For a government that has been busy granting the people of India rights to employment, education and food, the United Progress Alliance has been lackadaisical in protecting the citizens’ right to privacy. Industrialist Ratan Tata was, therefore, right to seek the protection of the Supreme Court in the matter relating to leaked tapes of telephone tapping undertaken by the Union government’s tax authorities. After finishing its internal investigations, the government must tell Parliament why the income tax department ordered the tapping of the telephone of public relations professional Niira Radia, what relevant information was procured and what action taken and, most importantly, how those secret tapes got leaked. A government has the right to gather information about illegal and anti-national activities of a citizen, provided due procedure is followed. Even so, there can be no justification for leaking such tapes to the media and making private conversations public. If the tapes have revealed any act of criminality, illegality and such like penal offences, the government is duty bound to take action against such offenders. However, no government should allow its intelligence arms to be used to play favourites with corporate houses, the media or political rivals.
When conversations taped are purely private in nature, perhaps malevolent, perhaps in bad taste, perhaps revealing a lack of integrity or judgement on the part of the interlocutors, but not pointing to any criminal misconduct, agencies of the government have no business to go public. The government has correctly decided to probe the leak of these tapes and the guilty ought to be punished.
The leaking of the tapes has, of course, contributed to some soul-searching within the media and the corporate world, and that is a good thing. A positive consequence of the ongoing controversies could be that new norms of corporate, political, governmental and media conduct will be adopted by all concerned. While the consequences of an illegal act, namely the leaking of the tapes, have been positive both for the media and public life, the act itself should not go unchallenged. There have been far too many instances of a breach of privacy and governmental intrusion into a citizen’s private life in recent months. An atmosphere of fear is being generated. People worry if they are being spied upon and their privacy intruded. What is troubling is that rather than any national interest, such investigations seem to serve party political and corporate interests. There has to be a greater degree of transparency in the functioning of revenue and intelligence agencies. These agencies should not be seen as handmaidens of vested interests and those in power. Shades of the ignominious Emergency Era are being painted, with detractors of the ruling dispensation finding themselves in difficult situations. These tendencies should be nipped in the bud. Hopefully, the Supreme Court will do its bit to empower the citizen, defending the right to privacy without in any way coming in the way of the normal functioning of various arms of government. For their part, both the media and the corporate world have their lessons to learn.
