Tapped into it

What many consider Independent India’s most progressive legislation — the Right to Information Act — is in serious danger of being crippled. First bureaucrats tried to defang it by seeking to keep their file notings outside the purview of the Act.

Then several other agencies, like the Armed Forces, wanted an exception to be made in their case. Last week, the Central Information Commission (CIC) ruled that the nation’s machinery of justice — judicial proceedings of courts and tribunals, which are of central concern to every citizen — will not come under the RTI radar.

And now, the state information commissioner (SIC), in a landmark judgment, has ruled that the state has the right to tap the phones of any individual without consent and that ordinary citizens cannot use the RTI to ascertain whether this is being done and, if so, the reasons for it.

The SIC has ruled that such information is ‘classified’ and cannot be divulged under the RTI. The case concerned a private individual who suspected that his two mobile phones were being tapped. When he approached the public information officer, his application was turned down, and the SIC upheld the denial citing a Supreme Court judgment of 1991, which held that the state had the right to intercept messages of private citizens in the interests of ‘security, sovereignty and public order’.

Clearly, the SIC has chosen to take the conservative route on this issue, upholding the government’s contention that no details about such tapping should be released. Yet, this was an opportunity to stretch the RTI. Phone tapping by itself is not objectionable, if it is done in the course of law and order or intelligence investigations.

There are strict norms laid down for phone tapping: orders for it can be issued only by bureaucrats of a certain rank and only for six months at a time, and so on. Yet, the scope for misuse does exist, not only in substance, but also in procedure.

How is the victim of such tapping to know that his phones are being tapped in accordance with the said norms, and not, say, out of malice? And what if — and this is not an outlandish idea — such tapping is being done without following the regulatory procedure?

The RTI is a piece of legislation that can and has helped to make Indian democracy more vibrant, by empowering the common man and handing him a weapon through which he can demand accountability from government bodies.

Persistent attempts by various arms of the government to dilute the RTI have not succeeded enough to reduce the importance and efficacy of the Act. But a more liberal approach would give citizens confidence that the Act can help improve governance further.