The Hindu Business Line : Iron frame strong as ever

The much-reviled ‘civil serpents’ must equally be credited with bringing the country, slowly but surely, to the doorstep of global superpower status.

Shanker Chakravarty

IAS provisionals on a visit to Parliament House.

B.S. Raghavan

India’s bureaucratic machinery is 60 years old, and like Johnny Walker, is still going strong. But this was not what was on the cards on the eve of India’s Independence. In fact, even well ahead of the event, government services of all kinds which had served the British Raj loyally were in the grip of grave uncertainty, if not panic.

Among the stalwarts of the Indian National Congress who were taking over the reins were vehement castigators of the Indian ‘civil serpents’ who were the props and pillars of the colonial rule and were party to the repression let loose against those fighting foreign domination. Jawaharlal Nehru, in his vitriolic attacks against them, had only been echoing the deeply held distrust and animosity built up over a period of nearly 200 years.

So the bureaucracy had good reason to expect the new rulers of free India to bundle out the whole lot of them, make mincemeat of the creaky old structures, hierarchies, systems and rules, and put in their place a totally differently designed edifice of governance which was alive to the urges and aspirations of a resurgent India. The people too were all keyed up expecting sea changes in the way of running government.

Instead, in a spirit of unbelievable magnanimity, the freedom heroes retained undisturbed the entire administrative framework as forged and handed by the British. If at all there were changes, they were cosmetic, such as renaming the Indian Civil Service (ICS) as Indian Administrative Service (IAS), and reducing the number and amounts of increments and maximum of the scales of pay of different categories of personnel.

Even the working of the secretariats of the Central and State Governments, and field formations were left untouched. As in times of yore, the files moved ponderously from the bottom-most rung to top echelons, carrying pages of notings from each level, and squeezing the last ounce of implications and ramifications of the matter under dissection.

The only departure from the past was ironically calculated to make the bureaucracy more remote from the people and more indifferent to their needs and expectations than under colonial dispensation: During the British rule, all government officials from the village headman to the Viceroy, in their correspondence with members of the public, signed thus: “I am, Sir/Madam, Your most obedient and humble servant”.

Apparently thinking this to be too obsequious, free India’s rulers immediately sent out a fiat doing away with the phraseology in favour of a brusque ‘yours faithfully’!

Spectacular trajectory

The popular impression of the ground reality in the Diamond Jubilee year of Independence is that the bureaucratic chariot, with the people tied to its wheels, rumbles on, unchanged in features, manifesting the same insulated and supercilious mindset, as inaccessible and unresponsive as ever before.

But its not a picture of unrelieved bleakness. A dozen or more panels set up over 60 years have sought to tone up governance, resulting in countless instructions-filled circulars, citizens charters, grievance redress mechanisms, departmental adalats and the like. Also, on a larger canvas, the country owes to the much-maligned bureaucracy its recovery from the trauma of Partition, and the resettlement of millions of refugees pouring into India which awoke to life and freedom, as Nehru would say, only to face riots and massacres on a large scale. Generally, India’s bureaucracy has been more than equal to the management of innumerable man-made and natural disasters.

Let us give the Devil its due: It was the old-style bureaucracy that provided the underpinning of continuity and stability in the early years of freedom and but for its time-tested thoroughness and expertise, the founding fathers would not have been able to frame the masterpiece of a Constitution so deftly catering for the complexities, diversities and inequalities that characterise the polyglot polity that is India.

If the country today is on a spectacular growth trajectory, all set to take it place as a global superpower, it is on account of the gains it has made in various directions such as agriculture, industry, technology development, communications, poverty alleviation, rural development, and social infrastructure in the six decades since Independence.

For all the reviling of the Nehruvian economic strategy, let us not forget that the public sector, largely manned by civil service veterans, laid the foundations for all that is now taken for granted in terms of industrial development, green revolution, public distribution and so on at a time when the private sector was yet to find its feet.

Bureaucratic wheels might have ground slowly, but they have ground surely to make all this possible.

Here are two examples of what bureaucracy achieves when it sets its mind to it: Creation of massive facilities for the successful hosting of the Delhi Asian Games, providing live, colour television pictures of international standards worldwide; and the “transmitter-a-day” drive which saw 100 TV transmitters installed across the country to achieve the expansion of Doordarshan and colour TV on a historic scale.

And yet, bureaucrats have continued to be the whipping boys of citizens, berated from all sides for woodenness, lethargy and callousness. This is because ‘service first, service last, service at once, service always and service in all ways’ are yet to become the compelling watchwords of bureaucracy. Chanting of the mantras of accountability and transparency notwithstanding, they are yet to permeate its work culture, presenting a robotic, rather than a human face. Halfway between Independence and the present time, something happened that neither the British rulers nor their immediate Indian successors bargained for. Indian bureaucrats, even at levels previously considered immune, began getting politicised and wittingly aligning themselves with political parties/personalities for exchange of favours. The number infected by this malaise has now become so large that there is a clear danger of damaging the democratic fabric thanks to the near universal politician-bureaucrat nexus.

Collusion, corruption

On the other side of the equation, the politicians, in the years following Independence, scrupulously conformed to the maxims on the respective roles of politics (policymaking reflecting the people’s will) and administration (aiding policy formulation, implementation and service delivery in line with people’s expectations and needs). However, the ‘lesser breeds above the law’ (as Rudyard Kipling would say) that mutated in latter years became wily enough to know the vulnerabilities of bureaucracy and learnt to exploit them for self-serving purposes.

Thus, an unholy but symbiotic alliance came into being between the politicians and bureaucrats in every State. Inevitably, the cosy cohabitation has culminated in an ever widening web of corruption, believed by the person in the street to be extending all the way from the village headmen, beat constables and health centre staff to Vice-Chancellors, Judges and Ministers. This development is steadily eroding the trust and confidence that a bureaucrat used to command for his ability to tender unbiased advice. As a consequence, he is regarded by the people more as a liability than as an asset.

The situation today is such that not merely the higher services, the police and the government employees, but (let us face it) even the media, the Bar and the academics and littérateurs do not mind openly coming under the sway of one party or another, even if it means surrendering their professional integrity and independence of judgment. It is no surprise then to see bureaucracy caught up in the total collapse of a value system that was at one time held to be immutable and sacrosanct.

This is why mere tinkering with a practice here or a procedure there based on some committee recommendations has done little to improve citizen-bureaucracy interface. It is unrealistic to imagine that somehow bureaucrats alone will smell like roses, while the environment around them is so fetid.

Revitalising bureaucracy has thus ceased to be a standalone exercise. It has to become an integral part of a holistic movement to reform societal ethos itself, to make every section of the population tread the eight-fold path for right conduct laid down by Gautama, the Buddha: Right thoughts, right views, right communication, right intentions, right speech, right action, right living and right effort.

All said and done, bureaucrats come from the same cultural stock as the rest of the people, and are the victims of the same ravages sweeping away time-honoured principles and precepts. Actually, the wonder is that working within these crippling constraints, India’s bureaucracy can still claim its share of credit in bringing the country thus far, without the kind of catastrophes by which countries elsewhere have been overtaken.