The Congress has been leading the pack of the political whimpering and screaming after the central information commission (CIC) ruled that the six major ones among them come under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. It is paradoxical, given the fact that it was the Congress itself whose government heralded the transparency revolution. Its president never tired patting herself on the back for giving an instrument to people to fight corruption and improve governance.

Now that same instrument is going to be used against the party itself. Congress spokesman Sandeep Dikshit has said the CIC verdict is fundamentally incorrect and adventurist, union ministers P Chidambaram and Salman Khurshid thought the order was not based on credible argument. (Curiously, Rahul Gandhi, who the other day spoke zealously about the need to reform the Congress party structure should say something on this CIC verdict too.) CPM and other parties too have similar thoughts, though the BJP has largely favoured transparency.

What are their arguments?

* Argument 1: Parties will be flooded by RTI queries and they do not have the resources to deal with them.

The law has around for more than seven years now, and no government department has been flooded by RTI queries. As for resources, who will believe that the Congress and the BJP with their tens of thousands of volunteers and the government-given land are short of hands and space? This argument comes from the folks who are going to invest heavily in social media to reach out to voters.

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Also, this argument is similar the one we heard a couple of years ago, when the government was toying with the idea of diluting the provisions of the law. It was argued that there was a need to weed out frivolous petitions.

READ MORE: ‘Frivolous RTI pleas’ is frivolous argument

* Argument 2: The parties already accountable to the election commission (EC), the income tax authorities, and to people at large through elections. RTI will only bring “bureaucratic accountability”.

However, accountability towards EC is within the limits of the Representation of People Act and not comprehensive. In the absence of electoral reforms (thanks to great opposition from the same political parties that are today opposing RTI), accountability via elections is only symbolic, not effective.

READ MORE: How political parties are making a mockery of election reforms

RTI is just another way of ensuring accountability to people. There can be no harm in it.

* Argument 3: Political parties are not ‘public authority’, they are not part of the state. The CIC has used “functional logic” instead of “organisational” logic to define them as ‘public authority’.

A simple response to that is that the parties receive state funding in various ways and thus fit the definition. More importantly, parties – more than any other component of our republic – run governments. If they are not part of the state, then they are super-states in themselves. Keeping this all-important element of democracy outside the purview of RTI while bringing even private players (in the case of public-private partnerships or PPPs) within it is rather contradictory.

* Argument 4: This will interfere with parties’ internal affairs. Even parties would start using RTI to spy on one another.

Firstly, the query will have to come to the party itself, and it can well deny information if it is not in ‘public interest’. Secondly, if the applicant persists and goes to the information commission, the details sought will have to be of ‘public interest’ – not about internal affairs like, for example, how Nitin Gadkari was removed as BJP president or what the Congress’s strategy is behind so effectively losing Gujarat for 18 years now. If matters of public interest – especially source of funds – are made open to scrutiny, it can only strengthen democracy.

In any case, as long as sources of donations below Rs 20,000 need not be mentioned before EC and tax authorities, the parties have little to fear. And they are striving hard not to make that provision stringent.