Latest news with #MazdoorKisanShaktiSangathan
Hindustan Times
01-08-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Religion vs dissent: Which right wins?
The Supreme Court has, through multiple judgments, affirmed the right to protest while imposing 'reasonable restrictions' on its exercise in public spaces. The Court's rationale has been that the right to protest cannot be exercised at the expense of public order, with considerations such as the smooth flow of traffic weighing on the court's mind. As the Kanwar Yatra ended this year, the Delhi Police saw a surge in complaints on traffic congestion, excessive noise and disturbances well into the night over the span of a few days. There have been reports of hooliganism, aggression and violence by the kanwariyas. In India, streets are not just for commuting: The everyday affairs of community, religion, celebration, mourning, and social life play out on them too. (ANI) There are few legal challenges to these acts or restrictions on the Kanwar Yatra. Religious practice, the reasoning goes, must be given a longer rope. But does such accommodation on disruption of regular life in the city pass muster? Every year, several groups of kanwariyas traverse the streets of North India. In recent years, the Kanwar Yatra has grown in both popularity and scale — large trucks are hired, food stalls set up (with QR codes displaying information on the seller's religion in some places) and roaring boomboxes announce its arrival. It may seem that the yatra has turned into an opportunity for unrestrained revelry and lawlessness. Often, the yatra seems no more about personal, pious observations, but a means of loud and disruptive assertion. By and large, the kanwariyas have a de facto immunity — actions that would normally invite the attention of law enforcement agencies are ignored and even actively permitted. In India, streets are not just for commuting: The everyday affairs of community, religion, celebration, mourning, and social life play out on them too. But the access to this public space, and the degree to which rights can be exercised, are differentiated. Who may occupy a public space and for what purpose is neither universal nor equal. In Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (2018), the Supreme Court held that the rights under Articles 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(b) of protestors have to be balanced with the rights of commuters. Permission for a demonstration or public meeting should be granted keeping in view its effect on traffic, human safety, and public tranquillity. Similarly, in Himat Lal Shah (1973), the Court held that the right to a public street can be regulated so that all can enjoy that right. In the wake of protests at Shaheen Bagh against the Citizenship Amendment Act, the Supreme Court found in 2020, that the right to dissent could not be at the cost of inconvenience to commuters and authorities must take action to prevent undue encroachments and obstructions in public spaces. In 2021, during the farmers' protests, the Supreme Court once again remarked that protests could not inconvenience the general public and lead to roads being blocked. The only time that the Kanwar Yatra has been made subject to legitimate restrictions was in 2021, when the Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of the yatra held despite the rising cases of Covid-19. No doubt, all sects have a right to profess and practise religion, subject to 'public order, morality and health'. The right to protest is restricted by similar considerations. Should the State then not be equally concerned by the civic inconveniences caused by religious processions, as it is by the peaceful public gathering of dissenters? If freedom and liberty are the cornerstones of our Constitution, their equal application is its chief anchor. The popular saying 'your right to swing your wrist ends where my nose begins' must apply in equal measure to all those who lay claim to a public space. Katyayani Suhrud and Trisha Chandran are lawyers practising in the Supreme Court of India. The views expressed are personal.
Indian Express
25-04-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
Opinion How an amendment to the Data Protection Act puts the Right to Information at risk
For over a month now, 30-plus civil rights organisations such as the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), Common Cause, the National Campaign for People's Right to Information (NCPRI), Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS) and the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) have been raising an alarm about the dilution of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005 through the amendments introduced in the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDPA). The abovementioned dilution is the amendment to Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act through Section 44(3) of the DPDPA. Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, as it stands now, exempts disclosure of information if it causes 'an unwarranted invasion of privacy'. A disclosure of personal information that may infringe one's privacy can only be made if 'a larger public interest justifies the disclosure of such information'. Section 44(3) proposes to change this provision to only say 'any information which relates to personal information'. This means there will be a blanket restriction on disclosure of 'any personal information' through the RTI Act. This is a significant departure from jurisprudence on transparency in other jurisdictions that have robust data privacy laws such as the European Union and the UK. The amendment also flies in the face of the Supreme Court's settled principle on the necessity of balancing the right to transparency that flows from Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution and the right to privacy which has been held to be an inherent part of Article 21 in the case Central Public Information Officer, Supreme Court of India v Subhash Chandra Agarwal. There are many immediate and obvious concerns about the impact of such an amendment. For example, past successes through RTI investigations to ascertain businesses that may have profited from public sector procurement or verifying beneficiaries could be impossible after the amendment is enforced. However, there is an unusual twist to the story. While the DPDPA envisions protecting the privacy of those in power, the applicants who seek information through the process must be utterly transparent with the powers that be. Section 6(1) of the RTI Act provides a statutory right to citizens to file RTI request applications in electronic form. In 2023, the Supreme Court held that this means that all states, Courts and Union Territories must have an RTI web portal. In 2025, the states of Sikkim, Nagaland and Manipur made their RTI web portals. However, the web portals are so designed that they seek mandatory disclosure of Aadhar card, or other identity proof. While Bihar and Odisha have had RTI web portals since before the Supreme Court's Order; they also make Aadhaar card or identity proof disclosure mandatory on their websites. For anyone who has visited the Wikipedia page for 'Attacks on RTI Activists in India', this is a cause for immediate concern. However, the concern becomes amplified in light of an Office Memorandum (OM) issued by the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) under the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions on June 20, 2017, stating: 'the personal information details like Aadhar no. should not be asked for while handling applications.' To make matters worse, the Central Information Commission ('CIC') observed in Vishwas Bhambhurkar v Public Information Officer that 'denial of information for lack of Aadhaar card will be a serious breach of right, which was guaranteed by the RTI Act and amounts to the harassment of the applicant'. In light of the CIC's judgment and the DoPT's OM, mandating Aadhaar cards for RTI applications is a serious breach of privacy. This has not stopped the developers of the RTI web portals of Nagaland, Manipur, Sikkim, Bihar or Odisha from indulging in this practice. Among the five, Sikkim stands out as the only website designed by the National Informatics Centre, Sikkim. A body directly affiliated with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology should have even less of a reason to plead ignorance of a seven-year-old OM from another central ministry in relation to this issue. One would be hard pressed to find a good reason for any of the state governments to plead ignorance on an OM specifically issued with instructions on the process of filing RTI applications, while making a web portal for filing the applications. However, the most unusual of the privacy concerns arise from the RTI web portal for Punjab. The state of Punjab mandates that a user must share their device location in order to be able to log into the RTI web portal. This mandatory sharing of location could very well violate the fundamental right to privacy recognised by the Supreme Court in K Puttaswamy v Union of India. In Puttaswamy, the Supreme Court has clearly stated that 'any infringement on privacy of an individual must pass the three-fold test of legality, necessity and proportionality'. It is difficult to imagine that a demand for device location data passes the proportionality test, specially paired with the 'take it or leave it' manner in which it is provided. It certainly is concerning that disclosure of device location is made mandatory to avail a statutory right. The Punjab RTI web portal's privacy policy is also a significant departure from the other RTI web portals in the country. The portal reserves the right to gather certain information about the user, such as 'IP addresses, domain name, browser type, operating system, the date and time of the visit, etc.' The website does claim however, that it does not process this data unless an attempt to damage the site has been detected. Most peculiarly, the government also states that access to this data can be provided to 'regulators, law enforcement or any third party' at government's complete discretion. The silver lining here is that the issue of unwarranted invasions of privacy on RTI web portals is limited to Punjab, Odisha, Bihar, Nagaland, Sikkim and Manipur. However, it is worth noting that nearly every RTI web portal in the country is incomplete in its onboarding of all public authorities. Which means that certain authorities can only be contacted through physical applications, submitted in person or by post. Hence, demands for identity proofs by PIOs (public information officers) could largely be undocumented in these cases. This demand for identity proof practice may even be entirely undetectable, unless a wide-scale inspection of the practice is addressed by State and Central Information Commissions in the annual reports. As of date, the Annual reports published by the CIC and the SICs are entirely silent on this issue. The hope is that someday governments at the centre and the state will be uniform in the applicability of transparency laws and in upholding the privacy of applicants exercising their fundamental and statutory rights.
