Information Commissioner Sridhar Acharyalu has questioned the manner in which Chief Information Commissioner R.K. Mathur dissolved and reconstituted a Bench hearing complaints against political parties. He has said this action will erode the independence of individual information commissioners.
“It raises serious questions about the independence of individual information commissioners who can be part of a Bench for some time and not for some other, against his will, without his consent and without a reason or without giving a reason. Can a larger Bench be constituted without reference from the existing Bench,” he asked Mr. Mathur in a February 22, 2018 letter.
The letter, which was circulated among all information commissioners at a recent meeting, was a follow-up to the February 7 letter which also raised questions about the manner in which the Bench of Sridhar Acharyulu, Sudhir Bhargava and Bimal Julka hearing complaints against six parties was dissolved by Mr. Mathur.
The BJP, the Congress, the BSP, the NCP, the CPI and the CPI(M) were brought under the ambit of the Right to Information Act by a full Bench of the Commission in 2013. It is alleged that their failure to comply with the directives has brought on the complaints before the Commission.
For six months in 2016, the Bench heard the case; but in December that year, Mr. Julka recused himself from it, citing his pending work. In August 2017, a new Bench was constituted by Mr. Mathur, in which none of the members of the previous Bench was included. Interestingly, in January 2017, Mr. Acharyulu was taken off the RTI matters pertaining to the Human Resource Development Ministry, days after he ordered disclosure of Delhi University academic records for the year in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi passed out. He was assigned the matters just 10 days earlier.
“Distribution and redistribution of subjects cannot be left to any single individual authority, but to be decided by the Commission as such in a reasonable manner,” he said in the letter. He called for guidelines to avoid “external pressures” to change the subject of a particular commission or remove one commissioner from a Bench.
The matter of the political parties has not been heard since a new four-member Bench was constituted in August 2017 despite a Delhi High Court order to complete the case within a time limit. The Bench has also been reconstituted after one of the members retired in January this year. “After dozens of specific complaints, we are consuming years in the process. What kind of message we are sending across the nation? Why are we not discussing these issues at the CIC meetings?” Mr. Acharyulu said, asking for transparent and independent decisions on the “critical issue of political parties.”
“If we cannot do this, cannot act independently, cannot protect the individual independence of information commissioners, we cannot still claim to be an institution of accountability and transparency. In such an event of disaster, should this institution continue without a purpose as a burden on the exchequer and wait for the people to demand its scrapping? Please think over,” he said.
Mr. Acharyalu demanded that his letters — dated February 7 and February 22 addressed to Mr. Mathur and circulated among all information commissioners — be posted on the commission’s website. “As this issue is of high public interest and because the people have right to information from political parties, these aspects must be deliberated and placed in the public domain,” he said.
