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PHOTO: C.V. SUBRAHMANYAM

Public consent Aruna Roy: ‘We need to take legislation to the people’

Roy is a Ramon Magsaysay awardee for Community Leadership and International Understanding. She was in the city recently to inaugurate the Corporation Bank Officers Conference (CBOO).

Beginning her career as an IAS officer in 1968 she quit the civil services in 1975 to join her husband Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy at the Social Work and Research Centre in Tilonia, Rajasthan. In 1990 she set out to form the Mazdoor Kissan Shakthi Sanghatan (MKSS) with Nikhil Dey and Shanker Singh.

The MKSS built a grassroots movement that has triggered broad debate on the public’s right to scrutinise official records. It is one of the sparks that lit the RTI movement that has now resulted in an Act.

Excerpts from an interview.

MKSS follows a mix of Gandhian and Marxist philosophy. There are two kinds of approaches to social change — electoral politics and pressure politics. While Gandhi and M.N. Roy practised pressure politics, Jawahar Lal Nehru and Vallabh Bhai Patel were into electoral politics. It is in fact a dilemma before activists whether electoral politics has become corrupt because it was long ignored by the pressure politics practitioners.

At MKSS everyone participates in the decision making process. Any idea has to be approved by most of the members of MKSS to be considered viable. At MKSS we give importance to everyone’s participation and ideas.

Rajasthan is a smaller version of India. Rajasthan’s political situation is interesting as the state catapulted into democracy from feudalism. The socio-economic condition in the state is different as it abounds in non-cultivable land and one crop land. The Special Economic Zone (SEZ) politics also is different as migration is a part of its culture.

We need to take legislation to the people and policy can’t be framed without the consent of the people. In a democracy no policy can be formed without a public debate. Like the first native American President Evo Morales said: ‘There is the Left, there is the Right and then there are the people.’ SEZs in Rajasthan will be defined by its people. The RTI too was made by the people. Today we will deal with SEZs at many levels by mobilising people.

The civil service is a hangover from the British colonial system and must be abolished. We must break the notion that IAS or IPS is the only way to affect change. Civil servants have become puppets in their own hands.

Last year the government tried to amend the RTI act. There was a dharna in Delhi with ordinary people. We went to V.P. Singh who has supported this cause from way back in 1998.

Also we parleyed with the Left and finally we even had stray MPs coming out defying party politics. An SMS poll by the media returned not a single vote for amending the act. The first thing people need to know is that RTI is not a key to happiness.

Its effectiveness depends on how one puts the procured information in the public domain.

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