Last week, Vishwapati Trivedi, an upright IAS
officer from Madhya Pradesh who was the coal secretary, was unceremoniously
removed from his post. His only fault was that he forwarded the Shah Commission
report on the Goa Mining Scam directly to Parliament, by passing Cabinet. Even
his minister Dinshaw Patel wasn’t informed of his transfer as Chairman of the
Inland Waterways Authority. Last month, Sunil Arora, a senior IAS officer from
Rajasthan, was made Development Commissioner in the commerce ministry. Before
he could formally join in New Delhi, the appointment was quietly withdrawn
because he wrote a letter to the then cabinet secretary on matters concerning
his previous ministry in 2005. Are these knee-jerk reactions the sign of
insecurity of a paranoid government battling rising allegations of corruption
and coalition dharma compulsions? Or, were they meant to make a hapless civil
servant without a godfather a scapegoat for an administrative lapse? The answer
lies somewhere in between.
Of late, civil servants have been facing the wrath
of investigative agencies for their alleged roles in numerous scams. Over two
dozen senior babus are in jail or facing probes. Never since 1977 has India’s
7,000-member steel-framed babudom been under such relentless judicial and
public scrutiny. If whispers in the corridors of power are to be trusted, a
group of around a dozen senior secretary-level officers has decided to take up
cudgels on behalf of their troubled colleagues at the highest levels. With
constitutional institutions like the CAG, Election Commission, Central
Vigilance Commission, and even Parliament under severe threats, the bureaucracy
suffers the most. The only instrument of continuity in a democracy, it has been
losing credibility and relevance.
A government that is struggling to retain its
parliamentary majority and mandate for its executive decisions is now being
crippled by a new kind of policy paralysis. It may be making bold
pronouncements on reform, but its ability to carry the implementers along is
eroding faster than its credibility. The bureaucracy is the backbone of good
governance. It is like a tiger, and can create havoc in the system unless tamed
tactically.
It was as recently as April 21, Civil Services Day,
that the prime minister said: “It is our government’s commitment to put in
place a system and create an environment in which our civil servants are
encouraged to be decisive, and no one is harassed for bonafide mistakes of
errors of judgment. We stand committed to protecting honest and well meaning
civil servants who might have made genuine errors in their work.”
Just a few months later, Trivedi’s ignominious exit
is escalating into a major crisis; most civil servants are refusing to move
files and process even routine proposals and decisions. Civil servants are now
being held responsible for wrong or illegal decisions. Coal Minister Sriprakash
Jaiswal had made it clear in his interview to IBN7 that babus who took wrong
decisions for coal block allocations would be punished, but not the ministers
who approved the recommendations. He asserted: “Do you expect a minister to
visit every coal block or study every application before signing a file? He
approves it because he expects the officers to do their job properly.” Jaiswal
was only reflecting the mindset of the political class. Former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao told me ominously, “It’s the bureaucracy
that has led the nation down. Left to me, I would hang them from the nearest pole and shoot them one
by one.” His government was also embroiled in numerous corruption cases.
The political leadership has, thankfully, failed to
physically eliminate even the worst and tainted civil servants. But its
inability to protect the innocent and reward performers is going to cost the
UPA leadership more than it can imagine. Earlier, officials had the privilege
of writing to the chief secretary of the state or the cabinet secretary at the
Centre on problems concerning their minister or ministry. Both the bureaucratic
bosses would discuss these grouses with the CM or the PM and initiate corrective
measures. But with the PM and the CMs losing authority because of coalition
dharma or other compulsions, the system of selecting officials for sensitive
and key posts has suffered immensely.
Manmohan Singh is the first prime minister since
Independence to instruct the cabinet secretary to take the minister’s prior
approval before proposing the name for the post of secretary in a ministry.
Even CMs are under pressure to select officers on the basis of extraneous and
not meritorious considerations. As a result, most chief secretaries and cabinet
secretaries are individuals who neither enjoy acceptability nor credibility
among their colleagues, while lacking the courage to protect them from the
political leadership.
The tendency to hire more and more technocrats and
corporate honchos to bail out the government is no coincidence. Since the established bureaucracy is unwilling to stick its neck out,
over a dozen outsiders have been engaged to advise the government on fiscal
matters, infrastructure issues, public-private partnerships—they’re willing to
speak the leadership’s language and face the consequences. But leaders should not live under the illusion
that only babus who fail will go to jail. Bureaucrats
may not display their power or their talent for manipulation, but they know how
to weave a web to trap their political masters.
Power
& Politics' column appeared in The
Sunday Standard and The
New Indian Express during September 2012
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