Institutions and Development in South Asia Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xvi, 318 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$75.00, cloth. ISBN 9780190124786.
Himanshu Jha has written an illuminating account of how India enacted fundamental changes to the country’s information regime—from a presumption of official secrecy, to legal recognition that access to government-held information was integral to democratic citizenship. The culmination of this process was the passage of the Right to Information Act 2005 (RTIA), one in a series of rights-based laws enacted by the coalition government of Manmohan Singh, who served as prime minster from 2004 to 2014. These included the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005, the Forest Rights Act 2006, and the National Food Security Act 2013.
Jha asks why this transformation of the information regime occurred when it did, and why it took the legal and administrative shape embodied in the RTIA. The book comes in the wake of a monograph by Prashant Sharma (Democracy and Transparency in the Indian State: The Making of the Right to Information Act, London: Routledge, 2015), which pursued more or less the same analytical puzzle. Sharma’s account highlighted interaction between a multitude of explanatory variables, including the role of policy entrepreneurs who straddled the domains of grassroots activism and such elite professional bodies as the Supreme Court Bar, and the government’s need to signal to the increasingly important private sector that the Indian state was committed to the norms of transparency on which efficient markets rely.
A great strength of Jha’s book is that it is not preoccupied with tearing down previous explanations for this profound policy change. Jha seeks instead to supplement these with a focus on the gradual evolution of ideas about how government information should be regarded. A key influence on his approach is Peter Hall’s The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), which sought to move beyond institutional incentives and interest-group realignments as the causes of fundamental policy shifts. Jha, like Hall, emphasizes how intellectual constructs can drive the adoption of new norms. He also cites in this connection the work of his Heidelberg University colleague Rahul Mukherji, who has successfully applied a similar approach to studying the transformation of India’s economic policy paradigm.
Jha traces the information regime back to, among other landmarks, the late-colonial era Official Secrets Act of 1912, while remaining keenly aware of the role that control over information played in the origins of the entire colonial enterprise—a process analyzed brilliantly by the historian C. A. Bayly in his classic, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Jha documents efforts by reformers since Indian independence in 1947 to break the state’s monopoly over information, meticulously tracing the fate of proposals emanating from press associations, consumer-rights advocates, legal scholars, and others.
Jha pays particular attention, however, to ideas developed within the state itself. These were planted, germinated, and cross-bred as a result of all kinds of processes, including officially constituted committees, rulings issued by India’s judiciary, parliamentary hearings, initiatives within the bureaucracy to redesign administrative structures, and (not least) policymaking practices imported by consultants and other “lateral entrants” into the Indian civil service. Given the huge amount of material available, it is a blessing that the author offers us a judiciously curated set of exhibits rather than an exhaustive tour through decades of inter-agency deliberations and legislative proposals.
Indeed, the book’s thematic rather than chronological organization is one of its major assets. It allows Jha to stress the significance of crucial moments in the evolution of ideas about government-held information. One of these was the shift in perspectives about citizen engagement that began to take hold within the state during the coalition government that ruled India from 1977 to 1979. Not coincidentally, this was the first time India was governed by a party other than the Indian National Congress, which led the independence struggle. Jha also sheds light on what might otherwise seem like periods of inaction. For instance, after winning the 1991 general election, Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao did not pursue a Right to Information Act, despite his party having promised in its election manifesto to do so. Jha shows how Rao actually restricted the flow of certain kinds of information. Knowledge of these countercurrents makes the story of transparency’s ultimate triumph all the more intriguing.
Jha argues that a “layered tipping point” model of institutional change most closely fits the transformation of India’s information regime. He emphasizes the slow-moving “ideational churning” within the state, and between state and non-state actors, that preceded the passage of the RTIA. This is possibly the least convincing part of the book, since the tipping point appears mainly as a metaphor rather a precisely defined mechanism. The concept is unsatisfying precisely because its vagueness contrasts sharply with the careful and astute analysis found throughout the book. The timing of the RTIA’s passage—enacted amidst a wave of rights-based legislation—also calls into question the value of the tipping point model, and indeed the role of ideas more generally in precipitating fundamental change. Are we to believe that ideas nurtured within the state were also the key factor responsible for the legal recognition of people’s right to employment, to retain control over land, and to be supplied with adequate nutrition? And was it a coincidence that each of these sites of ideational contestation happened to reach a layered tipping point at the same historical conjuncture? Would not other institutional or political explanations be at least as convincing?
The ability of Indians to use the RTIA to promote accountable governance has been badly damaged under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been in power since 2014. The autonomy of the Information Commissioner—India’s transparency watchdog—has been undercut. Judges have failed to punish repeated government non-compliance with the RTIA’s provisions. Activists seeking to exercise their right to information are regularly intimidated and subjected to violence. Jha notes some of these changes, and he is correct that they do not detract from the validity of the book’s objective, which was to chart the evolution of ideas about information access without ever claiming that ideational change was unidirectional. Indeed, the deeper understanding this book provides about how India’s information regime was liberalized may aid the process of restoring the rights that have so quickly eroded.
Rob Jenkins
Hunter College, City University of New York, New York