Pending
Bihar was the model state in the days soon after the Right to Information Act passed. Then began the slow slide into intimidation, chaos, silence—and much worse.
On 24 September last year, the Right to Information activist Vipin Agarwal left his house in Harsidhi town in Bihar’s East Champaran district. He had errands: documents to photocopy, medicines to pick up for a sick calf, a meeting at the block office. On his way back, two persons on a bike crossed paths and fired at him.
Two bullets hit his chest, two his abdomen. He was first taken to a local private hospital, and then to Sadar Hospital in Motihari, a bigger town than Harsidhi. He succumbed to his injuries before he arrived. He was 45 years old.
Threats to his life were an occupational hazard, a fact of which Vipin was aware. So were the police. In 2017, he’d told the superintendent of East Champaran that an administrative officer was instigating people who had illegally grabbed a large parcel of government land in Hardsidhi bazaar to kill him.
Three years later, on 16 February 2020, his house was attacked. His pleas for security fell on deaf ears. Before he died, he’d been digging up details about the bazaar land, a 17-acre plot encroached by land mafia, who’d built a petrol pump and an ATM on it.
There were no witnesses to the murder, but Vipin’s father Vijay had little doubt about who was responsible. Still, he filed an FIR in Harsidhi police station, against ‘unknown persons.’ “I feared that if I name the accused they may kill me also,” he told me.
The sub-divisional officer in charge of the investigation, Abhinav Dhiman, drew up a case diary naming 15 accused. Several of these names matched a list that Vipin had prepared and submitted to the circle officer in December 2019. The list contained the names of individuals who had encroached on the bazaar land in Harsidhi.
So far, nine persons have been arrested for Vipin’s murder. One name in Dhiman’s case diary is yet to be subjected to a detailed investigation: Rajendra Prasad Gupta, a local Bharatiya Janata Party leader, said to be close to Radhamohan Singh, a BJP member of Parliament from East Champaran constituency. A Special Investigation Team called Gupta in for a brief questioning, but that was the end of it.
Gupta denied all charges. “I am not involved in this case at all. I don’t know why Vipin’s family has put my name,” he told me. He also denied that the land for the petrol pump—since sealed by the government—was public land at all. “I bought the land from Vipin’s uncle in 2005 and established the petrol pump. Then I sold it to another person in 2012.”
Vipin Agarwal’s murder in broad daylight did not come as a surprise to participants and observers in Bihar’s RTI circles. Data collected by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative shows that 12 of 99 RTI activists killed over the last decade in India were from Bihar, the most from any state except Maharashtra (19 deaths) and Gujarat (13 deaths). Vidyakar Jha, an RTI activist associated with National Alliance of People’s Movements, maintained the figure was, in fact, considerably higher. Jha’s data, gathered from media reports and interviews with relatives of the dead, indicated that 20 RTI activists have been killed in Bihar over the last decade.
This is significant because, in the years after the RTI Act came into force in 2005, Bihar was held up as an example of a state where the machinery actually worked. Action followed the release of information, information-deniers were penalised and innovations were welcomed.
But something flipped from 2010 or so. It heralded the start of an ongoing era of half-baked information, fake cases, framing jobs—and murders. Vipin Agarwal’s murder was preceded and succeeded by a long trail of RTI-related malfeasance. The activists who were, and are, in the thick of it, have seen how the Act improved the quality of public life. Now they are witness to what happens in a time of decay.
A Golden Age
n 29 January 2007, on the advice of a Magsaysay Award-winning activist named Arvind Kejriwal, Bihar’s chief minister Nitish Kumar inaugurated the Jankari call centre, the first hotline in the country dedicated to receiving RTI applications. RTI would curb corruption and red-tapism, Kumar said; the call centre was going to bring about Ramrajya, a state of ideal governance. He made the first call to the Jankari line. (He asked for information about the Indira Awas Yojna, a government-run programme to provide housing to the rural poor.)
The Right to Information Act, which came into force in October 2005, was a watershed moment in the history of government accountability. It represented the culmination of a long grassroots campaign by non-governmental organisations like the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, as well as codified Supreme Court judgements that unequivocally read the ‘right to information’ as part of the fundamental rights granted to citizens by the Constitution.
To be sure, Bihar had had a slow start on RTI. States were given four months to formulate rules and implement mechanisms that would empower common Indians to demand information from and about government bodies. Bihar took eight months.
But, after that, it went out of its way to be effective. Initiatives like the Jankari call centre, and even a toll-free number, were unique. On 12 February 2009, the Union Ministry of Personnel awarded Bihar with the e-Governance Medal for Administrative Reforms for its call centre facility. By July 2011, a video conferencing system was set up to save applicants the trouble of making repeated journeys to the information commission office in Patna.
A new kind of activist began operating under these circumstances, dedicated to filing RTI applications to uncover the truth of what was happening with government services. They demanded information on food allocations, the status of public infrastructure projects, and the functioning of government offices.
“It is not that we used to get replies to RTIs within a month,” Tripurari Pandey, an RTI activist based in the state’s Aurangabad district, remembered. “But there was prompt action when the applicant would go to the information commission.”
In the year 2007-2008, 5730 RTI applications were filed in Bihar, more than ten times the number in the previous financial year. In the year 2011-2012, a record total of 24,843 RTI applications were filed, according to the yearbook of Bihar’s State Information Commission.
“It is not that we used to get replies within a month. But there was prompt action when the applicant would go to the information commission.”
The numbers were not mere lip service. Activists told me that the applications prompted action on the part of government bodies. In 2010, Shiv Prakash Rai exposed a scam around solar street light procurement. He’d found the information he was looking for within the stipulated time of 30 days, he told me. Bureaucrats faced real consequences for deadline breaches and sharing incomplete information. (Vikas Burman and Manu Maharaj, two Indian Police Service officers, discovered this to their detriment. Burman was fined ₹25,000 and administrative action was taken against Maharaj.)
One man had a lot to do with the smooth functioning of the system. Shashank Kumar Singh, a retired judge of the Patna High Court, was Bihar’s first chief information commissioner. Appointed on 26 August 2006, many activists described his term as a sort of golden era for RTI users.
“If ever the application went to Shashank Kumar Singh, the department concerned would have blown up,” said RTI activist Girish Gupta. “He used to talk to RTI applicants with respect and deal strictly with department information officers.”
The system worked—almost too well, according to Shiv Prakash Rai. When RTI was implemented in Bihar, he said, activists unearthed evidence that began to expose the corruption in previous administrations. But the RTI system began to weaken as applicants progressed to addressing corruption that implicated the incumbent government.
The slide happened gradually, Rai said. It took some time before it drew attention. Then an activist was murdered in 2010—and instead of being an exceptional shock to a healthy system, it became the first sign of a rot working its way in.
Khabrilal’s Story
he locals of Phulwaria village in Begusarai district still think of Shashidhar Mishra as khabrilal—the man with the information. His wife Anita Devi told me that he’d always astonished people with the breadth of his knowledge, even though he hadn’t studied past the ninth class.
Mishra had been campaigning against local corruption for several years before the RTI Act was implemented. In 1995, he formed an organisation called Lokhit Sangh, meaning ‘association for public interest.’ More often than not, Shashidhar’s activism yielded results that came at great cost to the local land mafia.
In 2005, he wrote to the circle officer against the levelling of a public pit where sewerage from Phulwaria village collected. The next year, he alerted the chief minister to the embezzlement of funds by the assistant engineer of the National Rural Planning Program. It caused the then speaker of the Bihar Legislative Assembly to order an investigation.
On 14 February 2010, Mishra cycled home from work at around 9pm. Before he could step inside his house, a shot to the head felled him.
“That night there was an event in the neighbouring house,” said Suryakant, Shashidhar’s elder son. “So when the sound of firing came, we thought that someone had burst crackers.” Suryakant was six years old then. His mother was occupied with his two-and-a-half-month-old sibling, and the other women of the house were in the kitchen.
By the time they found Shashidhar lying motionless in a pool of blood, the news had spread. Police reached the spot and sent his body for post-mortem, which confirmed that a bullet had pierced his brain.
Shashidhar’s younger brother Mahidhar Mishra lodged an FIR on the night of the murder. “Vivek Mishra and Roshan Mishra took him in their grip and shut his mouth by hand,” the report reads, “Ranjit Mishra had a pistol in his hand. He shot in Shashidhar’s head and fled. They were further identified in a neighbouring village.”
The FIR also notes that Shashidhar had been previously attacked by a group that included two of the accused, Roshan Mishra and Ranjit Mishra.
Shashidhar had even filed an application with the station house officer (SHO) of Teghra police station on the day of that earlier attack: 22 April 2008. In it, he suggested that he had been attacked because he had filed an RTI with the Block Development Officer to investigate some malpractices conducted by an anganwadi worker. The worker was the wife of one Dharmdev Gupta, who allegedly threatened Shashidhar with the following words before the group injured him with a pistol butt: “I will ensure that the application you have filed against my wife disappears, and I will also kill you.”
The men accused of Shashidhar’s murder were arrested but released on bail within the year. For his family, it was the beginning of a life marked by rounds of courts and police stations. They believe that the three men were not operating in isolation.
Anita Devi told me that the then superintendent of police in Begusarai (Vinay Kumar, I later checked) came to their house and collected many documents related to the RTI work Shashidhar had been doing. “He had promised he would take action on the basis of the documents. But even after 12 years, the culprits are roaming and we are waiting for justice.”
Anita hasn’t heard from the public prosecutor in a decade now. “The public prosecutor asked for money for the hearing, but where do we have any money to give?” She didn’t recollect the name of the public prosecutor, but a local resident tipped me off: it was Amarendra Amar, who’s been a candidate in local assembly elections for the BJP. Amarendra confirmed that he was the public prosecutor in 2010, but said he was not aware of any such case.
Suryakant is now in the twelfth standard, preparing for the National Defence Academy’s entrance exam. If it doesn’t work, he intends to try for the Union Public Service Commission and Staff Selection Commission.
“My mother wants the killers to be punished, but she is afraid that if she pursues the case, our family may be attacked again,” he told me. “But when I get a job, I will fight to get justice for my father.”
Things Fall Apart
hashank Kumar Singh’s term ended on 1 January 2008, two years before Shashidhar Mishra’s murder.
The RTI Act requires a state to appoint a chief information commissioner, who is additionally aided by state information commissioners. (The Act does not stipulate qualifications for membership.) A three-member selection committee comprising the chief minister, a minister and the leader of the opposition are meant to sign off on these appointments.
Shashank Kumar Singh’s successors were Ashok Kumar Choudhary, R.J.M. Pillai and Ashok Kumar Sinha. Singh is the only one on this list from a judicial background—the others are retired IAS officers. Of the nine state information commissioners appointed from 26 June 2006, eight worked under the Bihar government. [1] Farzand Ahmed, the exception, was an independent journalist.
Bihar’s chief information commissioner as of this writing is Narendra Sinha, also a retired IAS officer from the Bihar cadre. Shiv Prakash Rai thought the continued appointment of ex-bureaucrats, instead of representatives from the legal system, hastened the decline of the RTI regime in Bihar. “Government has made these important posts as retirement perks for its favourite IAS officers,” he said. “IAS officers work with the state government, so they are pro-government.”
But Neeraj Kumar, former minister of Information and Public Relations, refuted the charge. “People are free to make any allegation,” he told me. “If appointments have been done following the rules and regulations, then we have no right to question it. Secondly, it’s not just Bihar where bureaucrats are being appointed as chief information commissioner and state commissioner. Other states are also doing the same.” [2]
The Act allows a state to appoint up to ten information commissioners at a time. Since its implementation, though, Bihar has never had more than two at a time. Even when it comes to this meagre hiring, the state has dragged its feet. The Act requires an information commissioner’s post to be filled within three months of the end of the tenure. But Ashok Kumar Choudhary, Bihar’s second information commissioner, was appointed only 22 months after Shashank Kumar Singh had vacated the post. It took 15 months for the fifth information commissioner to be appointed.
These are two among a range of challenges before a person who wants to file an RTI request in Bihar. In 2013, the state government directed that an RTI applicant must get an order from the first appellate authority if they wish to file a second appeal. The rule was challenged and then struck down in the Patna High Court.
In 2020, the government directed that a second appeal can be filed only after the applicant gives a written declaration that their application is not pending with the first appellate authority. RTI activists told me that this rule discourages a second appeal, since the reason for filing in the first place is the absence of a reply from the first appellate authority.
“The government has made these important posts as retirement perks for its favourite IAS officers.”
There’s also been a steady decline in the imposition of penalties on officers who don’t respond to RTI applications. In 2006-2007, two officers were fined for not providing information under the RTI Act. The number of those held accountable increased to 86 in 2010-2011 and 139 in 2013-2014. Then the pattern reversed. Seventy-two officers were fined in 2014-2015, but not a single officer was pulled up between 2015-2016 and 2018-2019. [3]
According to the 2020-21 Report Card of Information Commissions prepared by Satark Nagrik Sangathan, a non-governmental organisation, Bihar fared the worst, scoring zero percent. [4] All other states recorded somewhere between 13 percent to 100 percent. “If any government department had not responded, that is still explainable, because the departments want to hide information,” Anjali Bhardwaj, a member of the organisation, said. “But in the case of Bihar, the information commission is not even acknowledging the receipt of RTIs.”
When I reached out to information commissioner Tripurari Sharan for a response, he suggested that the commission’s hands were tied by official passivity. “To make RTI stronger, every government department needs to work seriously.”
Ajit Singh, a Bhagalpur-based RTI activist, unequivocally called it a story of “high interference by government and government machinery.” One of the ways it was doing this, Singh said, was by filing false cases and fabricating evidence to harass RTI activists.
Claim to Frame
n the morning of 13 May 2018, Narayan Giri was washing his face in the courtyard when four armed policemen came and stood before him.
“A case has been filed against you. We’ve come to detain you,” an assistant sub-inspector said. The case in question was an FIR dated 7 July 2016. Narayan had been charged with molesting a woman in Rohtas and hurling casteist abuse.
“I knew I was innocent,” Narayan told me. “When the judge was hearing my case, he asked me why I didn’t get interim bail. I told him I was innocent so I did not need any bail.”
The complainant, whose name is Asturna Devi, is unknown to him, he maintained. He learnt about her accusations only from a news item in a Hindi newspaper four days after the FIR was filed. He went to the police station and procured a copy of the FIR. As he read through it, he began to believe that it was a frame job in response to his RTI activism.
His work has often exposed corruption within bureaucracy. In a 2011 corruption case, an FIR was lodged in Natwar police station against panchayat officials and then program officer Amit Upadhyay for irregularities in the disbursement of the funds for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The SHO of Natwar police station was fined for not responding to Narayan’s RTIs. In yet another case, Narayan’s RTI request revealed that a beneficiary had received funds of Indira Awaas Yojna thrice. An FIR was lodged against the beneficiary too.
On 18 July 2016, Narayan wrote a letter to the National Human Rights Commission, attaching documentary evidence to prove that he was not in Rohtas on the day of the alleged molestation. He was, instead, at the office of the state information commission in Patna for the hearing of an application. “I had no faith in the state administration and information commission, and that is why I chose to write to NHRC,” Narayan told me.
The arrest, two years later, came despite this. In prison, Narayan went right to work. “Many prisoners knew me as I was constantly doing RTIs and the news was published in the local newspapers regularly,” he said. He even helped prisoners with their bail applications.
When he was released, he filed a couple of RTI applications about hand pumps, toilets and the supply of medicines in jail. “I came to know later that a few hand pumps were repaired, and water quality was ensured,” he told me.
“You call it intoxication or passion or something else. If I do not do RTI, then I will not sleep.”
On the instruction of the NHRC, the Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of Police took over the investigation and concluded that there was no evidence against him. In the final charge sheet submitted on 30 April 2020 in Sasaram court, Narayan’s name was left out. Probes were ordered against two policemen for framing Narayan. [5]
He has not considered quitting the work. “You call it intoxication or passion or something else. If I do not do RTI, then I will not sleep,” Narayan explained.
But it’s not always possible for activists to forge on like Narayan. “Those who are not well known, they have to bow down,” Shiv Prakash Rai told me. In 2016 alone, he alleged, more than 600 RTI activists in Bihar were framed. Today, he speculated, that number might be more than 1000. [6] The pandemic provided a fresh excuse, as Girish Gupta found out.
Too Many Questions
n the peak of the nationwide lockdown in April 2020, a group of policemen and administrative officials knocked on Girish Gupta’s door. They demanded to see him, producing no warrant or explanation. Amit Kumar Gunjan, Girish’s son, was forced to wake his father up.
“When I came out of my room, they started beating me. They gave no particular reason,” Girish told me. “Then they took me in a police van to a dilapidated room which was under construction. The room was unplastered and dark. They beat me there too.”
In May this year, Girish showed me a list of his RTI applications pending before the information commission. He keeps another list of applications for which he hasn’t even received responses. They are among the 2000-odd RTIs Girish has filed in his 16-year career as an RTI activist.
Some of the people who assaulted him that night are meant to be respondents to some of these applications, he said. Between 22 March 2019 and 10 February 2020, for instance, he had filed 24 RTI applications with sub-divisional officer Nishant Kumar. Another member of the group was Parmanand Pandit, the Block Development Officer, with whom Girish had filed 29 applications between 17 July 2018 and 20 January 2020.
“Nishant Kumar told me that I ask a lot of questions by filing RTI applications, so he would kill me,” Girish alleged. “He said I would be released only if I withdrew the RTI applications filed against all the officials.”
By 10pm, Girish was taken to the police station. He was released only after Amit was made to sign a blank sheet of paper. The same day Sumant Chaudhary, SHO of Phulwaria police station wrote an application to a Begusarai judge to lodge a complaint against Gupta for violating lockdown, and for abusing and assaulting police and administrative officials.
“The police were visiting the area to follow law and order during the lockdown,” the SHO wrote in his application. “When the team reached Rajendra Road in Phulwaria Bazar at around 7.30pm, they saw a person opening the office and roaming on the road. When we asked his name, he identified himself as Girish Gupta.”
It was a bewildering turn of events. “On the day he was assaulted, he did not even leave the house after 5pm due to the lockdown,” Pratima Gupta, Girish’s wife, told me. “How are the police saying that he was walking after opening the office at 7.30pm?”
In mid-2020, the National Human Rights Commission turned to Begusarai’s superintendent of police (SP) to investigate the allegation. The SP returned to the NHRC with a two-page letter containing the results of the probe. The person-in-charge of the probe was the sub-divisional officer Nishant Kumar, who was one of the people who allegedly beat up Girish that night.
The two-page letter, a copy of which I have seen, reproduced details that were already known and contained no conclusion on the question of who assaulted Gupta under custody. Both the SHO and the SP were unresponsive to my calls.
Now, Girish has become extremely wary about who he talks to and where he goes. After the incident, he had a CCTV camera installed in his office. When I first went to meet him there, a young man started recording our conversation on his mobile phone. “That’s it,” Girish said to the man after a few minutes, “It’s not needed anymore.”
Nearly all the activists I interviewed spoke about looking behind their shoulders, for fear of being framed and harassed. When I called Razi Hasan, for instance, he asked a tech-savvy relative to look me up on social media, and agreed to meet only after he saw my bylines and felt reassured of my credentials.
The 42-year-old RTI activist, a resident of Muzaffarpur city, always carries three hidden cameras on his person. One camera is hidden in a pen, another can pass off as a shirt button, and the third one is fitted in a crutch that he uses to support his amputated leg.
“If an unknown person wants to meet me, I suggest meeting in a crowded place. If I go to any office, I take hidden cameras with me.” No doubt as a result of the charges against Narayan Giri, he is wary about being framed in a harassment case. “If there are women employees in any office, I do not go there under any circumstances.”
Application Pending
his is what remains of the RTI story in Bihar: a series of pending cases. Many are connected to real murders and false charges, and wait to be heard before courts and commissions. What is common among them is the state’s effort to wipe off or blur any connection to RTI activism.
“I don’t know which period you are talking about,” Jitendra Singh Gangwar, Additional Director General of Bihar Police headquarters, said. I brought up the pending cases, and the allegation that at least 20 RTI activists had been murdered since 2010. I started to count off the names of specific activists. “I can’t say anything until I see the files of individual cases,” he responded. “But my impression is that appropriate actions have been taken in all the cases. In the cases where action has not been taken, we will take action.”
He contradicted the idea that the state did not do enough to protect its RTI activists. “Bihar is one of the rare states where there is an established procedure for this. If any person needs security, he can apply to the police. A three-member committee verifies the application. After the verification, the application comes to a senior police officer who decides if the person needs security and for how long.”
“If an unknown person wants to meet me, I suggest meeting in a crowded place. If I go to any office, I take hidden cameras with me.”
Shiv Prakash Rai told me about an RTI he had filed seeking information about government-provided security, which had cost the state around ₹100 crore until then. “According to the reply, both paid and unpaid security was provided to mafias, big builders and influential people,” he said. “Not a single RTI activist got police security despite threats to their life.”
Tripurari Pandey said that the pandemic had allowed the enablers of the RTI system to behave more callously than ever before. Virtual hearings, he said, leave a lot to be desired. “I have been boycotting virtual hearings which started during Covid-19 because we don’t get time to make our points. Sometimes, we are unable to hear what the commissioner is saying.”
The commission disposed of two of his applications related to land disputes on the grounds that Tripurari hadn’t participated in virtual hearings. He only learnt about this when he received letters in connection with the two matters: one of them even suggested that he had participated in the hearing.
Epilogue
ohit, RTI activist Vipin Agarwal’s son, was 14 years old when his father was shot to death last September. Over the last year, he learnt some hard truths about police inaction, institutional corruption and the denial of justice.
On 24 March this year, he showed up at the SP’s office to press him to arrest the accused. He waited at the premises for five hours for someone to listen to him. Infuriated, he returned home, threw the application demanding speedy investigation at his grandfather Vijay, and stormed out of the house.
After a few minutes, he called his grandfather, asking him to tell the SHO of Harsidhi police station to come and meet him. He had 15 minutes. Rohit was calling from the roof of a three-storey building close to his house.
“I told him that he should come down,” Vijay told me. “I also told him that we will fight the battle together.” Along with a few others, Vijay rushed to the front of the building where Rohit was calling from. They tried to calm him down even as they frantically called the SHO. Someone was dispatched to the station to call a police officer.
Nobody arrived.
A few moments later, Rohit poured kerosene oil on his body, set himself on fire and jumped off the roof. Later that day, he died of his injuries at the local hospital.
Vijay Agarwal now lives alone. His daughter-in-law and her children live with her father. Any hope he had for justice died with the death of his grandson. “I have no faith in the government,” he told me as he put away the documents related to his son’s murder. “I am sure I will not get justice, so I have left the battle.”
Umesh Kumar Ray is an India-based independent journalist who mainly covers environment, climate change, human and development stories from Bihar and West Bengal.
Corrections and Clarifications: An earlier version of the story suggested that Amit Lodha was the superintendent of police in Begusarai in 2010. The SP, in fact, was Vinay Kumar. The error is regretted.