Please, Mr President

For someone who has consistently espoused the cause of transparency and openness, and has done much to make the office of the President more approachable, President APJ Abdul Kalam's note to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the Right to Information (RTI) Act is inexplicable.

The President is correct in asserting that the secrecy of his communications to the Prime Minister is guaranteed by the Constitution, but the very purpose of the RTI is to open up to public scrutiny documents/papers that are protected by some law or convention.

Indeed in the case of the Nanavati-Shah Commission, which was probing the Godhra riots, the President's office refused to make public the correspondence between then President KR Narayanan and then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on precisely those grounds, whereas surely the correspondence has relevance to the country's citizens, who would then get to know the mind of the President as well as the quality of information/assurances given by political leaders to the country's first citizen.

It is not for the President, or anyone else, to decide whether such correspondence affects the people at large, for by that logic almost any information can be sought to be kept from public scrutiny.

The suggestion that the notings of senior bureaucrats be excluded from the RTI is even worse as it can completely choke the flow of information; after all, which file/proposal in the government doesn't go till the top, or thereabouts, if only to keep the bosses informed? In any case, most if not all political interference takes place at the level of the top bureaucracy.

If these notings are to be kept confidential, how is the lay public to know just where things have been changed and at whose instance? Indeed, in most cases, it is difficult to figure out what is wrong with a proposal, steeped as the papers are in bureaucratese, until you see notes of senior bureaucrats in the margins of the file. Keeping this out of the purview of the RTI will make the new law quite irrelevant.

As for the view that such disclosure will prevent bureaucrats from functioning freely, that has not been the case in other countries where a right to information law exists. Indeed, the threat of scrutiny may encourage bureaucrats to take decisions after fully applying their minds--anonymity is often a cover for bureaucratic bungling.

If the fear is that business houses against whom a decision is taken will harass the bureaucrat or get him/her transferred, most businessmen know just what has been written on the file anyway.

The proposal that only the Centre be allowed to frame the details of the RTI, of course, is eminently sensible since this will ensure that laws are consistent throughout the country. Left to themselves, each state will allow and disallow access to different bits of information, making a mockery of the spirit behind the law.

A law with such potential for bringing about change is bound to get most bureaucrats/politicians nervous, and it is a pity that, however inadvertently, the President has given their cause tacit approval. The saving grace, though, is that it is up to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to accept the President's suggestions since the latter has already given his assent to the RTI Act.