COUNTERVIEW:
Ahmedabad: Tuesday, 22 December 2015.
Gujarat’s
chief information commissioner Balwant Singh, in a ruling, which is unlikely to
be taken kindly by RTI activists, has said that senior IAS official Sanjay
Prasad’s two-year-old report on the death of three Dalit youths in police
firing of September 2012, may be public, as it relates to a “human rights
violation”, but under certain condition.
The release
of the report, says Singh, should be done after examining if the report or its
portions are under the Right to Information (RTI) Act’s exemption category
Section 8(1).
Putting the
job of examining this on Gujarat government officials, Singh says, they should
find out if any of its portions in the report fall under the “exemption”
categories of Section 8(1)(a), 8(1)(c), 8(1)(g) and 8(1)(i).
He
underlines, the commission under him “is imposing this condition because the
commission has not has not seen the report, which is supposed to be under
submission and pending for government’s decision.”
Section
8(1)(a) exempts disclosure which would “prejudicially affect the sovereignty
and integrity of India”; section 8(1)(c) exempts disclosure, if it leads to
“breach of privilege of Parliament or State Legislature”; Section 8(1)(g)
exempts disclosure if it endangers “the life or physical safety of any person”;
and Section 8(1)(i) exempts disclosure about “cabinet papers, including records
of deliberations of the Council of Ministers, Secretaries and other officers.”
As the
commission “is not in a position to decide whether any provisions of the
Section 8(1) of the RTI Act will be attracted in this matter”, Singh says, it
is the job of the First Appellate Authority, who is Additional Secretary, Law
and Order, Home Department, Gujarat government, to do the job.
“He should
examine whether any of the above provisions of Section 8(1) will be attracted
in this matter. He should also examine whether the report can be disclosed
after severing any part of it which contains exempt information under Section
8(1)(a) or 8(1)(g) of the said Act”, he says.
“Before doing
this”, Singh says, “The Appellate Authority has to make sure that the
provisions of Section 8(1)(c) or 8(1)(i) are not attracted in this matter.” At
the same time, it allowed the applicant, Kirit Rathod, a Dalit rights activist
who had sought to make public the report through an RTI plea, 45-days time to
put forward his position.
Singh imposes
these conditions despite the fact that he believes the “special branches of the
home Department may be handling a range of issues, but not all of which can be
said to affect ‘intelligence and security’ aspects of the state.”
He clarifies,
“The inquiry report of Sanjay Prasad may have some effect on law and order
issues in certain areas, but it cannot be said to adversely affect the
‘intelligence and security’ matters of the state.”
The death of
three Dalit youths sparked statewide protest against the police action,
following which the Gujarat government was forced to ask the then social
justice and empowerment secretary Sanjay Prasad to examine into the incident.
Ever since Prasad submitted his report, Rathod had been seeking to look into
its details, but in vain.
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