RTI & Political Parties: On 3rd June 2013 full bench of CIC passed a detailed Order (53 pages) holding that 6 political parties:
1) Indian National Congress/ All IndiaCongress Committee (AICC)
2) Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)
3) Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM)
4) Communist Party of India (CPI)
5) Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and
6) Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)
are covered as “public authority” under the RTI Act (Covered in my article of July 2013). Last para of the order reads as under:
93. The Presidents, General/Secretaries of these Political Parties are hereby directed to designate CPIOs and the Appellate Authorities as their headquarters in 06 weeks time. The CPIOs so appointed will respond to the RTI applications extracted in this order in 4 weeks time. Besides, the Presidents, General/Secretaries of the above mentioned Political Parties are also directed to comply with the provision of section 4(1) (b) of the RTI Act by the way of making voluntary disclosures on the subjects mentioned in the said clause.
It appears that none of the said 6 parties acted on the above direction.
The Commission had issued notices on 7th February and 25th March, to these parties seeking their detailed comments on the complaint by Agarwal that they had not complied with the orders of the CIC. The notice had been sent to the chiefs of Congress, BJP, BSP and NCP and to the general secretaries of CPI and CPI-M.
In what could spell trouble for Congress president Sonia Gandhi, the Delhi HC in August, 2014 issued direction on a petition accusing her failure to abide by a Central Information Commission directive.
HC directed the CIC to decide in six months a complaint against Gandhi that she hasn’t implemented the transparency panel’s direction making political parties answerable under the RTI Act. The court acted on a petition filed by RTI activist R. K. Jain who had earlier approached the Commission with his complaint against Gandhi saying that party had returned his RTI application without furnishing details that were asked.
Now in the month of September 2014, The Central Information Commission (CIC) has issued showcause notices to BJP President Amit Shah and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, along with the heads of four other political parties, asking why an inquiry should not be instituted for non-compliance of its order to implement the RTI Act.
