K-P government has ensured that the IC becomes a toothless tiger which will never get its orders implemented
KARACHI: Everyone is familiar with the adage, ‘One step forward, two steps back’, whereas we, in Pakistan, have upped it to ‘one step forward, 10 steps (20 steps, 30 steps and so on) back’. A ray of hope had emerged when the PTI, riding on a mandate of transparency and accountability, had enacted, for the first time ever in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P), the Right to Information (RTI) Act in November 2013. It was a bold piece of legislation and it was felt that not only would it be a harbinger of good governance in K-P, but it would also have a domino effect on the other provinces to introduce their own, better, right to information legislations. And that it did, for it forced the PML-N to legislate Punjab’s own RTI law in December 2013, a bill that had been pending for more than four years. It also galvanised the federation and Sindh to work on bettering their archaic freedom of information laws.
However, all these gains may be lost as the K-P government has caved in to the arrogant mentality of legislators by amending the K-P RTI Act to exclude the province’s legislators from its ambit. Secondly, further subjecting the decisions of the Information Commission (IC) to the tedious and the Sisyphean judicial process of district and sessions court, the K-P government has ensured that the IC becomes a toothless tiger which will never get its orders implemented. For rather than complying with the IC’s orders, the government can easily challenge it in the district or sessions court and embroil the process in never-ending litigation. Why the K-P government agreed to roll back all the gains is a mystery. But the mystery goes beyond the obvious and raises the fundamental question of why the peoples’ representatives, who have been elected by the people, whose perks and privileges are financed by the people, and who sit in a legislature financed also by the people’s money, do not feel themselves to be answerable to the very same people. That is the crux of the issue; should servants not be answerable to their masters? Come voting time, our representatives assure us that they will serve us in the assemblies and after getting elected, they don’t even feel the need to be answerable. This has been our catch-22 situation since long and there seems to be no end to it.
The other dilemma is that this cave-in by the K-P government will deliver a negative domino effect for the other provinces that may roll back their progress on transparency and accountability taking the lead from K-P. Why is it that for this beleaguered nation, the light at the end of the tunnel always turns out to be the light of an oncoming train. Can no one turn that light into the first ray of sunshine?
Dr Raza Gardezi
Published in The Express Tribune, June 30th, 2015.
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