NDTV: Mumbai: Friday, September 15, 2017.
In a house
tucked away in a teeming, low-income Mumbai neighborhood, Bhupendra Vira began
a relentless campaign. The 62-year-old man wanted his steelworks factory back.
Vira's family
claims that his landlord forcefully seized the factory. The landlord owned
Vira's home but had no claim to the factory, Vira said in a police complaint
from 2010. Vira had been paying rent for his home regularly and noted in the complaint
that he was a law-abiding citizen.
Vira believed
local authorities were helping the landlord legitimize claims to properties in
the area, his son-in-law Sudhir Gala said. So, to prove that the property was
his, he started collecting a mountain of papers under his bed and in his
wardrobe - documents obtained through India's freedom of information
legislation.
Vira soon
uncovered evidence suggesting that his landlord controlled several unlicensed
properties. Authorities took note of his investigation and started tearing down
the illegal structures.
Vira always
knew his work was dangerous. That's why he made multiple appeals to his local
police station asking for protection. That's why he made copies of copies, all
neatly filed.
Then one
evening in October, while he was watching television, someone came into his
home and shot him in the head.
"There
was blood everywhere, and a hole inside his head," said Ranjan Vira,
Bhupendra's wife, who found him. "I used my scarf to cover his wound. My
nightgown was soaked with his blood."
An officer
investigating the case said police think Vira was killed because of the
complaints he made to authorities based on his freedom of information requests,
known in India as the right to information. The officer declined to give his
name because the case is pending and he is not authorized to speak to the
media.
In India,
where corruption is rampant and injustices are many, ordinary citizens have
turned into investigators. Indians make approximately 4 million to 6 million
requests every year, said Anjali Bhardwaj of the National Campaign for People's
Right to Information.
But many of
those who file right-to-information requests know the risks involved. The
Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative lists at least 60 people who were brutally
killed after they filed requests since the act was introduced in 2005. At least
300 others have been harassed or physically hurt. Activists say the figure is
likely to be a conservative estimate, compiled from news stories, as
authorities do not separately record deaths linked to right to information.
"This is
uniquely a South Asian phenomenon," said Venkatesh Nayak, coordinator of
the Access to Information Program at the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative,
speaking about the killings. "It started in India in 2007-2008 and now we
are hearing of cases of assault and intimidation from Bangladesh as well."
India is one
of 70 countries with a freedom-of-information law. According to a recent report
by Transparency International, India is also the most corrupt country in Asia,
with 69 percent of respondents saying they had accessed public services by
paying a bribe.
The existence
of corruption here is widely known, and a subculture of anti-corruption
warriors tries to prove it. These right-to-information activists have taught
themselves how to read complex legal documents and navigate India's labyrinthine
bureaucracy. They comb through government documents searching for hints of
falsification or malpractice. Many of them start using the act to redress a
personal grievance against the government.
"It's
very critical to understand the nature of corruption in our country,"
Bhardwaj said. "It's unlike Western countries, where you have corruption
at the highest level but things work at the lowest level. In India, you have
corruption at every single level."
More than
half of all requests for information come from people living in extreme
poverty, according to a report by the Right to Information Assessment and
Advocacy Group from 2014 in which a random sample of applicants were surveyed.
"There
is a very strong people's demand for the right-to-information law,"
Bhardwaj said. "It is used and owned by the common and ordinary citizens
of the country."
Since the
legislation was introduced in 2005, Bhardwaj said, successive governments have
tried to weaken it. Recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata
Party-led government, which claims to have "not even one taint or
blot" of corruption, proposed rules to end appeals to the Information
Commission if an applicant dies. If implemented, campaigners say, the rule
could prompt more killings like Vira's. (Applicants appeal to the Information
Commission if government offices reject their request.)
Information
activists nationwide who take on corrupt officials and mafias have been gunned
down or beaten, and some have even been jailed or threatened by police.
Yet the
requests keep coming. In one neighborhood in southern Delhi, a group started
making requests to find out where their undelivered food rations were going. In
another region, stricken by drought, residents discovered their local
government representative was spending money building fountains instead of
ensuring a clean drinking water supply.
"What
people are able to connect with is the link between that information and
getting your rations," Bhardwaj said. "So getting information became
a matter of being able to use your other rights."
Vira, in his
quest to recover his steelworks factory, became known as a crusader against
corruption. Soon, people from surrounding neighborhoods sought his help in
filling out request forms to resolve their own grievances.
The
steelworks factory had once belonged to Vira's father, but he and his sons had
begun using the space for storage for their new businesses making photocopies
and selling stationery. According to a complaint Vira filed to local police in
2010, his landlord, Abbas Razzak Khan, and his son broke the padlock on the
factory door and seized items worth about $4,700.
"I
talked to Mr. Abbas Razzak Khan regarding same, but he threatened to break
hands and legs of myself and my sons. And then Abbas Razzak Khan left, putting
his own lock on the shop," Vira's statement reads.
Vira believed
Khan had paid off local authorities to allow him to take over properties in the
area. To prove it, he started filing right-to-information requests. The
requests rattled officials, said Gala, Vira's son-in-law. According to another
complaint filed to police in 2016, Vira describes being threatened by a
municipal officer.
Police said
they later found a gun and bullets in the home of Amjad Khan, the landlord's
son. Police arrested and charged the pair. Abbas Razzak Khan was later released
on bail. The trial against the pair has yet to start, and a verdict could take
years in India's slow-moving legal system. Both father and son will plead not
guilty, said Amin Solkar, a lawyer who represented the elder Khan in the bail
trial.
As she awaits
justice, Ranjan Vira is starting to confront the prospect of living her later
years without her husband, whom she married 40 years ago when she was 18.
Now, she has
two battles to fight: reclaiming her husband's factory and seeking justice for
his killing. "We know we're right, so we're willing to risk
everything," she said. But minutes later, her resolve crumbles.
"Sometimes
I feel I'm ready to go, too," she said. The money she earns barely covers
her daily costs. "Why go through all this, just to put two rotis in your
stomach at the end of the day?
"For the
past week, I haven't been working," she added. "I've become alone. I
feel like running away."
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