When Pushp Comes To RTI Shove

A sting-happy journalist faces police intimidation for a story that embarrassed the government.

- Ushinor Majumdar

A damning report on alleged government policy to keep Muslims out of the Ayush ministry has stirred quite a controversy. The minister-in-charge, Sripad Naik, was quick to dismiss the report as false and filed a complaint with the Delhi Police. Pushp Sharma, the freelance journalist who wrote the report, ‘We don’t recruit Muslims: Ayush ministry’ for the English fortnightly Milli Gazette, has so far been interrogated for three days in a row at a police station.

In his report, Sharma claimed he had filed three Right to Information (RTI) applications seeking information on the Yoga Day functions from the Union ministry for Ayush (Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy). One of the questions was on whether any Muslims had been hired as yoga trainers and sent abroad ahead of the Yoga Day function last year and how many had applied. “There had been reports about expenses incurred for the International Day of Yoga, so this is the question that I decided to ask,” says Sharma, who now faces repeated questions from the police on who ‘funded’ the report and who ‘leaked’ the details from the ministry. This, despite his stand that the report is based on the ministry’s replies to his RTI queries, which he claims to have received by post last October- November.

Sharma has uploaded all 42 pages that he had received from the ministry along with the envelopes with post marks. “I was surprised to receive several unnecessary and unexpected documents, one of which was an annexure,” he says. “The information I sought was all in two or three pages.” According to a Milli Gazette staffer, Sharma first approached them in November, but waited until March for “any further responses from the government”.