Devangshu Datta: The competent authorities

A friend, SC (his initials), is writing an indigenous 1984, set in India circa 2020. The date was inspired by the “Vision 2020” documents released by government departments, Dr Kalam’s essay and Chetan Bhagat’s recent novel. He hopes to pick up surrogate sales on the choice of year.

In SC’s “Vision 2020”, there is no Big Brother. Nor is there a parliamentary or presidential system. Instead, there is a faceless, amorphous something called “The Competent Authority” (TCA). All interactions between citizens and government – be it applications for Unique ID cards, gas connections, bank accounts, sex-change operations, public interest litigations – have to be addressed to, and cleared by, TCA.

TCA decides the Budget, makes laws, hires civil servants, conducts counter-insurgency operations and issues diktats on everything. TCA is represented in public life by the image of a rubber stamp entitled “The Competent Authority”. When it has to interact with the public, a large cut-out of the rubber stamp is wheeled out by men in brown safari suits and TCA’s statements are made in a computer-generated voice.

Perhaps TCA is an individual? This is possible. It is rumoured, however, that TCA is actually a collective of faceless gnomes. The person hanging from the next metro strap might be TCA. Or maybe TCA is the flash guy zooming around Khan Market in a Ferrari.

Large parts of Delhi and other cities are sequestered from the general public, just as the Forbidden City and the Kremlin were. Certain other bits and pieces of India, including some of the most touristy parts, are also out of bounds. Those parts are out of GPS coverage and not marked on maps. Presumably, TCA lives in one of those areas, or shuttles between those parts. Nobody knows.

The secrecy is deemed necessary by TCA, for security reasons. It is easier to protect a faceless gnome (or a multitude of faceless gnomes) than a beloved leader, whose face is blazoned on billboards. You cannot target a faceless gnome but he can easily target you.

Are we heading towards this paranoid vision of a nation run by a faceless bureaucracy and a government gone mad in a quiet, cc-ed in triplicate, fashion? It seems that way. Internet censorship, for instance, is run by something called CERT-in, which is deemed the competent authority for Web censorship by whoever was deemed the competent authority to appoint a competent authority for Web censorship.

CERT-in is headed by a director, currently (and for the past several years) Mr Gulshan Rai. Mr Rai doesn’t interact with the media — his brief doesn’t oblige him to. He does, however, issue the notifications on the basis of which Web censorship occurs.

Why is an agency like CERT-in, that was supposedly set up to oversee security for government websites, considered the competent authority for censorship? Who knows? All right, then on what grounds does CERT-in make decisions to block websites? Through in-camera meetings, with confidential minutes.

There are other faceless “competent authorities”. For example, the Radia tapes were recorded by competent authorities, which were then (selectively?) careless about stashing them safely. Who made the decisions to tap hundreds of individuals? A competent authority.

What restraints are there on that competent authority’s power of surveillance or safeguards against it being careless? Have you heard of any officer being punished or suspended for recording 5,000 hours of tapes and releasing them into the public domain?

If Kapil Sibal had his way, CERT-in’s workload would be reduced. Web service providers and intermediaries would do a lot of pre-screening and blocking. One could call that a public-private partnership (PPP) between social networking sites and the competent authority.

Somewhere along the line, it’s up to citizens to question the very concept of a competent authority. Otherwise the vision outlined by my friend could well come to pass, and it could happen much sooner than 2020.