The Fight Against RTI

Just when you think Manmohan Singh can’t drag the UPA any lower, he does. Like his recent suggestion to relook the Right to Information Act (RTI). One can see why he feels that way: after all, it was one of the RTI responses that brought to the fore Pranab Mukherjee’s allegation that Chidambaram was (also) responsible for the 2G scam. Another RTI reply cast doubts on the CAG’s assessment of the extent of losses in the 2G scam.

For a government that claims it likes and does things for the aam aadmi, it’s surprising that they want to focus their energies on muzzling RTI instead of providing protection to the aam aadmi who asks inconvenient questions.

Both politicians and bureaucrats claim that too much transparency hampers government functioning. Of course, it does. Never used to any kind of accountability, one can see how transparency can hamper corruption, incompetence and inefficiencies (or what they call “governance”). Manmohan Singh can be educated in the West and the guy who brought in liberalization, but at heart he belongs to the old school that doesn’t like open government, who believes he cannot be evaluated or questioned because he knows best.

As former chief election commissioner J.M. Lyngdoh, said, “Nobody can fully cleanse the system, but at least RTI is helping to do so in bits and pieces. It has put some fear in the system”. One can see why politicians wouldn’t be willing to tolerate any cleansing, even in bits and pieces.

Seeing the backlash against the “relook RTI” proposal, the Congress has backed out. Now let’s wait a day or two for the Congress sycophant to say that the idea to back out was Rahul baba’s or Sonia madam’s. Yeah, right: like the PM can say anything that wasn’t cleared by madam!

Comments

  1. KumarOctober 16, 2011 at 8:58 PM

    Yes, yes.

    I noticed that our Prime Minister's observation on RTI (Right to Information) is pathetic. He said that RTI makes honest bureaucratic not able to perform! What respect any honest bureaucrat will now have for the prime minister, who is standing up for dishonest bureaucrats instead of for them? Why should any bureaucrat, who is doing his job right, be intimidated by RTI act? Does the Prime Minister openly admit that in general our bureaucrats are doing plenty of fraud? If not, why should they be so much against transparency?

    It is understandable that matters which needs discretion, hence require guarding, are of a different category. When people ask for RTI, we can always determine if they want to pry into national secrets. I admit that wouldn't be healthy. But our politicians are not discussing that aspect actually. They just don't want transparency for socially unhealthy reasons - it is all personal and nothing straight-forwardly official!

    At this juncture, there can only be happiness about this:

    For the first time after our independence, so many politicians are facing trial and some are in jail during the legal proceeding. Even if some of them may escape from getting sentenced, many politicians must have realized that their assumption that "they are above the law" can be questioned by the people with some positive (negative for the politician) results. In the past, not one corrupt politician worried on this count. They always went scot-free.

    Our Prime Minister's foolish remark makes me think this: Let the politicians continue to have their right to nonsense! Let our people continue to have the right to Information.

    ReplyDelete

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