RTI Under Siege: The Deadly Costs of Transparency in BJP-Run India

Posted on 25th October, 2025 (GMT 11:35 hrs)

ABSTRACT

The Right to Information Act (RTI), once hailed as a revolutionary tool empowering citizens to hold power accountable, now stands at a critical crossroads. Two decades after its enactment, the law that once illuminated corruption, exposed scams, and strengthened democracy has been systematically hollowed out through political interference, bureaucratic evasion, and legislative dilution. From the 2019 amendments weakening Information Commissions to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act’s Section 443 shielding the government under the guise of privacy, transparency has been recast as a threat. India today suffers from data opacity, manipulation, and denial—where evidence is replaced by erasure and secrecy becomes governance. Institutions once devoted to public integrity—the NSSO, CAG, and Indian Statistical Institute—face interference, delayed data releases, and censorship of inconvenient truths. Activists who dared to ask questions have been attacked or killed, while citizens encounter silence and obstruction. The RTI’s decline mirrors a deeper democratic crisis: the transformation of a people’s right to know into the state’s right to conceal. Yet amid suppression, citizens continue to resist—filing mass RTIs, exposing institutional failures, and demanding reform. The fight to save RTI is no longer just about access to information; it is a struggle to reclaim the soul of Indian democracy itself.

Today, we’re diving into a story that is both inspiring and worrying… a story about one of the most powerful tools of Indian democracy—the Right to Information Act, or RTI.

Enacted in 2005, the RTI was meant to do something radical: give ordinary citizens the power to ask questions, to hold authorities accountable, and to demand transparency. It promised to make democracy more than just words on paper… it promised to make it alive.

But today… twenty years later… the RTI is facing a crisis. And this is not a small problem. This is structural, systemic. So let’s unpack it.

Imagine a law that allows you—any citizen—to ask a public official for information… and forces them to answer. That was the RTI.

It has exposed corruption, mismanagement, and failures across the board—from local municipalities to massive financial scams. Take the fight against secret political funding. Activists used RTI to uncover the hidden flow of money in elections, which eventually led the Supreme Court in 2024 to declare the Electoral Bond Scheme unconstitutional. This was a landmark victory… and it happened because citizens demanded transparency, relentlessly.

Over the years, RTI has revealed inflated project costs in the Commonwealth Games scam, irregularities in the PDS system, misuse of MPLADS funds, illegal gifting of public land, fast-tracked environmental clearances for corporations, and misappropriated disaster relief funds. RTI empowered people to see behind the curtain… and for a while, it worked.

But the story doesn’t end there. In recent years… the RTI has been under siege.

Legislative changes in 2019 affected the salaries, tenure, and independence of Information Commissioners, giving more control to the government and weakening their autonomy. Institutional paralysis is now rampant: as of mid-2025, over 400,000 RTI cases are pending across India, and some Commissions remain non-functional for months. Imagine trying to get information… and the very institution you depend on is… not there.

Bureaucratic hurdles add another layer. Requests are delayed, dismissed, or answered evasively. Some are labeled “hypothetical” or blocked under vague claims of national security. This creates an illusion of transparency… while power remains shielded.

And then there is the chilling reality faced by those who dare to ask. India has become one of the most dangerous countries in the world for transparency activists. According to data compiled by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, over 50 RTI activists have been murdered since the Act came into force, and hundreds more have faced violent attacks, threats, or harassment for simply seeking truth.

From Satish Shetty, who exposed land scams in Maharashtra, to Niyamat Ansari, who revealed MGNREGA corruption in Jharkhand, to Amit Jethwa, who fought illegal mining near Gir forest—each was silenced brutally. Their deaths were targeted killings, not random acts of violence. In most cases, justice has either been delayed or remains unfulfilled.

Specific examples include Sanjay Dubey (Mumbai, 2019), Vinayak Shirsath (Pune, 2019), Bhola Sah (Bihar, 2018), and Rajendra Prasad Singh (Bihar, 2018), all murdered after filing RTIs exposing corruption, illegal constructions, or financial irregularities. Families continue to fight lonely battles while the state remains indifferent. The message is clear: transparency has a cost, and those who insist on it may pay with their lives. When asking for information becomes dangerous… people stop asking.

In critical domains like police accountability, corporate–government deals, and major financial scandals, the Right to Information has effectively died. On paper, RTI still exists; in practice, it has been buried under layers of silence.

Behind this decay lies not bureaucratic neglect but political intent — a will to hide. The BJP-led regime has systematically hollowed out the foundations of democratic transparency, converting the RTI’s promise into a hollow shell. What we are witnessing is not the failure of a law, but the triumph of secrecy as state policy.

India today suffers from data opacity, data paucity, data manipulation, and data denial. Information has become a controlled substance — rationed, filtered, and weaponized. Even institutions once devoted to public knowledge and integrity — the Indian Statistical Institute, the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), and the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) — have been undermined through interference, delayed releases, and suppression of inconvenient data.

Unemployment figures, COVID-19 mortality data, environmental clearances, corporate debt restructuring — all are now curated to serve political convenience. This is no longer governance by evidence; it is governance by erasure.

The BJP’s tightening control over India’s information architecture — from the dilution of RTI to the weaponization of privacy laws like the Digital Personal Data Protection Act — signals a deeper democratic crisis. The right to know is being systematically replaced by the right to silence. The regime’s tightening grip over information architecture — from weakening RTI provisions to enacting the Digital Personal Data Protection Act — has transformed privacy into a weapon to silence citizens. Section 443 of the new law dismantles the RTI’s core principle of disclosure in public interest, shielding the government from scrutiny under the pretext of protecting data. The right to know — a pillar of democracy — is being replaced by the right to silence. In response, over 120 opposition MPs, civil society groups, and citizens have united to demand repeal of this section, warning that democracy is being dismantled one law at a time. When the citizen loses the power to question, the state gains the power to erase. The struggle for transparency today is not merely legal — it is existential, a fight to reclaim the soul of democracy itself.

What remains today is therefore an architecture of concealment — a regime where data itself becomes a tool of domination, and darkness is mistaken for order.

This opacity extends to the corporate sphere. Massive public–private deals, including defense contracts, infrastructure PPPs, and financial resolutions, are increasingly shielded under “commercial confidence.” The BJP’s proximity to conglomerates like Adani, Ambani, and Piramal has made RTI virtually toothless in probing corporate–state collusion. Under the guise of “Ease of Doing Business,” a culture of secrecy has replaced the constitutional ethic of open disclosure.

Even the judiciary, once a defender of openness, has grown opaque. Case data is often hidden behind malfunctioning portals; cause lists vanish; judgments are delayed without explanation. In the name of privacy and “data protection,” transparency has been quietly sacrificed. RTIs to the Supreme Court registry are now redirected to official websites that reveal nothing specific—symbolizing the slow death of judicial accountability.

Citizens have not given up, but the struggle for transparency is fraught with obstacles. Mass RTI filings, coordinated campaigns, and strategic litigation have been attempted to hold power to account. Take, for instance, the DHFL financial scandal: activists and victims, including those associated with OBMA, filed numerous RTI applications seeking clarity and documents. Yet, instead of disclosure, they faced systematic bureaucratic stonewalling—a tragic “tragedy of transfers,” where each RTI was passed from one department, ministry, committee, or regulatory body to another, with no substantive information ever released. In this context, silence became the loudest statement: maunam sammati lakshanam—the bureaucratic refusal to respond spoke more than any official word. This evasion illustrates how the machinery of information denial can render democratic tools like the RTI Act impotent, even when citizens act with rigor and persistence.

It must be mentioned that most of the RTI responses to DHFL-related queries are now often copy-paste replies, evasive, or outright denials citing Section 2(f)—claiming the information is beyond the scope of the Act. Yet Section 2(f) explicitly includes material available in electronic form, such as media reports and digital records. Activists are asking questions well within that definition, but authorities hide behind procedural excuses. This is not just bureaucratic laziness—it is a deliberate hollowing out of transparency.

When DHFL activists like us requested the Reserve Bank of India to provide data regarding the RBI-appointed Committee of Creditors for DHFL, the RBI responded that they neither had the information nor any responsibility to maintain it. But under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, it was the RBI that referred DHFL to the resolution process. How can a statutory authority disclaim responsibility for records it directly triggered?

We also sought details about the Committee of Creditors’ expenditures, meeting minutes, and voting records, only to receive the same evasive response. The claim that they “don’t have their own data” is deeply concerning. If the regulator itself cannot produce or safeguard records of a process it initiated and oversees, how can citizens, stakeholders, or even courts rely on the integrity of that process?

This raises serious questions about accountability, transparency, and the very legality of such a stance by a central regulatory body.

Digital opacity extends beyond RTI. Under the “Digital India” narrative, e-governance was supposed to bring information closer to citizens. Instead, it has created new layers of inaccessibility: RTI portals that don’t function, unreadable document scans, and dashboards that display numbers without context. The promise of transparency through technology has turned into opacity through design.

Meanwhile, institutions meant to safeguard statistical truth have been silenced. Surveys from the National Statistical Office and NITI Aayog—on unemployment, consumption, and poverty—have been withheld or altered post-publication. Climate and environmental data, from air pollution levels to forest diversion records, are now often classified or hidden behind paywalls, crippling scientific and civic accountability alike.

Internationally, India’s democratic backslide has not gone unnoticed. Freedom House now ranks India as “Partly Free.” The V-Dem Institute calls it an “Electoral Autocracy.” Transparency International records a steep fall in India’s Corruption Perception Index. These are not just numbers—they reflect a nation where secrecy has become policy, and where the people’s right to know has been redefined as a privilege.

The death of RTI is part of a broader assault on dissent — a systematic campaign to silence those who question power. Under the BJP-led regime, censorship has taken new, institutionalized forms: legal intimidation, digital suppression, and the weaponization of defamation. When citizens and activists use RTI or public protest to expose state–corporate collusion, they increasingly face SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) and threats. DHFL victims, for instance, who questioned irregularities in the company’s resolution and protested the handover to the BJP’s crony ally Ajay Piramal, were hit with defamation and contempt cases — clear attempts to muzzle survivors and critics through legal harassment.

Similar tactics were used in the Adani–Paranjoy Guha Thakurta case, where multiple defamation suits and takedown notices sought to erase reporting that exposed corporate–government entanglements. The trend has since intensified: the 2025 ban on books by Arundhati Roy and other critical authors in Jammu & Kashmir, the arrest of environmental activist Sonam Wangchuk in Ladakh after he called for statehood and transparency, and the blocking of independent media outlets such as Vikatan for political satire — all signal an expanding state apparatus of censorship.

Journalists, RTI activists, and civil society groups now face a web of punitive responses — from defamation suits and digital takedowns to sedition charges and institutional blacklisting — all justified in the name of “national interest” or “data protection.” This merging of political power, corporate influence, and legal coercion has created a pervasive chilling effect across India’s democratic landscape. What began as the silencing of transparency has evolved into a culture of fear — where asking questions is punished, and silence is rewarded.

And yet, citizens turning into whistleblowing activists do persist. Even “meta-RTIs”—requests about RTIs themselves—have exposed how many Commissions are unstaffed, how files disappear, and how appeals languish for years. The people have turned the system back on itself, revealing its fractures.

What needs to happen? Strengthen institutions. Information Commissions must be fully independent, staffed, and functional. Vacancies must be filled immediately, and backlogs cleared.

Legislative reform. Laws that weaken RTI or allow selective secrecy must be reviewed. The independence of Commissioners must be restored. Privacy laws should not override the public’s right to know.

Citizen engagement. The RTI only works when citizens use it strategically. Awareness campaigns, organized filings, and persistent scrutiny are essential. Some states like Kerala and Rajasthan have shown that proactive approaches—publishing records online, digitizing public services, empowering citizens—still keep RTI alive. Decline is not inevitable. It is political.

The RTI Act is more than a law. It is a tool for accountability. It is the voice of the people insisting… that power is answerable… that democracy is alive… that transparency is not optional.

But this voice can only survive if we nurture it. If we file RTIs… if we mobilize… if we demand answers relentlessly.

The RTI may be under threat… but it is far from dead. Its survival—and the survival of democratic accountability—depends on us… every single citizen who dares to ask: what is happening in my name?

Because democracy is not just a system… it is a practice. And RTI is one of the most powerful ways we practice it.
When truth is hidden by design, democracy does not die in a coup… it dies in silence.

SOURCES:

The RTI’s shift to a ‘right to deny information’ VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 13th September, 2025 ©The Hindu)