The question is the citizen's right: a government that fears questions fears its people

For six days last month, the Tamil Nadu government tried to do something extraordinary: it tried to make the citizen stop asking questions. Government Order Ms No. 57, dated September 21, classified the Public (Law and Order) Department as an "intelligence and security organisation" under Section 24(4) of the RTI Act, 2005 — placing beyond the citizen's reach the very records that concern police firings, custodial deaths, alleged torture and preventive detention.

The order collapsed within days. Opposition parties, transparency campaigners — and even the ruling TVK's own allies, the Congress and the VCK — rose against it, and Law Minister C T R Nirmal Kumar announced its withdrawal on September 27, barely an hour after he had defended it. The government offered no explanation for issuing the order, and none for revoking it.

This newspaper does not celebrate the retreat; it records the instinct. A government that moves, on its own, to shield its policing records from public scrutiny has told us how it thinks about the citizen: as a subject to be managed, not a sovereign to be answered.

Periyar's rationalism — the philosophical bedrock of the Dravidian movement — begins with the right to question. To question everything was not a slogan for the opposition benches; it was a discipline for power itself. A movement born of the Justice paper, which made the colonial state answerable in print, should need no reminding that transparency is not a favour the state grants. It is a right the citizen holds.

And the record beyond this one order is damning. The Satark Nagrik Sangathan's 2024–25 report found more than 41,000 appeals and complaints pending before the Tamil Nadu State Information Commission as of June — a commission functioning with four of its eight sanctioned Information Commissioners and no Chief Information Commissioner at all. You do not need to exempt departments from the RTI Act when you have already starved the institution that enforces it.

The TVK government came to power promising a new politics. New politics was supposed to mean cleaner politics — not a law-and-order department quietly reclassified as a spy agency in a gazette notification. Inexperience is the kindest explanation available; disdain for scrutiny is the other. Neither flatters the incumbent.

The demand, then, is simple and it is old: fill the Information Commission, clear the backlog, and publish — proactively, routinely — the records of policing that the citizen has every right to see. The question is the citizen's right. A government that fears questions fears its own people.