PERHAPS one of the most important Bills to be tabled in Parliament after Cabinet approval in August is the proposed law seeking to protect whistleblowers from official retaliation. After the RTI (Right to Information) legislation, this Bill, if passed in the right spirit and without any emasculation, will be equal in import. It will be another vital blow in support of good governance and Best Government practices.In summary, the measure will authorize the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) to ensure that it protects the identity of citizens and government officials who expose fraud, waste and mismanagement in high places. While trying to insulate the system against frivolous complaints through disciplinary action against those who make them, the Bill simultaneously seeks to empower the CVC to punish those who either reveal the identity of or retaliate against whistleblowers.
The retaliation has often been bloody. Manjunath Shanmugam and Satyendra Dubey were murdered. Dubey, an IIT Kanpur civil engineering graduate, paid with his life for daring to take on the might of the highway construction mafia in Bihar. Shanmugam, an IOC employee and IIM, Lucknow, alumnus, blew the whistle on Uttar Pradesh’s petrol pump adulteration racket. RTI activists have been hounded, beaten up and gunned down as was Amit Jethwa, shot dead right outside the Ahmedabad High Court two months ago after naming BJP’s Junagadh MP, Dinu Solanki, during his expose of criminal mining in the Gir forest preserve. A few months earlier, Vitthal Gite was butchered in Aurangabad for uncovering wrongdoing in a village school in Beed.
These horror stories are endless. They reveal two streams of consciousness in our nation – one wedded to honesty and freedom from fear, the other driven by greed and venality. Our great hope – and an inspiration for future generations – that we need not wring our hands in despair over the fate of this nation lies in the refusal of our whistleblowers to give up notwithstanding the dangers they face.
Not all whistleblowers wind up with a bullet hole in their heads or a knife across their throats. The majority of them – in the bureaucracy – are harassed, hounded, declared medically insane or pushed into do-nothing jobs and bureaucratic Gulags. No one hears about them as they vanish into the black hole. It is for this reason that gfiles has chosen to highlight, on our cover, the story of C Umashankar, an intrepid Scheduled Caste IAS officer who dared to take on Tamil Nadu’s formidable political establishment. His case will probably go down as a classic in the annals of Indian whistle blowing. Barring bullets and hatchets, there is little that the might of the state has not thrown at him. He remains unbowed, a beacon to others who refuse to tolerate fraud and injustice.
The whistleblower Bill is a powerful step in the right direction, but the nation needs to tackle fundamental reforms such as creating a Constitutional system of a true separation of powers in which the legislature no longer serves as a slavish extension of the executive and thereby assumes a more independent role of oversight through which it can better protect whistleblowers.
INDERJIT BADHWAR
