The Hindu Business Line : Permissiveness in bureaucracy

In the halcyon days following Independence, officials were chary of allowing anyone other than their relatives, fellow-officials and close friends to call on them at their official residence or even their homes, let alone accepting hospitality or gifts from those with whom they had or were likely to have official dealings.

Nowadays, it is a disturbing experience to see top bureaucrats of even sensitive departments such as commerce and industry, income-tax, security, intelligence, and so on, hobnobbing uninhibitedly with business persons and shady individuals.

Permissiveness has become so rampant that one wonders whether persons at senior levels have stopped feeling squeamish when they transgress standards of rectitude. One sees all round an increasing tolerance of venality and other types of misconduct.

A couple of years ago, the media was full of reports of a business firm paying for lavish parties, providing cars for use and offering other improper gratifications to the then Cabinet Secretary, Mr Prabhat Kumar, and the Chief Commissioner of Central Excise (Delhi Zone), Mr Someswar Mishra. Inquiries by the CBI revealed that the firm had paid about Rs 1,40,000 for three parties hosted at the official residence of Mr Kumar in New Delhi between March 1999 and July 2000.

As per Mr Prabhat Kumar’s explanation at the time, he did not host some of the parties, and he had borne the expenses for such of those parties which he hosted from out of his personal funds. He also reportedly claimed that the Chairman and Managing Director was a friend with whom he had no official dealings. He should have known that nobody spends lakhs of rupees on a top official just out of a friendly impulse.

In the 1960s, such imputations would have raised doubts about the official’s integrity and he would have been summarily barred from holding any high post. In the case of Mr Kumar, with the shadow of a CBI inquiry over him, he was made the Governor of Jharkhand, during whose tenure again, yet another party was paid for by the same business firm. Only the persistent publicity given by the media to these goings-on eventually made him resign from the post. Thereafter, nothing further has been heard of the findings of the CBI investigation either.

Standards nibbled away

Or, take the case of the Uttar Pradesh Agricultural Production Commissioner (APC), Mr Anis Ansari, whose wife, a fashion designer, threw a garden party for families of bureaucrats and select business-persons on the lawns of the APC’s official residence, to advertise, as per the government’s version, the designer clothes created by her.

It did not seem to have entered the APC’s mind that using a government bungalow for a quasi-commercial activity on behalf of his wife is a misconduct. It is interesting that it is not seen in that light by some of today’s serving and retired bureaucrats whom I sounded in an informal straw poll.

In another instance, when a commercial outfit, training aspirants for All-India and Central Services, needed a venue to conduct mock interviews and sought the help of a reputed bureaucrat, spoken of highly otherwise, he arranged for it to be held in a government building and justified it on the ground that it was a public service to help budding policy-makers of the nation, though it was done on a commercial basis.

Ethical values and standards of integrity do not crumble at one go. They are nibbled away slowly but surely by failure to nip in the bud each case of deviation, however slight. This is what leads to pervasive corruption. And this is what has happened in India.

B. S. R.