on the politics of mass movements.
On the other
hand, we need to understand the exact impact of RTI on the power structures.
The users of RTI, no doubt are able to bring out information in public that are
at best irritating to the authorities. Do we want to really believe that naming
and shaming of authorities has really created fear among the powerful and has
the potential to democratize them? These claims underestimate the way in which
power is organized, protected and perpetuated. The claims also presume that
naming and shaming is equivalent to holding the powerful accountable. On the
contrary, in the corridors of power, those who are exposed are considered as
heroes with the capacity to take strong decisions without accountability. The
Act as well as its implementation clearly excludes the information that exposes
the nature of power they exercise. The results of exercising the authority are
only provided as information but not the details of persons, processes and
criteria in arriving at decisions. The way power is exercised is sufficiently
protected from legal accountability. This is the primary reason why, despite so
many exposures, hardly any authority is held legally accountable. Holding them
to account with legal consequences is a huge and complicated process by itself.
This is the experience of all those who attempted to hold arbitrary decision
makers to legally accountable. There is no evidence to suggest that the RTI
activism has fundamentally altered the pattern in which power is exercised. Of
course, the powerful tend to become subtler in exercising their authority.
However, where vicarious liability is hardly accepted, making actual decision
makers accountable is much more difficult.
But going by
the increasing support for authoritarian figures and regimes in the popular
political culture, the craving for power without accountability seems to be the
natural instinct across the political spectrum. In fact, the enigma of
authority flows from mystery of decision making but not from its
accountability. It is not with sheer brutal force that the authority is
exercised. If there is so much of aversion to unaccountable authority in popular
imagination, how would most undemocratic leaders and nations emerge as
powerful? The powerful always think that accountable authority is no authority
at all and its predictability is considered as the prattle of the weak. This
understanding has a huge constituency in public culture. Does the RTI Act have
the potential to crack all these riddles of power? What happened to the
potential of constitutionally valid fundamental rights to transform the
hierarchical social fabric? One should have hopes about positive changes in
society but not the illusions.
(The
author teaches at Tata Institute of Social Sciences)
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