Transparent lobbyists, opaque govt

Our government is on the verge of establishing three integrated ‘theatre’ commands for actualising jointness in the planning and operations of our military forces. Meanwhile, our babus are turning the government’s promise of transparent governance into a ‘theatre of the absurd’. Their manner of handling RTI applications seeking mundane information makes little sense.

Readers may recall my lament in these columns (DH dated 18/06/2023) about the lack of transparency in the negotiations that India is having with the European Union (EU) for a free trade agreement (FTA). This is a sequel to that story.

Last week, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling upon our government to take all necessary measures to stop the ethnic violence in Manipur, protect religious minorities, and pre-empt any further escalation. Predictably, our official response labelled it as an unacceptable interference in our internal affairs and reflecting a colonial mindset. Meanwhile, thousands of displaced citizens in Manipur are mourning their dead, tending to the injured, and hoping for peace to be able to go back to the smouldering remains of their homes and churches.

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Our government also publicly admitted that it had approached EU lawmakers soon after multiple parliamentary factions jointly tabled the Manipur resolution for debate and adoption. Alber & Geiger, a leading ‘government relations’ law firm, recently issued a statement asking the EU to take up the Manipur issue with India first, before discussing the ‘harsh’ resolution at the European Parliament so that the ongoing FTA negotiations would not get jeopardised.

On its website, this firm counts amongst its victories, the assistance given to our government to successfully “navigate the political landscape in the European Parliament” and “address lawmakers’ concerns about human rights and privacy protection” in India. The firm is said to have provided EU lawmakers with factual evidence and a clearer understanding of the Indian situation which, apparently, resulted in their support for the FTA.

In June 2023, three identical RTI applications were submitted to the External Affairs and Commerce Ministries and our embassy to the EU in Brussels, seeking the names of external agencies engaged to support and advise India on the EU FTA pact, their terms of reference, the amount of funds spent on them, and action taken reports they submitted in return.

The External Affairs Ministry (MEA) replied that it had not hired any such agency since April 2019. The Commerce Ministry is yet to send a substantial reply despite the 30-day deadline lapsing last week. Our embassy in Brussels rejected the entire application invoking Section 8(1) of the RTI Act!

The manner of treatment of these RTIs is absurd because Section 8(1) contains more than 30 grounds for rejecting information whose disclosure will prejudicially affect our national security or foreign relations, or violate trade secrets or personal privacy or due process under criminal law. One is at a loss to understand how all these grounds are attracted.

Amusingly enough some of that information is already available publicly – from the lobby firm, not our government. Alber & Geiger have declared on the EU’s Transparency Register for lobbyists that our embassy in Brussels hired them for assistance with the FTA process and on the EU-Russia sanctions. Our embassy is reported to have contributed between 300,000-399,000 Euros (about Rs 2.75–3.68 crore) to their revenue in 2022 alone! But our embassy thinks all this information is still secret, a sarkari secret. Indisputably, the funds that the embassy spent formed must have formed part of the MEA’s budget that our parliament sanctioned in 2022. Yet, the MEA is in denial mode.

It is not enough if democracy merely courses through our veins. Core values of democratic governance like transparency and public accountability must cross the blood-brain barrier to saturate our grey matter.