Defending the indefensible and miserably failing ----- his electors should ask the "new boy in the game" how he manages to represent them if what he listens to is the "old boys club". "Manu Joseph :You’re saying that one of the big tickets acts is the Right to Information Act. Why don’t the six major political parties want to be under the purview of this act? Shashi Tharoor : Personally, I would have had no difficulty with this, but my voice doesn’t count on that. Let’s just say that it’s a decision made by all the political parties. I have got questions, needless to say, because when I don’t like what my own party is doing, I ask some of the leaders. What I was told is that the kinds of information that can legitimately be sought under the Right to Information Act can also be legitimately sought from the Election Commission. Your budgets, your money, your expenditure—you can file it with the Election Commission and you can tomorrow file an RTI application with the Election Commission and get it . If you [allow people to] file an RTI application towards parties, they say you would be deluged with politically motivated—maliciously motivated—questions, and the examples they are giving [are of] questions about how you choose a particular candidate and not another candidate, questions about how you raise the money that was spent on a particular campaign, or whatever. Various things... Manu Joseph: That’s a reasonable question, isn’t it? Shashi Tharoor :They say that we get 20,000 contributions of Rs 100 [each]. Where are you going to keep account of it and give receipts below a certain figure (I forget what that figure is)? But they are saying that in practical terms, we would all be snowed under. Certainly, we are not only a litigious nation but an RTI-losing nation. And the worry is definitely that the parties would suffer in the process, so [this] seems to be something on which the parties are in unanimity. Manu Joseph: Are you convinced? Shashi Tharoor: Look, the problem with me on these questions is that I am a new boy in this game. I have been in politics for four years and a bit. These are all people who have multiples of that experience of the way the politics works in this country. They say, ‘You are still learning. We’ve been at it. We tell you how it is going to be.’ And I really don’t have the basis to question their judgment. I think the only MP, to the best of my knowledge, who has questioned [the paries’ resistance to the RTI] is Jai Panda of the BJD. But frankly, the logic in the BJD is, ‘This thing is going to happen anyway so why not take the moral high ground?’ Because if it really—you know, in our position—would actually result in the change, then maybe we wouldn’t take the position... That seems to be what’s happening in these parties.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 16:25:14 +0000
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