Commentary/Dilip D'Souza

The Right To Know: They Know Why They Trample On It

Three years ago, a retired bureaucrat called N N Vohra submitted a report to the government. It 'unearthed' -- so the newspapers told us -- the 'nexus' between criminals, politicians and bureaucrats. Of course, this nexus is something all of us have known of for years, so I don't know in what sense Vohra 'unearthed' it. That apart, it took well over a year for the government to make Vohra's report public. After a fashion, naturally: Excerpts of it, names of politicians carefully excised, were placed before Parliament.

Pressed hard, the government promised to table an Action Taken Report on the Vohra report. For some weeks in mid-1995, ATR was arguably the country's best loved -- or at least best known -- acronym.

That it is practically unknown today, a year and a half later, is an indication of just how much action was really taken. It's also a sign that no real ATR was ever produced. The government has changed since those days, but what hasn't changed is the reluctance to tell Indians about Vohra's report and what, if anything, has been done about his findings.

What has never changed is the government's obsessive secrecy about its doings. Or undoings.

Today, there's a public interest petition that urges the Supreme Court to instruct the government to make the Vohra report public. More than that, it also asks what all of us yearn for: that the Court issue directions for steps to free our democracy from the suffocating embrace of criminals. All over again, we are turning to the courts to compel the government just to do what it must, what its own studies and reports say it must. What, in fact, is its duty to us.

Is this struggle necessary? Why must we battle every step of the way: to cut through the secrecy and find out what's in the report, to demand action based on it, to compel such action?

Those must seem like naive questions. Of course we face a battle for each of these things: it's the very nexus that the report identifies that is deciding what to do about the report! No wonder the government is reluctant to tell us what's going on with it. No wonder everything the government does is shrouded in secrecy.

Democracy, we like to think, is founded on transparency and openness, on our right to know what's going on. Nobody knows that better than the criminals who wield power. Hold that thought while I digress to something quite different.

It was Republic Day recently, the day when we have a fabulous parade down Rajpath in New Delhi. There are floats from each state that celebrate our ancient culture and history (like the one from Maharashtra this year, whose theme was 100 years of Indian film). Troupes of dancers and acrobats perform, and there are also lots of schoolchildren who make their way down Rajpath. As do various items from our military arsenal: tanks, missiles, guns, aircraft and platoons of men.

So much a part of Republic Day is this display of armed might that a lot of us grew up thinking it was the real reason we were celebrating this day. I know I did. I understood guns and planes far more easily than what Republic Day actually stands for: the remarkable document we put into effect that day in 1950. That's why I beat my chest proudly about the impressive arms, but spent years in ignorance of our Constitution.

No government we have had has been able to resist that equation, that easy route to pride and patriotism. Why should they, when this response to the parade is typical: the 'display [of our military might] is very reassuring' and 'gives me a sense of security'? That's from Sonal Mansingh, classical dancer, who also said this about watching the parade to The Times of India: 'I feel proud as an Indian.'

I wish I shared Sonal Mansingh's sense of security. It's hard to do, because after thumping my chest for some years, I began wondering about that document we never hear much about. I wonder about those schoolchildren marching along Rajpath interspersed with guns. I wonder about the country's leaders who watch the parade pass by from their secure seats on the podium.

I wonder: how many children do we have in this country who will never be in a Republic Day parade simply because they don't attend school? How much have we betrayed our Constitution by ignoring this simple directive that's in it: the State must provide free and compulsory education for all children below the age of 14? What do planes and security mean when half of India -- the 400 million people unable to read and write -- cannot so much as write those words?

Back to our right to know what's going on. If you agree that that is vital to democracy, you agreed because you are able to read these words. You want to know what the government is doing, you have the ability to demand that it tell you what it is doing, because you were educated. Transparency and openness make sense only to the educated. More than that, they make no sense in a society where half the people are illiterate. Because those people don't have the ability to ask for those things.

Which is precisely why the men we elect to represent us are able to stall the Vohra report. They know that half of India will not be able to conceive of asking that it be made public. They need not pay much attention to the few demented voices from the other half that clamour for information about the report. Regardless of the Vohra or any other report, and not least because they have spent nearly half a century ignoring what the Constitution requires them to do, the criminals can continue to rule us.

And since they do, I wonder once again about Sonal Mansingh's sense of security. How secure are we if we have rioters, murderers and thieves in positions of considerable power? If they control the tanks and missiles? The hardware will protect us from foreign enemies, but what will protect us from our own very Indian enemies?

When we place remarkable power in the hands of politicians we elect to form our government, there are only two effective restraints on how that power is exercised: A free press and an enlightened body of citizens. The only way to produce those restraints is to ensure that all Indians have a chance at an education.

In a real sense, these notions all feed on each other: security, education, a free press, transparency, the right to know, democracy.

Twenty-five years ago, US supreme court justice Potter Stewart wrote this in a decision about governmental secrecy and the peoples' right to know: 'When everything is classified, then nothing is classified, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion. I should suppose, in short, that the hall mark of a truly effective internal security system would be the maximum possible disclosure.'

Sonal Mansingh might want to read that. If she did, she might wonder, as I have been doing, just how many of the men N N Vohra named in his report have appeared on the Republic Day podium over the years, saluting as the military paraded past.

It might give her a new outlook on security.