People’s movements brought rights-based laws: Aruna Roy

• AAP has brought fresh hope but still in nascent stage

• Common man has a say in policy making due to RTI

Hyderabad: Political and social activist Aruna Roy on Thursday said that all rights-based laws had come from people’s movements. There was scope for people to work outside politics and there was a space for conscious politics. “India is a vibrant system with a pluralistic society,” she said.

The activist, who was in Hyderabad to deliver a lecture on the ‘Democratic Governance- A Contemporary Discourse’ at University of Hyderabad (UoH), said that the nascent efforts of AAP had brought a fresh hope but it was too early to make any assessment.

“They have greater challenges ahead. AAP’s testing times would begin when they start engaging with rural India. Electricity, water and corruption apart there are other questions that need to be addressed,” she said after receiving Doctor of Literature (Honoris Causa) from UoH.

Aruna, a former civil servant, who left the civil services after serving for six years in 1974 to plunge into social activism, recalled the struggle over the years and spoke about the democratic process and the people’s movement, especially in Rajasthan for Right to Information (RTI).

Issues of governance

On the early days of RTI, she said that Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), the organisation she founded, was often critiqued on two aspects. The first was asking for transparency and accountability, an esoteric concern of seminar rooms and bureaucrats. The other was that a radical change would only happen with a complete change in the regime.

“In a democracy one needs to own the government as the single largest institution paid for and maintained by the tax payers’ money. The power of RTI and campaigns helped ordinary people to lay claim over the centres of power and decision-making in government, she added.

“We still have a feudal-social structure. Real issues lurk in the hinterland. There are several layers of power even among the Dalit community. In Jharkhand, if someone without social and political backing were to ask for rights he/she gets killed. In spite of reserved seats it is the powerful who garner the seats,” she said.

To a question that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) had not reached the masses, she said, “We have come a long way since the days when out of a rupee only 15 paise would reach the beneficiary. Today, one can say that about 50 paise reaches the beneficiary. In Rajasthan, one can find hundreds of walls in villages painted with facts and figures of projects.” She was upbeat on the future and said that she had faith and hope.

On corruption she said that the ratio could be 60:40, the bureaucrats garner the maximum. Recalling her early days in the civil services she said that the bureaucratic stranglehold got to her as she did not know whether to promote or to stop on issues. Answering a question on the RTI if it was being only used by the educated elite she said, far from it, it had percolated down to the masses. It had become a strong weapon to fight. She called the people to get acquainted with the Constitution, especially the Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles of State Policy.

Quoting Dr Ambedkar, she said that if democracy dies it would be the doom. If there was no democracy there would be no chance for RTI and the right to dissent. We must have the freedom of expression in a pluralistic society.