Issue of Bringing Political Parties under RTI
In June 2013, CIC via an order had declared the political parties as public authorities and brought them under the RTI Act. It also asked them to appoint appellate bodies to answer RTI queries. Under Section 2(h) of the RTI Act, a public authority is defined as any ‘non-governmental organization substantially financed, directly or indirectly, by funds provided by the appropriate government’.
The move to place political parties under Right to Information Act had drawn up sharp protests from all major parties. The issue is still under debate and political parties still don’t come under RTI.
Arguments of Political parties
The move has attracted sharp protests from all major parties on account of one argument – that the political parties are not public authorities. Further, they also opine that Bringing Political Parties under RTI would hamper their internal working and political rivals may misuse the law thus adversely affecting functioning of the political parties.
Arguments of CIC
On the other hand, argument of the CIC is that political parties are public authorities as they receive financial aid including land from the government. Further, the political parties get total exemption under Section 13A of the Income-Tax Act for all their income and get free air time on All India Radio and Doordarshan during elections. These aspects make them public authorities, bringing them under RTI.
Analysis
Placing political parties under the RTI Act will open politics to public scrutiny, regulate political party funding and clean up our electoral ecosystem. Transparency will also discourage transactions of ambiguous nature, for example, Congress’s reported Rs 90-crore loan to a non-profit company, Young Indian, owned by Congress President Sonia Gandhi and Vice President Rahul Gandhi. In this way, the move seems very affirmative and effective which would ensure transparency and accountability in the governance system. But, it has also a potential which would create instability and Political parties use it against each other to create logjam. This fear was expressed in the move of the legislators when during the previous Lok Sabha, the government tried to overturn the CIC and SC order by resorting to amend the law itself, when UPA-II introduced the infamous Right to Information Amendment Bill, 2013, to specifically exclude political parties from RTI requests. With extremely low level of credibility that politicians as a class have in India, it furthers the belief that political parties have much to hide.
