DailyPost 2752
OPENESS AND TRANSPARENCY
We are scared of being transparent. The democratic movement towards transparency or the show of it have no takers. Major stakeholders bask under the cover opaqueness. The name of the game is to take giant strides towards greater opaqueness while indulging in best possible lip service and display of an urge to achieve and practice transparency. That is reason why it keeps breaking at its seams over and over again. The propellent to transparency is barely talked about, though we have all realized that transparency cannot hang in mid-air. Societal openness is at the core of it.
Do we believe is societal openness? If that would have been the case then, in a democratic ecosystem, the existent societal openness could have smoothly transitioned into democratic openness. Our experience is that it did not happen. Suffice to say we had insurmountable hiccups in our societal format which kept on surfacing, as one bottleneck after the other. Why has there not been any credible movement towards openness. Our societies don’t subscribe to it. The comfort of openness cannot be understood by people who having hiding every piece of information and have crude confidentiality as their DNA. There is a common feeling that if the worst variant of confidentiality is not there to take care of us, we will not be able to deliver at peace and of quality.
At every step; every law, every rule and every practice are grounded in the lack of official openness. The machinations of the hide and seek Indian families and the politics in it, translates into community hide and seek and lo and behold, it has manifested in our governance and the overarching functional democracy. One aspect of battle for transparency we have seen in the right to information, how much have we gained out of it, would be a billion-dollar question. The legality was created perforce, and even today getting worthwhile information remains a challenge. It was not a natural or organic result of openness.
The beauty of the whole exercise is that some laws of this nature exist and exist for decades but those have not been able to make any dent in the lack of openness we practice so blatantly. Information is power they say but in Indian communities and governance, hiding information is real power. Why have we not inched closer to an open date regime. What ease would it bring into our lives? Don’t we deserve it? If we have to exist as a robust democracy only openness and organic transparency is the way out.
TRANPARENCEY CANNOT BE CONSIGNED TO A LAW OR TWO, IT IS A WAY OF LIFE.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.