The right to privacy

For a government that has
been busy granting the people of India rights to employment, education and food,
the United Progress Alliance has been lackadaisical in protecting the citizens’
right to privacy. Industrialist Ratan Tata was, therefore, right to seek the
protection of the Supreme Court in the matter relating to leaked tapes of
telephone tapping undertaken by the Union Government’s tax authorities. After
finishing its internal investigations, the Government must tell the Parliament
as to why the Income-tax Department ordered the tapping of the telephone of
public relations professional Niira Radia, what relevant information was
procured and what action taken and, most importantly, how those secret tapes got
leaked. A government has the right to gather information about illegal and
anti-national activities of a citizen, provided due procedure is followed. Even
so, there can be no justification for leaking such tapes to the media and making
private conversations public. If the tapes have revealed any act of criminality,
illegality and such like penal offences, the Government is duty-bound to take
action against such offenders. However, no government should allow its
intelligence arms to be used to play favourites with corporate houses, the media
or political rivals.

When conversations taped are
purely private in nature, perhaps malevolent, perhaps in bad taste, perhaps
revealing a lack of integrity or judgement on the part of the interlocutors, but
not pointing to any criminal misconduct, agencies of the Government have no
business to go public. The Government has correctly decided to probe the leak of
these tapes and the guilty ought to be punished.

The leaking of the tapes
has, of course, contributed to some soul-searching within the media and the
corporate world, and that is a good thing. A positive consequence of the ongoing
controversies could be that new norms of corporate, political, governmental and
media conduct will be adopted by all concerned. While the consequences of an
illegal act, namely the leaking of the tapes, have been positive both for the
media and public life, the act itself should not go unchallenged. There have
been far too many instances of a breach of privacy and governmental intrusion
into a citizen’s private life in recent months. An atmosphere of fear is being
generated. People worry if they are being spied upon and their privacy intruded.
What’s troubling is that rather than any national interest, such investigations
seem to serve political and corporate interests. There has to be a greater
degree of transparency in the functioning of revenue and intelligence agencies.
These agencies should not be seen as handmaidens of vested interests and those
in power. Shades of the ignominious Emergency Era are being painted, with
detractors of the ruling dispensation finding themselves in difficult
situations. These tendencies should be nipped in the bud. Hopefully, the Supreme
Court will do its bit to empower the citizen, defending the right to privacy
without in any way coming in the way of the normal functioning of various arms
of the Government. For their part, both the media and the corporate world have
their lessons to learn.

(Source : The Business
Standard, dated 1-12-2010)