Life for Right to Information (RTI) activists in twenty-first century India could well fit the description of seventeenth century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who in his magnum opus Leviathan, visualised life for people without a strong central authority, as being `nasty, brutish and short.’
In the case of RTI activists, however, the central authority, despite being omnipresent, is wholly absent.
These activists often operate in an environment, where they ask the most basic questions of hugely entrenched vested interests.
What's a day in the life of RTI activists? They expose corruption in cooperative societies and irregularities in cooperative banks; unearth land-grabbing and real estate scams involving the land mafia; oppose the construction-realtor mafia in towns and cities; take the lid off irregularities in granting building permissions by municipal corporations; uncover forgery of property records used for illicit gain; bring to light irregularities like diversion of food grains under the mid-day meal scheme meant for school children and unmask pilferage in housing assistance benefits meant for poor families to ineligible persons; track down illegal takeover of sugar and other factories by politicians; highlight illegitimate and ecologically hazardous sand mining; reveal irregularities in the staffing and management of educational institutions; protect the rights and entitlements of pavement hawkers and vendors; lay bare irregularities in the transfer of key officials in civic bodies; identify truant employees of civic bodies; expose corruption in the repair and maintenance of sewer works and expose graft in road repair and pavement construction works - among other systemic swindles.
RTI activists are really asking for it because they do not get the protection they need, for the kind of answers they seek. Often situated in small towns and district headquarters, they are at the mercy of the local mafia and the political party in power, minus the cover of an urban and vibrant civil society as well as the national media, however compromised it may appear.
Consider the following. Between 2008-2013, a period of six years, 36 RTI activists were killed in the country. Between 2014-2021, a time span of eight years, the total number of those killed was 54.
In the case of physical assaults, for seven years between 2007-2013, there are 95 registered cases nationwide, as opposed to 2014-2021, where physical assault cases dropped to 78.
When it comes to threats and harassment, there were 114 cases lodged between 2007-2013, a period of seven years. The number of cases has come down to 71 in eight years between 2014 and 2021.
Transparency advocate Venkatesh Nayak, also one of India’s best known RTI activists, points out that the attacks, threats, and intimidation are not so much the handiwork of the central government or its agencies, but state governments and their cohorts. "The statistics do not indicate more than what happened in which year because the attacked RTI users in all instances probed the working of local bodies, the taluka or the district administration or the state government. There are no instances of attacks being linked to RTI interventions made with the central government agencies. The attacks are essentially a state-government specific phenomenon,” he told this writer.
Other activists like Ravi Nair, executive director, South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre, say that the attempts to muzzle and dilute the RTI existed from Day One, even during the Manmohan Singh government. "The difference, however, between this regime and the last is that there were people in the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC), who were favourably inclined towards RTI. Under this dispensation, the attempt to undermine the RTI has reached a crescendo. There is simply no one to turn to,” he told this writer.
For activists, the Whistle-blowers Protection Act (WBPA), passed by the Parliament in February 2014, to help activists develop safeguards against victimisation, is proving to be virtually toothless. The Act was initiated after the 2003 murder of Satyendra Dubey, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) engineer who exposed corruption in the $10 billion Golden Quadrilateral Highway Construction project in Jharkhand.
Two years later, Shanmughan Manjunath, an Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) officer was murdered for sealing a petrol pump when he found it selling adulterated fuel. The Act provides a mechanism for inquiring against corruption, wilful misuse of power or discretion, or criminal offences by public servants.
Today after seven years, it has barely been enforced. Instead, an amendment Bill was introduced in the Parliament in 2015 that proposes to withdraw the immunity available to whistle-blowers under the Official Secrets Act (OSA), which provides punishment of imprisonment for 14 years.
The Bill also restrains the information highlighted by whistle-blowers in relation to sovereignty, integrity, security, or economic interests of the State from being further inquired.
Additionally, information which relates to commerce and trade secrets in fiduciary capacity, cannot form part of the Act unless such information has been procured under the RTI, which defeats the very purpose of the Act.
In a recently released book, Life and Death in the Time of RTI, journalists Vinita Deshmukh and Prasannakumar Keskar, probing the slaying of 13 right to information activists in Maharashtra, reached compelling conclusions.
"The first established fact from our study is that none of these 13 whistle-blowers who met with brutal deaths, had any personal agenda or motive. This belies the rumour-mongering set about by government babus, politicians and even police, to brand these RTI activists as blackmailers,” wrote Deshmukh.
In her estimation, the negligence in police investigation in all the 13 cases was deliberate. The common thread, she wrote, was the acquittal of the accused due to haphazard or concocted information on police record and in several cases inordinate delay in which court trials have yet to begin, despite several years having gone by after the crime.
Observed the two journalists in their report: "This is mainly due to the absence of any concerted effort from any quarter - either government or civil society or the State Information Commission or the National Human Rights Commission (which treated at least one of the victims as a human rights defender) to document the aftermath of these murders.”
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