Marie Magleby and Professor Edward Carter, Communications

When governments keep secrets from citizens, corruption prevails and democracy remains a far-fetched ideal at best. However, government transparency – an antidote to corruption – is an inconceivable idea to much of the global population. In a high-pressure effort to approach this ideal, India enacted the Right to Information Act in October, 2005. Citizens now enjoy increased access to the inner-workings of government, and public servants are held to a higher standard of accountability. Through my research, I explored how journalists have used their newfound right to information to enhance their reporting practices and propagate public information through the media.

The communications rift between the Indian people and their government was cemented in 1923 with the Open Secrets Act, which gave officials effective authority to withhold information from the public without explanation. Originally intended as an anti-espionage measure during British colonization, it prohibits one from disclosing information that could affect India’s sovereignty and security. Perhaps it was more than a combination of situational hubris and convoluted verbiage that caused authorities to abuse the Official Secrets Act and deviate from its original intent. Regardless of reasons, “official secrets” began rolling off the tongues of officials, journalists and regular citizens alike as a dogmatic excuse for misinformation and the lack of transparency. Helpless, people succumbed to the idea that the government had the authority to do as they pleased behind closed doors. Their definition of Indian democracy became primarily one of election rather than representation, and authority rather than accountability.

Soon after India’s independence in 1947, framers of the new constitution included clauses guaranteeing the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression. Since 1950 when the constitution went into effect, the Supreme Court has interpreted this to include the freedom of the press. In effect, the constitution has repealed press restrictions and fostered the legal stage for one of the fastest-growing journalism industries in the world. But freedom of the Indian press is a result of decades of legal evolution; no law guarantees press freedom expressly, but it has been molded in time by several pivotal decisions of the Supreme Court.

Since the Act’s legal beginnings, journalism has been a catalyst for the information movement among the literate public. How-to articles and publication of success stories have encouraged more people to exercise this right when they were stifled from doing so before. Nevertheless, despite this tempered approach to the altruism of civic journalism, journalists on the whole have yet to recognize the latent power that lies in their own right to information. By definition, information is magnified when it reaches the hands of a journalist. As professional liaisons between the common people and their government, journalists have the social prerogative to pry into official corruption and stimulate change as necessary. Through the Right to Information Act, the Indian government has taken bold steps that enhance the journalists’ means to this end. Indian journalism, however, has yet to catch this vision and its role as official watchdog remains only fractionally fulfilled. A land that is laden with tradition, India is simply taking its time while it grasps the potential of the information revolution.

This research came at an opportune time in that the right to information is taking hold in its many arenas of government and society. On the other hand, it was perhaps preemptive in that few journalists understand their role in propagating the right. This made my interview-based research difficult because my questions probed what was not happening over what was, and I was asking questions about elements of the right to information that had never crossed the journalists’ minds. To some, my ideals ran contrary to theirs, which created an interesting dilemma for me to sift through as I continue to compile my research.