Right To Know: Holy Cows

- Dasu Krishnamoorty

A war with Pakistan may or may not come but the mere prospect of war can provide the state a pretext to curb civil liberties, including the right of expression and the right to know. Even when there was no war, the right to information bill remained a bill and not an Act. The Vajpayee administration introduced the bill in Indian parliament more than a year ago raising three questions: whose right to know; know from whom; and know what? Two features of the bill indirectly answer the second question. First, the excessive accent on access to information in the possession of public bodies and second, the total silence on the transparency of private sector institutions. The first aberration can be attributed to the myth that the state alone is guilty of withholding information and that there are no other agencies holding back information.

Every article appearing in the English press necessarily hugs this popular notion. It also suits the media eminently to highlight state tendency to be secretive in order to divert the attention of the public from non-governmental cupboards in society. Look at how one 'liberal intellectual' after another exclusively points the finger at the state. Kuldip Nayyar, doyen of Indian journalism, says, "In a democracy, where faith stirs the people's response, the government cannot afford to have an iota of doubt raised about what it says or does. It has to be transparent."

Amal Dutta, a former member of parliament, says, "The denial of information by the executive to the legislature and to the people is not a new phenomenon. While the denial did not affect the common man seriously earlier, with the increase in the functioning of the government, such denial makes impossible for him to understand whether he is getting a fair deal." Contrarily, the state is voluntarily surrendering its space to the private sector.

Indian judiciary too bears the cross of this 'liberal' tradition. It has always been reluctant to touch the press and even acted populist by singling out the government as a body that has a stake in keeping information under wraps. In a public interest litigation involving environmental pollution, the Rajasthan high court observed: "Every citizen has a right to know how the state is functioning and why it is withholding information." In the case of S.P. Gupta vs the Union of India, Supreme Court judge P.N.Bhagavati said:

"This is a new democratic culture of an open society towards which every liberal democracy is moving. And our country should be no exception. Therefore, the disclosure of information regarding the functioning of the government must be the rule, and secrecy an exception, justified only where the strictest requirement of public interest demands." The implication of these dissertations is that the government is the sole centre of power and public activity and therefore has a natural compulsion to deny information, which may affect its power status. Indeed, the more 'intellectual' you are, the more you condemn the state and spare the media.

Pointing out this partiality, Manoj Mitta (The New Indian Express, Hyderabad, 24 August 2000) writes: "It (the bill) imposes an obligation alright on a 'public authority' to provide information to any citizen. But the public authority is purely defined as a state-created or as state-funded body. The proposed legislation is entirely government-centric as though the state machinery were still the only repository of all the information that affects the people at large."

It is clear that the bill confers a right on the citizen to seek information from only government agencies. The bill does not apply to the private sector, which owns all print media and a majority of TV channels and nearly all Internet media. These media naturally shy away from exposing corporate misdemeanour. Economic reform, a euphemism for withdrawal of the state, undertaken under pressure from Bank-Fund twins, has triggered mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures with the multinational corporations, loosening state control and watch over consequent flight of capital and profits.

No citizen enjoys the right to know what role these corporations have played and are still playing in increasing economic disparities in the country and the media, owned as they are by these companies, cannot be relied upon to let the people know. With liberalisation, divestment and deregulation, more of what the industry, and less of what the state does and does not is crucial to the lives of the people. True, the Official Secrets Act must go and a new right to information act must come.

More important is that the right to information should empower the common man to demand information not only from public bodies but also from private sector institutions - about themselves and their operations, details of their ownership, their interests and their international connections. This empowerment will help the public to know who own the media and why. It is naïve to think that private companies are responsible only to their shareholders. Every private sector unit, which manufactures or distributes or franchises goods and services, is accountable to its consumers.

There is a serious flaw in the logic that regards the government as the sole enemy of transparency and not as one among many. This exclusivity is not found anywhere in the UN declaration of freedom of information (1946) and the universal declaration of human rights (1948). Both of them state that "everyone has a right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." There is no mention of state or public authority in either of the two documents. The implication is that every citizen can seek information that affects his life or interests from not only state agencies but also from whatever source that happens to store such information. Anti-statism is a basic tenet of free market theology and its natural fallout is the fiction that the state alone has a compulsion in suppressing information. The media controlled by giant companies and corporations have withheld more information than any state ever has through sheer silence - not publishing what they know, thus denying the public the right to know.

This is not to deny that the state is secretive nor to assert that its cupboards are transparent and freely accessible. The state as the dominant centre of power, has so far been the major fountain of information and has an interest in keeping it under wraps, generally for political reasons. This tendency of the state is too well-known to need reiteration. It is the other centres of power, representing private economy, which too need to be brought under the proposed information glasnost. The economy-controlled media point out at the state to deftly deflect public attention from themselves. The ongoing debate about corporate governance is in reality a debate about corporate crime. There is a plethora of laws under which companies are accountable to the state. But their accountability to the public, who constitute their market and who are the cornerstone of their survival, is woefully meagre. The consumer courts demonstrate this truth eloquently.

Two major flaws have always marked the debate about the right to know. One is the overemphasis on state activity and the other is the subtle suggestion that since the media are an information conduit between the state and the public, the latter can continue to delegate authority to the media to exercise the right to know on their behalf. The need to include the private sector also in the bill acquires urgency in the wake of increasing divestment of public activity in favour of the private sector. In fact, it is a deliberate, and unfortunately successful, attempt to abridge the public realm for the benefit of the corporate sector. Here is how this works against public interest. There is a lot of public information, which is now available free of cost and which is neither copyrighted nor classified nor covered by the official secrets act. The repeal of this act, which brooks no delay, is bound to make more information available as a matter of right. Also, the automatic declassification of information after the expiry of the 20-year embargo will add to the information, which hitherto was available to the public free or at a nominal price. But private sector publishing houses, with their great resources, are bound to corner all this information and put a price on it.

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