Last week, on April 14, India celebrated the 124th birth anniversary of Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar, India’s first law minister and the architect of our Constitution. Rich tributes were paid to the great man who was a legal luminary, politician, social reformer and one of the most influential thinkers and shapers of modern India.

These tributes — coming from those very entities that have not just subverted the law repeatedly, but also engaged in unscrupulous ways to amend it to suit their interests — are perfunctory at best and hypocritical at worst.

These entities are the six national political parties — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Indian National Congress (INC), Communist Party of India, Communist Party of India (Marxist), Bahujan Samaj party (BSP) and Indian Nationalist Congress Party, which have disrespected the law of the land and the Constitution by failing to comply with the order of the Central Information Commission (CIC) to come within the ambit of the Right to Information Act (RTI).

In doing so, they have disregarded a statutory body like the CIC and above all the highest law making body in the country — Parliament, where the RTI Act was enacted.

Scant regard for the law

The CIC had, in June 2013, passed a landmark order that declared the six national political parties to be “public authorities” since they are not only substantially funded by public money, but as institutions “directly or indirectly influence exercise of governmental power.” Besides there is an entire culture of secrecy, opacity, untimely and inadequate reporting of their financial dealings to the Election Commission. The full bench of CIC thought this would be corrected if the parties were brought within the ambit of the RTI Act. The order stated: “It would be odd to argue that transparency is good for all State organs but not so good for Political Parties, which, in reality, control all the vital organs of the State.”

The conduct of political parties and indeed the government since the CIC order is a stark reminder of a trajectory laden with arrogance, defiance and unscrupulousness. Soon after the June 2013 order, the government of the day – the United Progressive Alliance — tabled a hastily drafted RTI Amendment Bill that sought to amend the Act so as to keep the political parties exempt from RTI.

This Bill was unanimously endorsed and supported by all parties in question but had to be sent to the Parliamentary Standing Committee for further deliberation after a massive uproar from activists and citizens across the country and outside of it.

The Standing Committee came out with the report but the Bill itself lapsed with the last Lok Sabha.

Fresh attempts were made by co-petitioners, Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) and Subhash Agarwal, to make political parties comply with the order. They appealed to the CIC to look into the non-compliance and pleaded for severe penalties. Jagdeep Chhokar of ADR appealed to the CIC to direct political parties to pay five per cent of their declared annual income over the past five years, a sum of Rs 44 crore, that would go into the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund. All the three times (between November 2014-January 2015) that the CIC issued show cause notices to the parties, none of them bothered to show up.

The INC sent a letter to the CIC that argued that political parties are not public bodies but association of individuals. The letter went to the extent of accusing the CIC of overstepping its authority and termed its order “ex facie illegal”.

To add some more dark humour to this saga, the CIC passed a bizarre final order on the March 16, 2015, where it basically threw its hands up in the air and concluded that while it still held that this was a case of “wilful non-compliance” by political parties, it was “bereft of tools to get its orders complied with.”

That the CIC cannot get parties to comply with its own orders is both pusillanimous and untrue — the CIC has ample powers to proceed with penal action if it wanted to, as it did in 2009, when it issued notices of criminal action against the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) for not complying with its order pertaining to file notings.

Why it chose to abdicate its powers so meekly and why the Information Commissioners who passed this order should remain in office when they cannot enforce compliance with their own orders are questions that need answering.

Citizen action

With that final closing order of the CIC, we are back to square one. While going to court is an option that ADR is considering, this brazen defiance of law should not be allowed to pass by quietly. As Parliament reconvenes, the issue of wilful and consistent defiance of the law, must be raised by lawmakers themselves.

Some citizens are petitioning with Members of Parliament like Jay Panda, Dinesh Trivedi, Derek O Brien and others who have been vocal proponents of RTI and demand answers from the leaders of the parties on the floor of the two Houses. Citizens must appeal to their respective MPs to do so too.

The country has seen, in recent times, the power of citizen action in the ongoing net neutrality campaign. A lot of the political class came out in support for a free internet, and rightly so, as a free and basic human right. Will the same political class have the gumption to stand up, call out the unscrupulous and law-breaking ways of its own ilk and appeal to the six national parties to follow the law?

For, if those in power have scant disrespect for the very law that they legislated, what right do they have to call themselves law-makers?

Home Minister Rajnath Singh at an event paid glowing tributes to Babasaheb Ambedkar on his anniversary. Yet, as the president of BJP in 2013, he is guilty of not complying with the law.

The INC has never missed an opportunity to tell us that it was responsible for bringing the RTI Act and yet it has not only not complied with the CIC order, its government went so far as to attempt to amend the RTI Act.

Even the Left parties didn’t walk the talk on this issues. The 21st congress of the CPI (M) was fittingly centred on Ambedkar Jayanti, but they must seriously introspect if they are even paying an iota of respect to the ideals that Ambedkar stood for. Finally, if the BSP must honour the legacy of its guiding light, it could start by following the law and respecting the Constitution.

The RTI Act is that one single powerful tool in the hands of the ordinary citizen that has enabled her to seek information and demand accountability. The political class cannot take away that very right from us.

It is not enough to pay yearly robotic tributes to chief architect of the Indian Constitution. It appears even more hypocritical when such tributes accompany the exact opposite of what Ambedkar stood for. When political parties cannot respect the law that they enacted in Parliament, any tribute to the great man rings terribly hollow. The apt tribute would be when they appoint Public Information Officers and, thus, save RTI and the Constitution.