The Right to know - a Flawed Debate - (The Hoot.Org, 11/06/2003)

There is no law at present that requires the media to yield space or time to the citizens. They can deny space/time to citizens arbitrarily, falling back upon a news logic of their own.

-- By Dasu Krishnamoorty

The right to information bill has been knocking at the doors of Parliament with members showing the least interest in it. The bill inheres several inadequacies. First, it turns the spotlight exclusively on state-held information. Second, it sanctions amnesty to private sector institutions. Third, the bill is silent on the public's access to media and educational content. The first assumption can be attributed to the myth that the state alone is guilty of withholding information and that there are no other agencies concealing crucial information. Every advocate of the right to know appears to hug this popular notion. It also suits the media to highlight state tendency to be secretive in order to divert the curiosity of the public from non-governmental cupboards in society.

Look at how one 'liberal' after another exclusively points the finger at the state. Kuldip Nayyar says, "In a democracy, where faith stirs the people's response, the government cannot afford to have an iota of doubt raised about what it says or does. It has to be transparent." Amal Dutta, a former member of Parliament, says, "The denial of information by the executive to the legislature and to the people is not a new phenomenon. While the denial did not affect the common man seriously earlier, with the increase in the functioning of the government, such denial makes impossible for him to understand whether he is getting a fair deal."

Indian judiciary too bears the cross of this 'liberal' tradition. It has always been reluctant to touch the media and even acted populist by singling out the government as a body that has a stake in keeping information under wraps. In a public interest litigation involving environmental pollution, the Rajasthan High Court observed: "Every citizen has a right to know how the state is functioning and why it is withholding information." In the case of S.P. Gupta vs the Union of India, Supreme Court judge P.N. Bhagavati said: "The disclosure of information regarding the functioning of the government must be the rule, and secrecy an exception, justified only where the strictest requirement of public interest demands." The implication of these dissertations is that the government is the sole centre of power and public activity and therefore has a natural compulsion to deny information, which may affect its power status.

Pointing out this partiality, Manoj Mitta (The New Indian Express, Hyderabad, 24 August 2000) writes: "It (the bill) imposes an obligation alright on a 'public authority' to provide information to any citizen. But the public authority is purely defined as a state-created or as state-funded body. The proposed legislation is entirely government-centric as though the state machinery were still the only repository of all the information that affects the people at large."

Sacred Cow

The point is not to deny that the state is secretive or to assert that its cupboards are transparent and freely accessible. The state as the dominant centre of power, has so far been the major fountain of information and has an interest in keeping it under wraps, generally for political reasons. This tendency of the state is too well known to need shouting from the housetops. It is the other centres of power, representing private economy, which too need to be brought under the proposed information glasnost. The economy-controlled media point out at the state to deftly deflect public attention from themselves. The ongoing debate about corporate governance is in reality a debate about corporate transparency. There is a plethora of laws under which companies are accountable to the state. But their accountability to the public, who are their chief constituency and the cornerstone of their survival, is woefully eager. The consumer courts demonstrate this truth eloquently.

There is a need to illuminate non-governmental areas of darkness by a new right to know regime. It is based on the simple truth that however private they are, trade and industry and other private organisations are in the business of public activity and their actions and activities affect millions of people every day and everywhere. There cannot be a greater act of self-delusion than to think that private sector economy is private domain and is therefore beyond public inquiry. It is not only economy that has passed into private sector hands but also culture, sports, literature and education. Most people in India believe that Indian girls are chosen Miss Universe or Miss World in order to capture the vast market in the country for the benefit of makers of beauty products. Thousands of beauty clinics have sprung in all metros and urban centres. Sportsmen have stopped playing for their country. They now play to do Pepsi or Coca-Cola or Wills or MRF proud.

The second Press Commission said in its report: "When the source of much of the information is government and public agencies, the only means of acquiring information without which there cannot be a well informed citizen, is through freedom of access to the materials in the possession of the government and also to proceedings of government." This is not true anymore. This finding sidelines the fact that an equal or greater amount of information vital for the interests of the citizenry is stored beyond accessibility by agencies other than government and its organisations. The working of the corporate sector that commands a larger area of the economy than the public sector is a closed book. Their accountability to the shareholders is notional and their accountability to the company law administration is part of Indian mythology. Some skeletons in their cupboards tumble out as a result of public interest litigation. Imagine how many people can seek the help of the Supreme Court to know what is happening in the corporate domain.

Right To Education

The right to know debate has an economic dimension. It concerns the price of learning crucial to human survival and progress. The more one knows, the more he is useful to himself and the society. To know is to learn. But learning has a price in this country. Till the reforms thrust cost-benefit logic on government calculations, most government reports were available at low and affordable price. This writer paid Rs 400 for a copy of the report of the Registrar of Newspapers of India. Such reports were available for less than RS 50 before the economic reform. An abridged version of Nehru's The Discovery of India published by a private publishing house sells at RS 1600 whereas an unabridged version published by a government division sells at RS 60. Has anyone computed how much information can be denied to the public through the simple ploy of high pricing? In poor countries like India, overpricing or even pricing itself can deprive millions of people of the essence of the right to know.

Half of India's school-going children will remain illiterate if the state agency, the National Council of Educational Research and Training, did not print every year millions and millions of textbooks at very affordable prices. Information essential to improve the quality of life ought to be available as a matter of right. It is foolish to insist that the right to know should include only such information that is not available at present as a matter of right. The right to know is only a subsidiary of the right to education. Privatisation is an assault on the right to know because it limits the opportunities to learn by commoditising information.

Two questions cry for an answer. They are: Whose right to know and to know what? The right of the citizens, obviously. Even the Indian Constitution confers the right to free speech and expression primarily on the citizen. That includes the right of access to information. The citizen needs a continuous flow of information on a daily basis and he has come to rely on the press for his information needs. The press gathers its information mainly from governmental agencies that are in a unique position to collect it through networking. But there are occasions when the citizens will have to have a right of access to any information the media have as a matter of right because sometimes both the press and the state fail the people.

Here we refer to a unique category of the citizenry, that is, the consumers of media products. The receiver (audience in popular parlance) is one aspect of mass communication the right to know advocates feign ignorance of. Is mass communication a one-way traffic, the media disseminating and the audience receiving? The right of the media to know (access) ought to be conditional on the access they yield to the audience. A deeper reading of the UN Declaration of Human Rights Article 19 indicates as much. "Everyone has the right (among other things) to impart information and ideas through any media." How one looks at this text depends on where he stands.

Nothing that has been said so far is aimed at arguing against media's right of access. The purpose is to show that media are a part of the society and not above it and all rights they claim are justified only by the good they do to a community and not merely to themselves. The war between the Reliance group and the Bombay Dyeing group enjoyed the hospitality of the Sunday Observer and the Indian Express for some time. Of what interest are these corporate wars to the readers? The owner of one of India's leading newspapers was accused of publishing a report with a view to hurt the reputation of a person who refused to collaborate with him in a deal. Can the owner of a newspaper use reader space to settle personal scores? The Press Council has admonished on several occasions the mainstream press for stoking fires of communalism, for publishing information without verification and denying access of their columns to aggrieved persons. The media have a right to access but it is not an absolute right uninformed by any social purpose.

The media assume certain responsibilities avowedly to inform the public and help them form judgements. On this ground, they claim certain freedoms. The reader (audience) does not figure in any of the media operations except as a passive receiver. When he cannot get two inches of space in the letters column as a matter of right, there is no question of his challenging media assumptions regarding readers' choices. For example, have the readers any say in deciding how the space in a newspaper should be used? Should not they have such a right, through an institutional mechanism, given the fact that there is no newspaper without readers? Two leading newspapers of India devoted four pages of space to report the death of their owners, making a mockery of news values. The extravagant reporting of Filmfare awards in the Times of India and Screen awards in the Indian Express is not informed by any justifiable news criteria except that the awards are sponsored by magazines owned by the Times and Express groups.

Access To Media

There is no law at present that requires the media to yield space or time to the citizens. They can deny space/time to citizens arbitrarily, falling back upon a news logic of their own. In short, they appropriate to themselves the exclusive privilege of determining what is news and what is not. Ultimately, a citizen seeking expression for his views has to have his own newspaper. Even if such a thing was possible a few decades ago, starting a newspaper today would call for investment of millions of rupees, meaning that the very rich alone can stay in the media arena. It boils down to saying that freedom of the press belongs to those who can own it.

Thus it is apparent that media access is monopolised by the very rich, the elite, persons who prescribe and direct dominant social values and by those who accept status quo without protest. There are unwritten media conventions, which media men do not publicly admit and which keep 'deviant' groups out of focus. Theses groups are either ridiculed or ignored. The media never took men like Ram Manohar Lohia seriously because he was unconventional and frequently needled Jawaharlal Nehru, who overawed the Indian media like few did anywhere.

People seek media hospitality only when other doors are slammed against them. If they are denied access here too, the consequences can be costly. They include an implication that the media have joined the state in choking the voices of the hoi polloi. Five decades ago, the Hutchins Commission observed that democracy depended on informed judgements and that the press should help such a process. This can happen only when the press provides voice to all sections of the society. UNESCO insists on free access to both the media and the general public and on media's ready response to the concerns of the people and individuals, thus ensuring the participation of the public in the elaboration of information. The Sean McBride commission too said, "It must be recognised that communication is a personal right belonging to all individuals, not only journalists and governments, not only those who exercise political and economic power."

The right to claim media space and time is an important adjunct of the right to know. In the last years of power of the Congress party, V.N. Gadgil, a former minister for information and broadcasting, tried to move a private bill in Parliament giving the reader the right to reply. The right to reply is a part of the right to know in the same way as the latter is a part of the right to free expression. The media's right to know is linked to its duty to inform. If they fail to do it, the citizen will have to have the right to do it in the form of a reply or rejoinder. Explaining the bill, Gadgil said, "The Indian press, by and large, is a responsible press. However, there is a section of the press, which indulges in misreporting and misrepresentation. A person's reputation or business can be ruined by a simple false newspaper report. Taking legal action against persons responsible for such reports is an expensive and time-consuming process. It is, therefore necessary to give a statutory right of reply to ensure that individuals can set the record straight." The reaction of the Indian press to this bill was on expected lines. It was an unthinking attack on the bill showing utter intolerance of any suggestion from outside to persuade the press to be accountable.

Links With Economy

Even as the criticism of the penal provisions of the bill was justified, the opposition of the press to even a review of the bill was unfortunate. As a matter of fact, the Supreme Court upheld the right of a Prof. Shah (August 1992) to get a rejoinder published. Prof. Shah had earlier circulated a study paper that was very critical of the working of the Life Insurance Corporation of India. A Mr. Krishnan wrote an article in the Hindu challenging Prof. Shah's conclusions. LIC's house magazine, Yogakshema, in turn, reproduced Krishnan's article. Whereas the Hindu published Prof. Shah's rejoinder to Krishnan's article, Yogakshema refused to publish it. The supreme court held that LIC's refusal was unfair because fairness demanded that both viewpoints were placed before the readers, however limited be their number, to enable them to draw their own conclusions and observed that such refusal was unreasonable because there was no justification for refusing publication.

Therefore, the beneficiaries of the right to know include not only the media but also the public, who have a right to know not only from public institutions but also private agencies including the media. Today, the economy and the media are inseparable. In this alliance, the former uses the latter as cover for their misdeeds. The public has a right to know who is shielding whom and from what which again implies they have a right of access to such stores of information as concern the working of the market and the media. The state is shrinking in size. So are its activities and information originating from it. The major player in public activity today is the private sector and its exclusion from the bill is a mockery of democracy. The public should have a right to know what information the media are hiding and why.