Prime Minister’s Office —Cool Champion of Ministerial Corruption

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V.SUNDARAM

“What we need and what we want is to moralize
politics, and not to politicize morals”—



K R Popper (1902-1994) in his “Open Society and
Its Enemies”

In a shameless and immoral
manner, the Prime Minister’s ‘non-functional’(!) Office in New Delhi has
suddenly become ‘functional’(!!) by becoming a cool champion of Ministerial
corruption. 



This Office has
decided to keep the assets of Ministers and their relatives under wraps by openly
stating that information in this regard is exempted from the RIGHT TO INFORMATION (RTI).  In reply to the application of one RTI
applicant Subash Chandra Agrawal, the PMO has termed the information as exempt
under Section 8 of the RTI Act and refused to divulge it for the same
reason.  The PMO had earlier provided the
details to the Cabinet Secretariat to facilitate the answering of RTI
applications in this regard, but later took an about turn and denied the information
to the RTI applicant Subash Chandra Agrawal. 

S C Agrawal had filed his
RTI application last year seeking details of assets of Union Ministers and
their relatives for the last two years from Cabinet Secretariat.




  A letter was sent to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) for necessary action on the
application filed by him.  Sri Subash Chandra Agrawal has recently
told the press: “In a letter dated May
19, 2008, the PMO provided the details of assets and liabilities of members of
Union Council of Ministers to Cabinet Secretariats to deal with such RTI
applications.  But after that I did not
get any response from either of the Offices. 
I had even moved an application with the Central Information Commission
in this regard.”

After six months, PMO in a
letter dated December 17, 2008 informed S C Agrawal that the information sought
by him could not be provided as it was exempt under the provisions of the RTI
Act. 



The PMO has sought exemption under Clauses 8 (i) (e) and Clause 8 (i) (i)
which relate to immunity granted to “documents
fiduciary relationship” and “Cabinet
documents under the RTI Act”. Thus the PMO is determined to keep all
information relating to the assets of politicians (I mean Ministers) and their
kin as a top secret. 

India’s ‘treacherous
tryst with its corrupt destiny’ began on 15^th August 1947.  The Congress Government under Nehru patented
and licenced all acts of ‘corruption’
to the Members of Congress Party, its Cabinet Ministers, and all its MPs/MLAs
down the line.  Pratap Singh Kairon in the Punjab, Pandit Ravi Shankar Shukla in Madhya
Pradesh, Atulya Ghosh in West Bengal, Antulay in Maharashtra, Nijalingappa in
Karnataka were all internationally known masters of corruption.  In his time Nehru actively condoned both
inefficiency and corruption at the highest levels of governance.  In her time, both Indira Gandhi’s Office and
residence, became the greatest centers of global corruption.  Many members of her family (according
to Dr. Subramanian Swamy Sonia Gandhi was the most important player in this
‘honourable’ game after 1970!)  actively
participated in this game and enriched themselves in a grand and fabulous
manner!

The science of politics
under our corrupt democracy consists in trading with the masses, in hoodwinking
and swindling them.  In return for the what
they want, or for the mere appearance of what they want, the gullible Indian
masses yield up what the corrupt Minister or politician wants, and what the
enterprising minorities behind him want. 
The bargaining is conducted to the tune of affecting rhetoric, with
music by the choir, but it is as simple and sordid at bottom as the sale of the
cheapest mule.  It lies quite outside the
bounds of honour, and even of common decency. 
It is a combat between jackals and jackasses!  This kind of uncontrolled and unabashed
corruption (like terminal stages of cancer) has become the murkiest master
transaction of the collapsing and collapsible Indian State today.  And now the PMO has given a green signal
under the RTI Act to all the Ministers, MPs/MLAs to brazenly practice totally
free Himalayan corruption enjoying full immunity and legal protection under the
provisions of the RTI Act. According to the PMO, no member of the public has
the right to ask for information relating to the assets of our Ministers and
their kin under the RTI Act. In short, the PMO has proudly declared that in
Indian politics there is no honour.  In
Indian Politics nothing is contemptible. 
The PMO would not have taken this anti-national and anti-people stand
without the full concurrence of our shaky, shakable and ‘liquid’ Prime Minister. 

James Madison (1751-1836),
one of the founding Fathers of the American State said: “




Knowledge will forever govern ignorance,
and a people, who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the
power of knowledge. A popular government without popular information or the
means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps
both”


.  The tragedy of the corrupt Indian State is
that it has become a helpless, directionless and rudderless farce today.  The PMO
and the Office of the Indian President are both individually and severally
responsible for the shameful predicament.

The NDA Government enacted The Freedom
of Information Act in 2002. It was adopted in January 2003 but never came into
force. The recent Right to Information Act was approved by the Parliament and
signed by the President in June 2005 and came into effect in October 2005

. It
replaces the Freedom of Information Act, 2002. The main objective of this
Act is to provide for freedom to every citizen to secure access to information
under the control of public authorities, consistent with public interest, in
order to promote openness, transparency and accountability in administration
and in relation to matters connected therewith or incidental thereto. Under the
Act, all Indian citizens have a right to ask for information from Central and
State public authorities. The public authority must respond in thirty days. An independent Information Commission has
been created at the Central level and all the States have followed suit.

During
British Raj, The Official Secrets Act was passed in 1923 mainly as a defence
mechanism against the rising tide of nationalism initiated by Mahatma Gandhi
from 1917. No citizen had any access to official information and every one was
distrusted by the British Government. This tradition was not only maintained
but enriched by the Congress Government under Nehru and Indira Gandhi after
independence.

Though we got our independence in 1947,
the Congress party and the Congress government were never interested in
educating the public or in making it possible for the common people to have
access to information relating to the functions, policies and programmes of
government departments

.
Jawaharlal Nehru, who wrote eloquently against
suppression of civil liberties in India during British rule, in his
autobiography in the middle 1930s, conveniently ignored the fundamental fact
that his hero Stalin, during the same period, was killing thousands of innocent
people in Russia every day under the subterfuge of protecting the Socialist
Soviet State against the so-called ‘Revisionists’ and ‘Reactionaries’.
Stalin’s ‘Purges’ did not emotionally affect Nehru. No wonder therefore that he
had contempt for civil liberties and when he became Prime Minister of
independent India on 15 August 1947, he was not interested at all in
introducing any legislation for giving free information to the public on public
authorities and government as a whole.

In
recent years, there has been an ever-growing global trend towards recognition
of the right to information by countries, intergovernmental organisations,
civil society and the people. The right to information has been recognised as a
fundamental human right, which upholds the inherent dignity of all human
beings. The right to information forms the crucial bedrock of participatory
democracy and it is essential to ensure accountability, transparency and good
governance.

It goes to the credit of NDA Government
that they passed The Freedom of Information Act, 2002. This was a revolutionary
step, conferring on every Indian citizen the fundamental right to demand and
get information from government, governmental agencies and public authorities.

The greater the access of the citizens
to information, the greater will be the responsiveness of government to
community needs. Alternatively, the greater the restrictions that are placed on
access, the greater will be the feelings of ‘powerlessness’, ‘helplessness’,
‘impotence’ and ‘alienation’. Without information, people cannot adequately
exercise their rights as citizens or make informed choices. The unrestricted
and free flow of information to the common citizens in India were historically
restricted by the following factors:

       
a.
The regulatory statutory framework which includes several pieces of restrictive
legislation, such as the Official Secrets Act, 1923.

       
b. The inherited colonial culture of secrecy and arrogance within the
bureaucracy which was later cemented by the callous attitude of Nehru and the
authoritarianism of Indira Gandhi.

       
c. The low levels of literacy and awareness of fundamental rights among India’s
teeming millions, the original monopolistic stock-in-trade of the Congress
party and later shared by all the other political parties as a perennial common
wealth.

The
real tragedy is that even though our Constitution makers included ‘the
right to information’ as part of the Constitutional guarantees relating
to freedom of speech and expression and this right was later upheld by the
Supreme Court in one of its landmark orders relating to governmental control
over newsprint and illegal bans on the distribution of newspapers, the
successive Congress governments showed indivisible contempt towards the Supreme
Court on the one hand and the common people of India on the other. Government
of India became the private property of the Nehru family. The name ‘Gandhi’
also became part of their private estate. Though Mahatma Gandhi is the father
of the nation, he held no official office in independent India. None of his
children occupied any official position in the Government of India. The most
poignant aspect is that his rightful name ‘Gandhi’ was snatched by another
family on account of the quirks of Indian politics, cleverly maneuvered and masterminded
by the Nehru clan. The original usurper
was Feroze Khan who became Feroze Gandhi, who in turn lent his name to Indira
Gandhi. Today it has descended to an Indian-Made Foreign Leader (IMFL).

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