The Wire: National: Tuesday, March 13, 2018.
Yet another
Right to Information (RTI) activist in Gujarat has paid with his life for
demanding transparency. On March 9, Nanjibhai Sondarva (35), a resident of
Manekvada village in Kotda Sangani taluka of Rajkot district, was allegedly
clubbed to death by six people.
The
deceased’s father has claimed that the attack occurred soon after Sondarvai
filed an RTI application demanding transparency about the funds spent on the
construction of a road in his village.
This was,
however, not the first time that Sondarva had been attacked. A year-and-a-half
ago, he and other members of his family were assaulted, allegedly by the
village sarpanch who apparently was furious at Sondarva for using the RTI to
expose financial irregularities in the developmental works undertaken in the
village.
Meghabhai,
Nanjibhai’s father, is said to have named the sarpanch in the complaint
submitted to the local police regarding the latest incident.
Costly to
seek information on ‘Gujarat model’ of development
With the
latest incident, the number of citizens and activists killed for using the RTI
to question the ‘Gujarat model’ has risen to 11. Since October 2005 when the
RTI Act became operational there have been reports of at least 16 cases of
assault in the media on other RTI activists in Gujarat.
Across the
country, the total number of those murdered allegedly for seeking information
under the RTI has now risen to 67. The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative has
been mapping these attacks across the country using details available in the
media.
The latest
attack occurred three months after a National Human Human Rights Commission
(NHRC) directive to the Gujarat government to protect RTI activists.
In October
2015, a day before the Central Information Commission (CIC) organised a
national convention to celebrate ten years of the RTI Act inaugurated by Prime
Minister Narendra Modi 30-year-old RTI activist Ratansinh Chaudhary was
murdered for exposing financial irregularities in the Banaskantha district of
the state.
Soon after
the RTI fraternity in Gujarat alerted me about this 2015 incident, I filed a
complaint with the NHRC in New Delhi. The organisation took cognisance of the
complaint and followed up on this case for two years.
In December
2017, while closing the case upon being satisfied that the police had acted in
accordance with the law by sending the murder case up for trial, the NHRC
directed the Gujarat government to provide security to Chaudhary’s family and
“ensure freedom of expression of RTI activists and HRDs (human rights
defenders) and give them necessary protection as per law”.
As the letter
was addressed only to the district superintendent of police, Banaskantha, I
alerted the NHRC’s focal point for HRDs about the urgent need for sending a
similar letter to the state government. The Banskantha DSP would have little
luck in ensuring security for RTI activists outside his jurisdiction.
The HRD focal
point, in turn, promised to look into this discrepancy in the final action of
the NHRC. Even as I wait for an action on my further request, another attack
has occurred in Gujarat.
Modi’s
call
While
inaugurating CIC Bhawan, the newly-constructed premises of the commission at
New Delhi, on March 6, the prime minister highlighted the efforts made by
various central government departments and agencies to bring more transparency
in the implementation of social development programmes across the country. He
underlined the importance of “informing people” in order to “empower them” and
ensure their participation in governance.
Towards the
end of his speech, he also talked about the need to pay attention to “‘Act
Rightly’ just like the RTI Act in our country”. He pointed out the need to link
“rights”, particularly “fundamental rights,” to “fundamental duties” mentioned
in Article 51A of the constitution.
While Article
51A is not enforceable in courts, the spirit of 11 clauses that list out a
range of duties, link in many ways to the endeavours of RTI users and activists
across the country. By demanding transparency and accountability, they are
upholding constitutional values, namely, the rule of law, social justice and
corruption-free governance and also safeguarding public property by monitoring
the use of public funds.
So when such
conscientious and well-meaning citizens are attacked for “acting rightly”, is
the state government “acting rightly” by not doing enough to safeguard them?
Did the Gujarat government need an 11th wake-up call after ten RTI users and
activists had already been murdered in the state?
While human
rights activists must question this linkage of rights with duties, this is not
the first time that such a connection has been made at the national level with
links to Gujarat. In 1947, when the UN was debating the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, Mahatma Gandhi said:
“I learned
from my illiterate mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved from
from duty well done. Thus the very right to live accrues to us only when we do
the duty of citizenship of the world. From this one fundamental statement, perhaps
it is easy enough to define the duties of Man and Woman and correlate every
right to some corresponding duty to be first performed. Every other right can
be shown to be a usurpation hardly worth fighting for.”
This
statement was reported on the front page of several English language dailies
published in December 1947.
B.R.
Ambedkar’s scathing criticism of the caste system in India which has survived
for more than two millennia by linking duties to social and ritual status to
the detriment of every person born in the “lowest” castes (published in his
celebrated but undelivered speech later published as Annihilation of Caste)
adequately demonstrates the dangers of making such connections.
In the 21st
century, who determines what is right? For a public official intent on hiding
his or her corrupt activities, RTI interventions of citizens to expose them may
not be an example of “acting rightly”. Even more dangerous is a majoritarian
government deciding what is “acting rightly”, inside or outside the parliament
or through a stony silence, by allowing hardliner groups that run amok to
determine and regulate citizen or group behaviour that is neither illegal nor
illegitimate.
Is attacking
people for eating beef or transporting cattle, attacking inter-faith weddings
in the name of ‘love jihad‘, preventing the freedom of expression by claims of
hurt to sectarian sentiments and setting a bounty on the heads of artistes and
cine actors, murdering members of political parties whose ideologies one
opposes, or vandalising statues, or disrupting parliamentary proceedings day
after day, “acting rightly”? The “act rightly” exhortation needs serious debate
across the country.
Venkatesh
Nayak is programme coordinator, Access to Information Programme, Commonwealth
Human Rights Initiative, New Delhi.
.JPG)
.JPG)
