Hi Friends !
I just saw this article in Yahoo and felt like sharing it with people . why only few are dared to take the risk and the rest are not .
This is a question that all of us would be willing to ask but why dont we take the steps ourselves ????
This is not the first time that whistleblowers have faced the music for exposing corruption in the country. Four years ago, India was rocked by the murder of Satyendra Dubey, an IITian who was killed for exposing corruption in the National Highway Building program. Two years later, Shanmugham Manjunath, a graduate from IIM (Lucknow) who was working with a state-owned oil company was murdered for sealing petrol pumps selling adulterated fuel. These whistleblowers are the not the first to face the wrath of corrupt officials, neither will they be the last.
So are we shocked by the brutal murder of Jethwa and the other activists who wanted to tame these corrupt officials? I don’t think we should be; instead, we should be shocked at our own impotence to raise our voice against the nexus between the politicians, the judiciary and the mafia. RTI activists have been victimized across the country ever since the act was enforced in 2005. These activists cannot win the battle alone. So will the government ever gets its act right to protect these whistleblowers?
There was a huge campaign to enforce the Whistleblowers Act after Manjunath’s case. There was a raging debate on whether the country needs to enact the act. The bill was supposed to be introduced in the Parliament in the later part of the budget session. But it is yet to happen. With the way things are proceeding in the current session, there is very little hope.
The latest attacks on RTI activists tend to question India’s landmark transparency law. The state passed the RTI to allow citizens to use this as a weapon to seek information. But it is falling short in bringing the real culprits to book or in giving protection, undermining its own commitment to truth. By not protecting the RTI activists and by allowing them to be harassed, the state is failing to uphold the spirit of RTI and in turn weakening the spirit of democracy.
I just saw this article in Yahoo and felt like sharing it with people . why only few are dared to take the risk and the rest are not .
This is a question that all of us would be willing to ask but why dont we take the steps ourselves ????
Whistleblowers!
Information comes at a price and in some cases even at the cost of a life. This is true for RTI activists who have been murdered in the last six months trying to expose corruption in our country. On July 20, an RTI activist Amit Jethwa was shot dead by an unknown assailant. Jethwa was trying to expose the nexus between officials, politicians and the mining mafia in Gujarat. And like most honest souls, he believed that he could make a difference in the system by diligently using democratic tools of empowerment. He relied heavily on the Right to Information (RTI) Act to plug the holes in the system, finally falling into the hole himself.This is not the first time that whistleblowers have faced the music for exposing corruption in the country. Four years ago, India was rocked by the murder of Satyendra Dubey, an IITian who was killed for exposing corruption in the National Highway Building program. Two years later, Shanmugham Manjunath, a graduate from IIM (Lucknow) who was working with a state-owned oil company was murdered for sealing petrol pumps selling adulterated fuel. These whistleblowers are the not the first to face the wrath of corrupt officials, neither will they be the last.
So are we shocked by the brutal murder of Jethwa and the other activists who wanted to tame these corrupt officials? I don’t think we should be; instead, we should be shocked at our own impotence to raise our voice against the nexus between the politicians, the judiciary and the mafia. RTI activists have been victimized across the country ever since the act was enforced in 2005. These activists cannot win the battle alone. So will the government ever gets its act right to protect these whistleblowers?
There was a huge campaign to enforce the Whistleblowers Act after Manjunath’s case. There was a raging debate on whether the country needs to enact the act. The bill was supposed to be introduced in the Parliament in the later part of the budget session. But it is yet to happen. With the way things are proceeding in the current session, there is very little hope.
The latest attacks on RTI activists tend to question India’s landmark transparency law. The state passed the RTI to allow citizens to use this as a weapon to seek information. But it is falling short in bringing the real culprits to book or in giving protection, undermining its own commitment to truth. By not protecting the RTI activists and by allowing them to be harassed, the state is failing to uphold the spirit of RTI and in turn weakening the spirit of democracy.
In India till date there have been eight murders and 20 serious attacks on RTI activists in the last one year. Politicians and corrupt leaders have found a way to permanently silence RTI activists.
ReplyDeleteSatyendra Dube, Manjunath Shanmugham, Yogendra Pande, Satish Shetty, Navleen Kumar, Amit Jethwa……. Martyrs of modern India.