A moral test for IAS officers

At the beginning of October, a 2001 batch Uttar Pradesh IAS officer was charged with molesting a young woman on a train. He subsequently defended himself as being a victim of caste politics. Ordinarily, the defence should have been enough coming from a person who had selected to hold Government positions which would affect the lives of millions. But it was not so in this case. As reported in the national press, when his peers in Uttar Pradesh heard about the discomfiture of their colleague, “20 IAS officers landed at the railway station (in Lucknow) to get him out and, using skills honed over a lifetime in government, negotiate a deal with the victim.”

The point must immediately be made that not everyone in the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) is like this person, even though it is true that the examination he got through, entitling him to a job in the once-elite service, “does not test a person’s morality.” Take the case of the much more senior Ashok Khemka, of the Haryana cadre, who shot into the news last week for ordering a probe into the land dealings of Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra with the real-estate giant DLF. There is little doubt that Khemka was shunted out of the Revenue Department for taking the line he did, which must be small change for the Calcutta-honed bureaucrat who, it is reported, has been transferred 40 times in his 21 years of service. It is reported that he wants to go on deputation to the Centre, but the suspicion is that this will take much longer to work out than is normal in such cases, because no senior would like to have such a stickler for rules on the staff.

Khemka’s Lone battle

In the two cases just cited one thing stands out, namely, that while the Uttar Pradesh officer had open support within the service, Khemka, as of now, is apparently fighting a lone battle. It is more than certain that many within the service all over the country ready to lend him their support. The question is, why have they not come out into the open, as did their UP colleagues? The answer is clear: no officer would like to jeopardise his or her prospects in the service, the inference being that no such apprehension existed for the 20-odd officers who batted for their colleague in Uttar Pradesh.

To come to the point, what is the Cabinet Secretary — the head of the service nationwide — doing in the two cases? After all, both incidents have shown up the IAS in a poor light, and the service is too critical a component of the state matrix for its affairs to be shrouded in departmental secrecy. The Indian Civil Service was a tool of the imperial masters, the people of India not being entitled to know the workings in its entrails. The IAS, being the executive arm of the republic, is in a different category altogether and enjoys no such cocoon.

Inaction

Indeed, what are the politicians doing about the two cases? On the face of it, this seems to be an excellent opportunity for a hue and cry to be raised yielding important political capital for the parties, and yet there is nothing more than just a murmur of the wrongdoing involved. All one can say is that all this bodes ill for the future of the republic. The need of the hour is a total revamp of the IAS recruitment system, because the requirement today is not just of good students but good human beings as well, and the present examination is hopelessly unsuited to meet this end.

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