Kingdom of the Official Secret

Remember we are talking about an institution that is over 200 years old, if we can date the Indian bureaucracy to the days when Lord Cornwallis set up an administrative system for the East India Company. Remember, too, that the British bureaucracy, on which India’s is closely modelled, had a reputation of being one of the most effective institutions in the world in terms of officially empowered discretion. In fact, information control was one of the lasting legacies of the Raj. This editorial comment in the Times(London), in the wake of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, says it all: “We don’t know why Mr Montagu is so fearful lest any news about India should reach this country …(his) whole policy in the matter of publicity is arousing, even among those anxious to support him, the most unwelcome suspicion of his methods.”

Last year, this time, British civil servants too had to experience the unfamiliar discomforts caused by the newly-promulgated Freedom of Information Act. As London mayor Ken Livingstone confessed, his office even observed a ‘Shredding Week’ before the law kicked in, to remove from the public sphere documents that had the potential of making life difficult for his office.

We don’t know enough about the activities of the shredding machines of Indraprastha, but there can be no getting away from the fact that if the Right to Information Act 2005 (RTI) — which purports to give us a “practical regime of right to information” — is to be realised, not partly but in whole measure, the bureaucracy and its political masters must necessarily internalise a radical shift within. It may seem the slightest bit hyperbolic to say this, but we are talking here of another independence movement. This, after all, is about transferring the sovereignty — vested with the people by the Constitution — back from the bureaucracy to the people.

Bureaucracy and impermeability have become almost synonymous and nobody understood this as well as Max Weber. In his 1922 classic, Economy and Society, Weber perceived the intricate relationship between bureaucracy and power as one mediated through information: “Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret. Bureaucratic administration always tends to be an administration of ‘secret sessions’; in so far as it can, it hides its knowledge and action from criticism…” This is why, says Weber, the “official secret” could only have been invented by the bureaucracy. It follows that the power of a bureaucracy (and executive), is in direct proportion to the ignorance of the legislature and citizen.

What a right to information law does is to empower the ordinary citizen by ending the bureaucrat’s unstated but tacit right to secrecy. But even with such a law, negotiating the labyrinths of power is a bit like attempting the Everest with rubber sandals by way of footwear. There are innumerable degrees of separation between citizens and the crucial information that could impact their lives. The first of these, of course, is the law itself, which has several exemptions to its application. Some of these are understandable given considerations of the country’s security and integrity. But in the hands of an opaque bureaucracy, the interpretation of an exception can be expanded in a way that could undermine the intent of the RTI law.

The rigidity of the traditional bureaucratic mindset does not make for great optimism on this score. The spirited wrangling over whether file notings should come under the scope of the Act gave early proof of the systemic intransigence. Already there is evidence that the bureaucracy is attempting to build a firewall between itself and the RTI regime, if we are to go by the fact that the 12 chief information commissioners constituting the Central Information Commission have reportedly all been drawn from the IAS. Replacing a bureaucracy with a super-bureaucracy of access, would greatly diminish the scope of the law. Besides, every important institution in the country today is busy attempting to wangle exemptions for itself under the new law.

Then there is the process itself. On paper, it appears a fairly simple one, with the structure extending to the gram panchayat level — one that can be accessed through even a postcard. In actual fact, it will never get going unless there are agencies at the local level that can guide it along, and interpret what could be unwieldy and inaccessible information in indecipherable language. This is where local civil society organisations can play a meaningful role.

The third hurdle that could come in the way of a functioning RTI regime is concerted political influence, which could stymie the efforts of conscientious officers to be more open and accountable. The personal difficulties faced by the former Solapur district commissioner, Manisha Varma, is a case in point. Varma followed up on a scam involving doctored muster roles in an employment guarantee scheme project — which had surfaced precisely because the Maharashtra Right to Information Act was put to good use by a local resident — and got transferred out for her pains. Clearly the regime cannot function on the integrity of just a few good officers.

Our civil servants may not realise this now, but the RTI regime may actually give them some autonomy in dealing with the more egregious demands of their political masters. This, however, would require them to take seriously Section 3 of the RTI Act, which makes it incumbent on public authorities to “maintain all records duly catalogued and indexed” and to provide “as much information suo motu to the public at regular intervals.”

Creative inertia and the belief that “if people don’t know what you are doing, they don’t know what you are doing wrong” was what powered the formidable Sir Humphrey Appleby, skilled practitioner of bureaucratic stonewalling, in the classic TV serial, Yes, Minister. It’s time to retire the man — and the mindset.