Livemint: New Delhi: Friday, July 27, 2018.
The
government and opposition in India are on a collision path, each ratcheting up
the political rhetoric ahead of the general election due by May. Over these
nine months, if parties follow precedent, the public discourse will be largely
political. The battle was kicked off last week on 20 June in an appropriately
stormy debate in Parliament over a motion for no-confidence introduced by the
Telugu Desam Party and backed by most of the opposition.
One of the
central points in the debate though never mentioned in those terms was the
people’s right to information. When the opposition Congress party president
Rahul Gandhi challenged the government to disclose the terms of a
multi-billion-dollar deal for the purchase of 36 French Rafale fighter aircraft
for the Indian Air Force, defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman intervened to
claim that a secrecy clause was introduced into the original agreement by the
previous Congress-led government in 2008.
Gandhi’s
central position was that French president Emmanuel Macron had told him there
was no secrecy clause in the agreement, which was signed in 2016 by the current
National Democratic Alliance government. Setting aside legitimate concerns over
disclosure of the specifications of the Rafale aircraft, Gandhi emphasised the
cost of the deal, which he claimed had “magically” escalated.
The French
intervened a day later saying the terms of the 2008 deal prohibited France and
India from disclosing classified information “that could impact security and
operational capabilities of the defence equipment”. The debate now is on
whether disclosure of the cost component could have such an impact.
Defence is,
of course, a sector that is mostly wrapped tightly in secrecy but in India, the
financial terms of costly defence deals tend to become explosive political
issues. Rahul Gandhi’s father Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure as Congress prime minister
came to an end after the opposition combined forces to challenge him over
allegations of bribery surrounding a deal to buy Swedish Bofors field guns for
the Indian Army.
With both the
opposition and government MPs serving privilege motions in Parliament accusing
each other of misleading the House, the Rafale deal could become a major
political issue in the 2019 general election. It has obvious connotations for
transparency and development. Yet, defence deals are not the only issues of
secrecy in India. Far more insidious and ubiquitous is the secrecy that petty
government officials seek to invoke to appropriate state resources and deny the
poor their rightful share of these resources.
Take for
instance the matter of subsidized food, the so-called rations that are crucial
for the millions of poor in India. According to the World Bank’s country brief
for Fall 2017, 268 million Indians, or 21.2% of the population, were living on
$1.90 per day (equivalent of Rs.25 by purchasing power parity) in 2011 (the
last reported period). There were nearly 763 million people (60.4%) living on
incomes of $3.20 per day (Rs.42.70 by PPP). More than 1.09 billion Indians were
living on incomes of $5.50 (Rs.74 by PPP) that’s 87% of the Indian population.
For years,
many of the poor who are meant to benefit from food subsidies have been turned
back by cheating and lying shopkeepers who squirrel away subsidized foodgrains
and sell them at market rates. One of the few weapons they have on their side
is the right to information, constitutionally guaranteed in the form of a law since
2005 as a result of years of struggle by activists. The usual excuse offered by
shopkeepers would be that they were not receiving government supplies only to
be caught out when consumers demanded a copy of the monthly stock register from
the government by invoking their right to information.
Today, with
over six million applications filed every year, the Indian RTI Act is said to
be the most extensively used transparency legislation one that has empowered
citizens to access not only food, but old age pension, water, sanitation,
healthcare and education, say campaigners.
However, the
government said last week it is planning to make changes to the law in the form
of a bill to be introduced in the current session of parliament, apparently
without any discussion with the public and without making the text of the bill
public, which campaigners say will weaken people’s fundamental right to
information.
Two days
before the no-confidence motion debate, where secrecy was such a huge subject,
the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government announced it is considering a
proposal to amend the Right to Information Act, 2005, to frame rules on
salaries and services of Chief Information Commissioner and Information
Commissioners, the Press Trust of India reported.
The next day,
on the eve of the no-confidence debate, Rahul Gandhi attacked the government
over the proposed changes.
“Every Indian
deserves to know the truth and the BJP wants to hide the truth. The BJP
believes the truth must be hidden from the people and they must not question
people in power. The changes proposed to the RTI will make it a useless Act,”
Gandhi said on Twitter. He added that the changes being suggested “must be
opposed by every Indian”.
The proposed
amendments, which PTI said had been circulated among members of Parliament,
seek to do away with the parity given to information commissions with the
Election Commission in terms of salary, allowances and conditions of service.
With supreme
irony, when officials of the National Campaign for People’s Right to
Information (NCPRI), a Delhi-based non-profit, sought details of the proposed
legislative changes by filing an RTI application, the government replied
through its director, department of personnel and training, that the matter is
still under consideration and the “information requested by you cannot be
supplied at this stage”.
NCPRI says
the bill seeks to empower the central government and state governments to
decide salaries of information commissioners. The RTI Act currently pegs the
salaries, allowances and other terms of services of the chief of all
information commissions and the information commissioners of the central
information commission at the level of a Supreme Court judge. Those of the
state information commissioners are pegged at the level of chief secretary of
the state.
“The status
conferred on commissioners under the Act is to empower them to carry out their
functions autonomously and require even the highest offices to comply with the
provisions of the law,” NCPRI officials, including Anjali Bhardwaj, Amrita
Johri and Aruna Roy, said in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, arguing
against any dilution to the law.
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