The week the government tried to blind the public

On September 21, the TVK government issued Government Order Ms No 57. In dry bureaucratic language, it exempted the Public (Law and Order) Department from the Right to Information Act, 2005, declaring it an intelligence and security organisation under Section 24(4). Consider what that department handles: inquiry reports into police firings. Inquiry reports into custodial deaths. Police torture. Under that order, the public would have had no right to see any of it. A government that promised zero compromise had moved to ensure the public could never check the compromise. The backlash was swift and came from every direction, and within six days the order stood revoked. A minister, CTR Nirmal Kumar, offered the now-familiar formulation: if the public is not happy, the matter may be reconsidered. But reconsideration is not the story. The instinct is the story. The first impulse of this government, when it looked at the department that investigates its own police's violence, was not sunlight but a shutter. Revocation under pressure is not transparency; it is transparency's hostage photo. A government does not get credit for untying a knot it tied itself, in the dark, hoping nobody would notice. Periyar taught that power which hides its violence fears the light more than it fears the violence itself. Anna taught that the ballot is the weapon of the powerless, but a weapon needs a target, and a target needs to be seen. The RTI Act exists precisely because the state cannot be trusted to narrate its own conduct. To exempt the very department that polices the police is to ask citizens to trust the one institution they most need the right to question. Ask the simple questions the order tried to bury: how many custodial deaths has Tamil Nadu recorded this year, and what did the inquiries conclude? How many police firings, and on whose orders? These are not intelligence secrets. They are the public's business, paid for by the public, inflicted on the public. The order is revoked. The instinct that produced it is not. It will return in another file number, another subsection, another quiet September. The public's job is to be watching when it does. That is what the RTI Act is for. That is what this paper is for.