Shielded for a Morning: What Tamil Nadu's Withdrawn RTI Order Reveals

Transparency Is a Duty, Not a Concession Picture the

officer asked to draft this order. The department in question handles communal and caste clashes and some of its files hold material that could inflame a district if released carelessly: intelligence on tensions, grounds for detention, perhaps the names of people who gave information.

The worry about protecting that material is not invented. The easy answer would be that secrecy is simply wrong. It is not always wrong. What the officer has to decide is whether the answer to a few sensitive files is to wall off the whole department.

What the Order Actually Did G.O. Ms. No. 57,

dated September 21, 2026, used Section 24(4) of the RTI Act, 2005. That provision lets a state government exempt intelligence and security organisations it has established. As reported, the notification specified the Public (Law and Order) Department as a whole as such an organisation, "for which the said Act shall not apply." When he defended it earlier on Sunday, the Law Minister said only certain matters, such as details of communal clashes, were being kept out.

The text of the order did not make that distinction. It covered the department itself.

Testing the Label Against the Work

The department's own list of subjects is what undoes the order. It examines inquiry reports into police firing, deaths in police custody, police torture and deaths of remand prisoners. It handles NHRC references. It processes NSA and COFEPOSA detentions, including detenus' representations and habeas corpus petitions.

None of this is intelligence gathering. It is the record of how the state has used its most coercive powers against individuals. Here the Act answers the question itself. Section 24 carries a proviso: even an exempted organisation cannot refuse information about allegations of corruption or human rights violations.

For human rights allegations, disclosure comes after the State Information Commission approves it, within 45 days. A department whose core files are about custodial deaths and preventive detention would sit inside that proviso on almost every request.

A blanket exemption would therefore have produced one of two results. Either it did nothing useful or it was meant to discourage requests the law still required the department to answer.

The Better Tool Already Exists

The sensitivity worry does not need a blanket label. Section 8(1) already lets an information officer refuse specific information that would harm security, put someone's life at risk or impede an investigation. Section 8(2) allows disclosure where the public interest outweighs that harm.

This is secrecy decided file by file and harm by harm, which is exactly what an ethical approach to confidentiality needs. Declaring a whole department an intelligence body swaps that judgment for a label.

The Pattern Question The Indian

Express reports that government insiders describe some of this government's reversals as a tactic: let a contentious decision reach the public, gauge the reaction, then decide whether to keep it. The government has not described the RTI episode that way and it should not be assumed.

The ethical concern holds either way. If transparency lasts only as long as nobody notices its absence, it was a favour granted, not a duty accepted.

The Resolution

The officer asked to draft this order should decline to recommend a department-wide exemption. Instead they should propose a written protocol under Section 8 for genuinely sensitive categories. The cost is real: information officers will make harder calls, some files will be contested and a mistake could expose something that should have stayed protected.

That is still the right cost to bear. The alternative puts records of state violence out of reach of the people it was used against.