Autopsy of RTI in the Police Universe of the Indian Polity

Autopsy of RTI in the Police Universe of the Indian Polity

Posted on 25th September, 2024 (GMT 16:28 hrs)

AKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY ⤡

DEBAPRASAD BANDYOPADHYAY ⤡

ABSTRACT

The article critiques the weakening of the Right to Information (RTI) Act (2005) in the context of politico-economic policing in India involving the rapid censorship or suppression of democratic spaces for dissent by means such as the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. It highlights how crony oligarchical forces of exclusion often resist transparency, using legal loopholes or claiming exemptions under the guise of national security or privacy. Despite RTI’s intent to empower citizens and ensure accountable communicative competence, it is frequently undermined by bureaucratic hurdles, delaying tactics, and increased threats on RTI Activists. The piece underscores how this undermines democratic engagement and public trust in the various law enforcement institutions in India.

“Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries

Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.”

— T. S. Eliot, Choruses from the “The Rock”

My computer screen turned off and then turned on again on its own, only to show a few recurrent messages written in a programming font on the blue screen of death: “DATA FAILURE”. “INFORMATION APOCALYPSE”. “DATA MISSING”.

At that moment, I realized:

I wish(ed) to achieve wisdom… but I have failed.

I wish(ed) to achieve knowledge…but I have failed.

I wish(ed) to achieve information…the world of null and void, of insubstantial statistical quantities!

BISHU। The calendar never records the last day. After the first day comes the second, after the second the third. There’s no such thing as getting finished here. We’re always digging one yard, two yards, three yards. We go on raising gold nuggets, after one nugget another, then more and more and more. In Yaksha Town figures follow one another in rows and never arrive at any conclusion. That’s why we are not men to them, but only numbers .Phagu, what’s yours?

PHAGULAL। I’m No. 47 V.

BISHU। I’m 69 Ng.

− Rabindranath Tagore, Red Oleanders (1925) ⤡

In this way, my unstoppable will-to-know (jijñāsā) and my will-to-power (ijigīṣā) led me to an abysmal world of ignorance or ajñāna with an ever-amplifying “will-to-suffer”, though the welfare state promises to provide me with “information” from time and again. So the transparent sovereign in India, at the time of global data abundance1 or data-as-commodity (with accompanying junks, cache or trash, but who would decide the junk to be thrown into the bin?), through its legal channels of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, is supposed to uphold communicative accountability (or/and Communicative Competence as the condition for democratization; a la Habermas) and also the Whistle Blower Protection Act (2014) is applied to protect me, a non-partisan political animal, from the malpractices committed by any public servant in terms of an attestable “abuse of power”, or power itself as necessitating a realm of abuse. “Corruption” as a buzzword has become systemically ingrained—deviation from the supposed “norm”, i.e., corruption has become norm-alized.

Thus, the rāṣṭra, not only in its supposed role as the “informer” (not in the commonsensical semantic connotation), apparently or de jure is supposed to furnish me the opportunity for knowing any given states of affairs (given that the said information is recorded, deposited into a repository or archive and retrievable whenever necessary) in the pervasive information age. This stems from an incessant will-to-archive or will-to-record in the mystic writing pad of the sovereign. This will-to-record figuring as archi-fever (illness as a metaphor? Cf. Susan Sontag) is very distinctly displayed through the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act)-NRC (National Register of Citizens)-NPR (National Population Register)-DPDPA (Digital Personal Data Protection Act) in India ⤡ ⤡ ⤡, the attempts by which the panopticonist sovereign attempts to encapture, codify, appropriate and encapsulate the citizen-subjects’ docile bodies as mere measurable quantities under its disciplinary control or surveillance technology. It is but an anatomo-bio-political intervention (a la Foucault) on the corporeals at the highest level.

“Still, although they differed in every other particular, conceivable and inconceivable (especially inconceivable), they were pretty well united on the point that these unlucky infants were never to wonder.  Body number one, said they must take everything on trust.  Body number two, said they must take everything on political economy.  Body number three, wrote leaden little books for them, showing how the good grown-up baby invariably got to the Savings-bank, and the bad grown-up baby invariably got transported.  Body number four, under dreary pretences of being droll (when it was very melancholy indeed), made the shallowest pretences of concealing pitfalls of knowledge, into which it was the duty of these babies to be smuggled and inveigled.  But, all the bodies agreed that they were never to wonder.”

− Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1905) ⤡

It, however, appears through my existential reckoning that the ‘information’ or ‘data’ or ‘corpse of corpus’ in the carceral information society is a lofty one-sided game, and there is a marked lack of what is usually called “bi-way traffic”. Reciprocity is essentially missing whereby the citizen’s “personal” data remains with the sovereign gang of savage and cannibal cronies and could be yielded against the subjects, but the individual citizen himself/herself cannot access the data lying “with” the sovereign, despite having tools such as the RTI Act in their disposal. The Hindutvavādī crony sovereign is only the informer (is it?) without sharing vital information of its workings with the “other 99%”. The information lack and lag is a striking feature in this context. The sovereign-power entity itself is free from the onslaught of the DPDPA, whereby it is ‘free’ to apply it whenever it needs to frown upon a “chosen” subject as “Urban Naxal”, “member of Tukde Tukde Gang”, “Cultural Marxist”, “Woke”, “pen-wielding naxals” and so on.

But…I do reckon: I, a taxpayer, have the right to know, the right ‘to be informed’ and also to be protected as a “subject” as per the Constitutional Code. I have found the word “paripraśna” (counter-questioning) in the so-called “Hindu”’s sacred text, the Gītā:

tad viddhi praṇipātena paripraśnena sevayā

upadekṣyanti te jñānaṁ jñāninas tattva-darśinaḥ (4.34)⤡

However, what a paradox! When the Indian welfare state has become reduced to a theocratic, oligarchical machinery, the sovereign does not at all follow the pluralistic path of paripraśna and inevitably engages in the task of suppressing, excluding, “marking off” and shrinking the spaces for dissent, dialogue, doubt, inquiry or question. The extortionist mono-religious state, thus, contradicts itself by denying me information at the age of the proliferation of information explosions. As a novice RTI activist, I was given stock, cliché and stereotypical answers (monsters that sleep within every sign! Roland Barthes) by the compromised state of the “independent” executive-administrative-bureaucratic-judicial bodies at every step of trying to consolidate my right ‘to be informed’: to know and be known.

Following is the list of the RTIs filed by me till date with their respective URLs:

RTIs filed by Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA)VIEW HERE ⤡

Why is this the case? Why are the RTI authorities, be it the concerned CPIOs or the FAAs, continuously resorting to deliberate, diplomatic and unnecessary delays, refusals, avoidances, negligence, denial to take up accountability, bypassing the essential points raised by the RTI applicant by projecting opaque ambiguities in responses within the unfolding dyad of the informer-informed relationship dynamic? Why is the RTI lacking transparency so much? Why is it contradicting its own provisions? Are these “authorities” simultaneously suffering from data mania as well as data phobia? Is it the “slow demise” of the RTI, as part of the decease of democracy (or the emergence of democratic unfreedom; a la Marcuse!) within the contemporary Indian political economy?

RTI DECEASED: THE STATE OF DEMOCRATIC UNFREEDOM VIEW HERE ⤡

Stifling the Freedom of Expression: the Fourth and Fifth Pillars of Indian Demo(n)crazy VIEW HERE ⤡

My answer is: it is nothing more than jugupsā (will-to-hide or erit celare), which is but a defence mechanism of the Hindutvavādī state-apparatuses that arises out the guilt-consciousness(es) of having done misdeeds (or deeds against the public interest) in the face of challenges from the affected party, driven by the anxiety neurosis of the authoritarian personality, having the Damocles’ sword hanging and swinging verily above its neck. This said neurosis creates a striving for psychotic foreclosures. They want to conceal whilst playing their hide-and-seek games with their subjects to shield themselves from the so-called “atrocities” of the censored voices. The above instances of my RTIs show information denial, rigorous information repression, malingering (acting out), systematic dissociation and metaphoric displacement of information. India has often been accused of poor data quality by international agencies even during the p(l)andemic⤡ ⤡. As an erstwhile player in the royal palace of Statistics in India, i.e., as an insider, I know exactly that India is a state where data denial, data paucity, data opacity and data manipulation are widely seen in various sectors/spheres, though the same is not “reported” in the public domain at all times.

In the Cor (thief)-Police game as a remarkable instance of such shifting hide n’ seek appearances of veiling and unveiling, the police have a singular mission as investigators, riddle-solvers or rather informers—to find out, chase down and capture the thieves (those who have hidden themselves in various spaces of a complex, almost hieroglyphic architecture), marking them “defeated” once caught, preceded by a teasing by the thieves from their hiding places saying in a tone or articulated signaling: “The Police cannot catch me”, thereby denoting an interplay of presence in absence, and an absence in presence. The chase is full of inquisitive excitement as thieves dart around by changing their places from time to time within the field of the game, trying to escape the clutches of their pursuers. The police constantly strive to make the absence a deciphered presence. But here is where the real magic happens: once the thieves are all captured and the police emerge victorious, the roles reverse. Suddenly, those who were in command—the police—now find themselves on the run, swiftly slipping into the role of thieves. And the ones who were once sneaking through shadows, the thieves, don the badge of authority as the new police. This back-and-forth continues, creating a rhythm where the thrill of chasing and being chased, of stalking and being stalked, is constantly refreshed. Each player experiences the rush of both sides—first the apparent pursuit of “justice” or “law and order” (?), and then the exhilarating escape from it scot-free. It is a continuing cycle of polymorphous power-relations and reversals, where the lines between hunter and hunted blur, making every round a new adventure of explorative revealing as well as hiding. The game does not end with one side’s triumph; instead, it thrives on the endless exchange or “transfer” of roles, where the thieves become the police, and the police, the thieves, again and again…infinite vicious circle of role-reversal. The police-universe has overpowered the non-thieves and vice versa.

In the context of the present Indian scenario, I have found one self-proclaimed “chowkidaar” (guard or gatekeeper), under whose “rule” thieves can simply fly away by stealing astronomical figures of money of the people⤡; rapists-molesters can escape their punishment and can be garlanded or treated with sweet delicacies⤡ ⤡; two chosen superrich business tycoons with their family-members can “get their way” with anything and everything⤡ ⤡ and so on. The infinite vicious circle of endless ‘hide n’ seek’ games is somewhat halted in the regime of this chowkidaar. It is a peculiar world of Orwellian dystopia (This very term was used by Justice Srikrishna, one who drafted the bill for “Data Protection/Privacy” in India⤡). The thieves run around the globe scot-free, but the police or gatekeeper refrains from taking any “disciplinary actions” about the same. Chowkidaar Chor Hai?!

As I have seen, there have been numerous violent incidents involving activists who use India’s Right to Information (RTI) Act⤡ to expose corruption, mismanagement, human rights violations and illegal practices. These attacks include murders, threats, and simply heckling or harassment, targeting individuals fighting for transparency and democratic accountability to smoothen the flow of information amidst the domains of the “governing” and the “governed”. Despite legal protections, activists often face severe risks (no wonder we all inhabit the “risk society”!) from such powerful entities of the state-corporate dyad, thus highlighting systemic failures in protecting these activists in a cherished space for free exchanges in the realm of redundant delays in supplying information as thousands and lakhs of RTI applications constantly pile up in the information commissions.

Vulnerable RTI warriors likely to face more threats as govt proposes new rules VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 4th May, 2017 ©Hindustan Times)

The very definition of “information” as such has become jeopardized and undermined, whereby the said term is being defined to protect the ruling group’s interests. I have received repeated responses by RTI authorities stating that the Section 2(f) of the RTI Act2 delineates information in specific terms, and allegedly my queries do not fall under the purview of the same. However, who defines information, and how exactly, since my questions put forth through the aforementioned RTI applications are not at all in contravention with 2(f)? I was even invited by the Hon’ble Supreme Court’s RTI Cell to attain a web conference on the basis of two of my two RTIs merged together (Cf. Serial No. 6 in the above list), but my humble, evidence-based pleas for hastening the multiple legal cases related to the DHFL scam at the apex court were bluntly refused and dismissed.

A few examples of RTI activists succumbing to the onslaughts of the threat culture from the past decades are given as follows:

• Amit Jethwa (2010) – Murdered for exposing illegal mining operations in Gujarat that were linked to a powerful politician.
• Shehla Masood (2011) – Shot dead in Bhopal while advocating against corruption.
• Narendra Kumar Upadhyay (2013) – Murdered for filing Right to Information (RTI) requests related to police corruption.
• Bhupendra Vira (2016) – Shot dead in Mumbai over a land encroachment dispute; he had utilized RTI applications to obtain orders against illegal constructions, leading to the arrest of the responsible builder.
• Rajesh Savaliya (2017) – Killed in Gujarat after filing complaints against unlicensed schools, which resulted in threats from a consortium of school owners. He was found critically injured and later succumbed to head injuries.
• Vipin Agarwal (2021) – A human rights defender from Bihar, Agarwal was shot dead after exposing land grabbing by politically connected mafias. His murder had a devastating impact on his family, leading to the suicide of his 14-year-old son due to the lack of action from authorities.
• Pankaj Kumar (2020) – Killed in Bihar after his RTI applications revealed the involvement of officials in the illegal allocation of land.

SOURCE: VIEW HERE ⤡

Furthermore, it was reported that nine individuals in Gujarat were blacklisted in August 2022 for allegedly “harassing” government officials through “excessive” and “unwarranted” Right to Information (RTI) queries. The Gujarat Information Commission (GIC) took this action after reviewing cases where the individuals were deemed to have “misused” the RTI Act, with one case involving a suspended bus conductor who filed nearly 150 applications. Officials reported that these queries were “not in line” with the RTI’s intended purpose and were instead used to exert pressure on public authorities.

Nine blacklisted for ‘harassing’ officials through RTI queries in Gujarat; NGO says ‘lifetime ban’ illegal VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 9th August, 2022 ©The Hindu)

It is curious how the actual harasser becomes the harassed (or likewise, the victim becomes the culprit!⤡) when citizens rightfully demand accountable and transparent practices from the responsible authorities! This is an outright attack on the liberty of thought and expression, i.e., on free speech itself as defended so well in the Indian Constitution!

The unchecked attacks on RTI activists reveal India’s democracy’s decline VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 9th Jan, 2022 ©People’s Review)

The current crony-monopoly capitalist regime in India has been accused in this regard for hastening the decline of India’s Right to Information (RTI) Act in other manners as well. The DPAP, as remarked earlier, is feared to further limit the RTI’s effectiveness by broadening exemptions for personal information, weakening transparency and the rise of domination along with the blurring of the public-private divide.

As Marcuse stated:

“In this society, the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian to the extent to which it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes, but also individual needs and aspirations. It thus obliterates the Opposition between the private and public existence, between individual and social needs.” (Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 1964/1986, pp. xv-vi; emphasis added)

Activists and human rights defenders (HRDs) belonging to the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) worry that this kind of data conditioning will severely undermine the foundational answerability and public participation in the decision-making processes (a la Chomsky), with critics like Nikhil Dey calling for more public consultation in this connection. The present central government has faced allegations of progressively weakening the RTI Act, particularly through the crucial amendments made in 2019 by the BJP government that reduce the relative autonomy of information commissioners by giving the central government excessive powers and thereby hinder public access to key information. The present ruling party of India is trying out every means (e.g., “One Nation, One Election”) to obliterate the federal, pluralistic essence of Indian polity.

Modi Government Acts to Hasten the ‘Slow Death’ of India’s Right to Information Act VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 2nd August, 2023 ©The Diplomat)

Seventeen years on, RTI Act is bogged down by vacancies, sluggish pace and a mounting backlog VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 17th October, 2022 ©Scroll)

Just as the RBI does not “know” the expenditure of their own appointed Committee of Creditors for the DHFL (Cf. Serial No. 11 in the list of RTIs above), in the same way, the executive public servant does not know the Constitution as well as the model codes of conduct, and violates the rudimentary provisions from time to time without facing any judicial trial or impeachment for the same⤡ ⤡ ⤡. The self-proclaimed Hindutvavadins are also entirely ignorant about their own scriptural texts and philosophical traditions.

I must reiterate Īśopaniṣad (Mantra 15) in this regard to unveil (The Heideggerian Gestell or ordered, enframed revealing) the unknown and unknowable truths:

hiraṇmayena pātreṇa

satyasyāpihitaṁ mukham

tat tvaṁ pūṣann apāvṛṇu

satya-dharmāya dṛṣṭaye

“The entrance to the True is covered by a shining disk, that (disk) do thou, O Pūṣan (O Public Servants!), remove, for me who is devoted to the True, that I may see Thee.”

And yet, all of us inevitably falter:

The Answers My Friend, are Blowin’ In The Wind…⤡

We are deeply enraged, dissatisfied, disheartened and disturbed to see the totalitarian conditions in India…

ENDNOTES

1. Chomsky called it the ‘Orwell’s problem’: how people can know so little even when the evidence is before their senses ↩︎
2. “Information” means any material in any form, including Records, Documents, Memos, e-mails, Opinions, Advices, Press releases, Circulars, Orders, Logbooks, Contracts, Reports, Papers, Samples, Models, Data material held in any electronic form and information relating to any private body which can be accessed by a Public
   Authority under any other law for the time being in force. ↩︎