CIC orders release of minority report

After targeting the judiciary over assets disclosure, the Right to Information (RTI) Act may singe the executive, too. The Central Information Commission (CIC) has asked the government to make the Ranganath Misra commission report available to anyone who wants it, though it has not been laid before Parliament.

The commission studied quotas for linguistic and religious minorities, and its suggestions may upset caste and communal equations. The CIC has ruled the government can’t claim immunity from disclosing the report when it is available to others.

“If the government does not place any material or report before Parliament or legislature, it cannot claim exemption from giving it to citizens exercising their fundamental right to information,’’ the CIC, comprising chief commissioner MM Ansari and commissioners Satyananda Mishra and Shailesh Gandhi, said.  

The CIC’s order has created jitters in the government and it is planning to challenge it before the high court. The ruling came on an application filed by one Franklin Caesar Thomas who sought a copy of the controversial report of the National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities headed by Misra, a former chief justice of India. The report was submitted to the government in 2007, but the UPA government has been sitting on it because of its divisive political potential.

The report is said to favour a move towards job reservations based on educational and social status, instead of religion and caste. It says, inter alia, that “the ultimate goal should be the evolution of a uniform pattern of criteria for identifying the backward, which should be based only on the educational and economic status of people and not on their caste or religion, and its application equally to all sections of citizens, irrespective of their caste or religion’’.

Currently, Dalits of OBCs who are categorised as Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs or Jains get the benefit of reservations, but not those who converted to Christianity or Islam. The issue has not only aroused religious passions, but also split the scheduled caste/scheduled tribe community since it would mean making reservations available to a larger number of backward categories within the same quota limit.

Little wonder, the government vehemently opposed Caesar’s plea on the plea that since the report had not been disclosed to parliament, it continued to be a privileged one.
The CIC rejected this plea on the ground that it was already available to others. Many websites seem to have copies of the report. “If the report has been made available to others, it can also not be denied to the appellant’’. This means that if a report is with the government, it can’t be denied to any citizen who wants its copy.

The exemption under section 8(1)(c) of the Right to Information Act applies only in cases where parliament or a state legislature has expressly forbidden the disclosure of such a report. In this case, none of these conditions hold true.

The Misra panel’s recommendations do not favour discrimination in fixing criteria for identifying backward classes. The criteria now applied for this purpose to the majority community - whatever those criteria may be - must be unreservedly applied to all the minorities, it says.

It also wants all those classes, sections and groups among the minorities to be treated as backward whose counterparts in the majority community are regarded as backward under the present scheme of things.

All such classes, sections and groups among the various minorities who are generally regarded as ‘inferior’ within the societal system should be treated as `backward’.

The Misra panel also recommends that all those social and vocational groups among the minorities who, but for their religious identity, would have been covered by the present net of SC/ST should be unquestionably treated as socially backward, irrespective of religion.