Questioning Sonia Gandhi using RTI is right of Tax Payer not Breach of her Privacy!

I don’t expect a guy who has never won a single election in his life and yet is the Prime Minister of the largest democracy in the world, to understand the foundational underpinnings of a democratic structure.  Dr. Manmohan Singh has done a lot of things in his tenure as PM.  A tenure which I am convinced will go down in ignominy when history of this nation is read 100 years from now.  It will be hard for people to understand as to how someone so educationally accomplished and known for his integrity could have sold the country out without remorse or spine.

His new statement on RTI is the hallmark of his complete lack of understanding of how a democracy ought to function.

Democracy brings a lot of rights – right to elect, right to express, right to live, etc – and many of those freedoms are usurped and rights misused by individuals.  But no matter how badly the unscrupulous mess up with these rights, these rights are always considered sacred!

Said Dr. Singh.

“There is a fine balance required to be maintained between the right to information and the right to privacy, which stems out of the fundamental right to life and liberty. The citizens’ right to know should definitely be circumscribed if disclosure of information encroaches upon someone’s personal privacy. But where to draw the line is a complicated question.”

To set the context, this statement from Dr. Singh, (sorry for this expression, but reality can’t be further from this) the faithful dog of Sonia Gandhi, comes on the heels of RTI and the questioning by Narendra Modi of Sonia Gandhi’s trips abroad for her own health treatments.

Whatever may have been the reply and window dressing – when the whole machinery of the Government gets in to motion to obfuscate the evidences – the answer was neither here nor there.

As for the cry of “Privacy” of Dr. Manmohan Singh, it is complete farce!  Modi was correct to push that question into the public domain, for the question wanted to know if the Tax Payers’ monies had been used for Sonia Gandhi’s “personal expenses”.  This is NOT a personal question for Sonia Gandhi or breach of Privacy, but a tax payer’s right to understand where his/her money that he gave on trust to his/her Government is being used.

Let me put it differently, if I start using travel expense money that my company pays me to buying personal gifts, then if the auditors question me to provide evidence to prove my innocence, then it is NOT a breach of Privacy, but a RIGHT of the company as to where its money is being spent which it has provided me on trust!

I know that for Dr. Singh, who heads one of the most corrupt Government that India has seen since the Mughals (yes, Brits were kindergarteners compared to these plunderers!), Tax Money really means his or his coterie of Ministers’ personal monies.  But it is NOT!  And that is another thing that I didn’t really expect this farcical integrity-peddling idiot to understand.