The right to information or RTI has completed 20 years and has changed the nature of our polity fundamentally. Yet this extraordinary piece of legislation is finding it difficult to negotiate the current political conditions, which denies its basic assumptions.
The RTI is built upon a few basic assumptions. First that the modern state apparatus is a derivative of the rational model of Hegelian ideals and Weberian structure. Therefore power flows from information and by monopolizing information the state monopolizes power.
Secondly that democracy aims at empowering the people and lastly that mass propagation of information is technologically feasible. Based on these assumptions, the parliament passed the RTI Act, which came into force in October 2005.
It was the first in the sequence of right based legislations that marked the UPA era and changed the way people looked at democracy and the system.
Suddenly the state no longer looked that formidable and people could engage with it. While it could also be said to be a part of the global total quality control and citizens charter movement, its philosophy was idealistic.
It gave rise to a unique community of activists, who aimed not on reclaiming authority from the state, rather to control the state from without. This diminished the aura and halo around the state and its positions, and emboldened the people to question it.
However it then became the unbecoming of the government, which was undone by a group of RTI activists, who orchestrated the Anna movement in 2011 and delegitimized it. Ever since, it has been a downhill ride for the Act. The current regime, which rode on the Anna movement to power, had totally different assumptions about the state and democracy.
It didn’t believe in the modernist rationalist idea of state, rather it believed in a traditional faith based system of state and democracy was not about empowering people, rather it was about empowering the state with the euphemism of’nation’.
It also believed that technology was not about propagating information but, about accumulating information even private in nature. With these changed assumptions, the RTI lost its spirit. The information commissions were left unmanned for prolonged periods.
The bureaucracy was encouraged to take an adversarial role and delay the process and lastly to take it to litigation, which killed the transfer of power totally.
Gradually the enthusiasm around it has waned and the community of professional activists have been derided as andolanjeevis, and expelled from the system. For the RTI to reclaim its position, the public needs to reassert a modern, rationalistic, secular and democratic discourse.
