Dear netas, amending RTI is not how you build confidence

That the UPA expects to get away with a mega self-goal in the form of amending the Right to Information Act to exclude political parties is a sad commentary on India’s electoral politics. The more than one lakh people from across India who have in the past weeks petitioned Prime Minister Manmohan Singh against amending the Act count for next to nothing. The one lakh petitions which have demanded that any attempt to undermine the law that has enabled Indians to monitor and access government services be halted immediately. [caption id=“attachment_1089703” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Have netas forgotten what happened during Anna’s Lokpal protest? PTI image[/caption] The number of Indians using the sunshine law has risen dramatically, from 2,87,187 requests recorded in 2007-08 to at least 10,85,997 requests received by government bodies across India by the end of 2012. The data is based on RTI returns filed to the CIC by various government bodies – with several agencies not sending in this report, the real numbers of those using the law could be much higher. And yet the UPA – and the Opposition parties, almost all united in this case – has insisted on attempting to push through the crippling amendment, sending a message to those ten lakh people. You don’t count for much, you are mostly confused urban voters, computer-literate and email-savvy. Maybe some of you don’t even vote. The proposed amendment to the RTI Act is a knee-jerk reaction to the Chief Information Commissioner’s order of June this year bringing six national political parties into the ambit of the sunshine law. There were attempts to muzzle the act earlier too, in 2006 and in 2009. The difference this time around is the determination of all major political parties barring a few to see the amendments passed. What information can you access if political parties are brought within the ambit of what the RTI law considers a “public authority”? Plenty. Where their funds came from, who funded them, who are their biggest donors, minutes of their meetings, their internal elections and candidate selection processes, internal correspondence and more. Anybody who has used the RTI law understands the power of knowing how democratic these parties are, how clean their accounts, how bloody their campaign finance and how deep their commitment to equal rights. Transparency and probity in political parties must not be negotiable, but that’s hardly an argument you can have with the UPA, its constituents or the big Opposition parties. Still, you can’t help wonder if nothing has been learnt from the unprecedented public demonstrations seeking the enactment of a Lokpal Bill. The biggest takeaway from those months of public, pan Indian churn was not just that India wants a solution to corruption – it was that India considers political parties vile. If the police, the bureaucracy and the corporate world are viewed as corrupt, the affairs of politicians and political parties are considered doubly sordid. That was not the CIC’s view. The order on political parties passed in June in fact called them the lifeblood of the polity and building blocks of our constitutional democracy. Opening them to public scrutiny will naturally improve the average Indian’s faith in public institutions and make democratic processes healthier. The political gains from this are somewhat distant, but clear nonetheless. That’s why, amid a deepset governance crisis, the political establishment would do well to welcome the CIC order. Unfortunately, that will not happen.