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It is nothing unusual for people in organisations falling out on matters of principle, conviction or approach. There is no field of human endeavour without its share of hawks and doves. In day-to-day administration too, it is not uncommon for heads of departments to be at loggerheads with each other over some matter they consider important.

Ideally, most such top-level conflicts should be resolved amicably behind closed doors by thrashing out the issues in a spirit of understanding: For, the very fact of a person occupying a high position implies a certain maturity, breadth of outlook, and sensitivity in relating to human beings.

The riddle, or, if you will, the beauty, of human personalities is that they differ so widely as to make it unrealistic to expect that they will all conduct themselves in the same sober manner when conflicts arise. In famous instances of recent history, even persons of the stature of Mahatma Gandhiji and Subhash Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru and Purushottam Das Tandon, Indira Gandhi and Morarji Desai, or President Truman and General Douglas MacArthur did not refrain from washing dirty linen in public. But then, in their cases, the disputes involved matters concerning freedom struggle, party ideology or war strategy.

The spat between the Minister of Health, Dr Anbumani Ramadoss, and the Director of the AIIMS, Dr P. Venugopal, by comparison was trifling: It could easily have been avoided by both sides showing the needed tact and tolerance.

However, providing for a Minister to preside over Governing Councils of statutory bodies is certainly an infringement of their autonomy and in the cases of highly professional institutions such as the AIIMS, may even be destructive of their ability to maintain expected standards of excellence.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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