BJP demands info from govt under RTI

When the UPA government passed the Right to Information Act, 2004, it would not have foreseen that the Act would become a weapon in the hands of the Opposition for unearthing embarrassing details against the government.

Senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley has become the latest convert to the RTI and has applied for information from the government on issues which the BJP is raising against the government.

According to top sources, Jaitley has filed RTI applications on at least three issues. The first application, to which a reply has been received, deals with phone tapping.

The application seeks to know how many phone taps and bugging devices have been authorised by the government in the last year or so. The answer reportedly shocked Jaitley, the number being an astonishing 40,400 taps ordered in the last year alone.

The second application was for the communication between the Crown Prosecution in the UK and the Central Bureau of Investigation in the Quattrochi case.

This application was twice rejected by the home ministry, after which Jaitley appealed to chief information commissioner Wajahat Habibullah. The matter is slated to come up before him.

The third application is about the BJP's old bete noire Election Commissioner Naveen Chawla. Jaitley wants to have an inspection of the letter written by retired chief election commissioner B B Tandon to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh just before demitting office, wherein he has given strong grounds for changing the norms for appointing election commissioners.

The application further asks the Election Commission to disclose the number of meetings of the full commission where there has been a split decision and a dissent note has been recorded.

Jaitley appears all set to take advantage of this Act and even has a colleague who specialises in drafting RTI applications.

"The trick is to draft the application in such a way that information cannot be denied," Jaitley reportedly said.