There has rarely been an occasion in the 64 years after Independence when the whole Indian nation had been subjected to the kind of catharsis that has followed the appointment of Mr P. J. Thomas as the Central Vigilance Commissioner (CVC).

It has now been climaxed by a historic verdict of the Supreme Court. It has found an echo in the minds of every Indian who cares deeply for ethical and moral imperatives in public life and conduct and has at heart an abiding respect for the Constitution and the law.

The Court verdict, in short, has lifted his spirit and rekindled his confidence in the self-corrective mechanisms of democracy, as nothing else in recent memory has done.

Of the three members of the Committee for the CVC's selection, only the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Ms Sushma Swaraj, has come out in flying colours, while the other two, the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, and the Home Minister, Mr P. Chidambaram, have shown themselves to have been unbelievably cavalier.

They plainly have not lived up to the faith and trust reposed in them by virtue of the positions they hold which require them to set the most stringent standards of thoroughness and uprightness for themselves.

Great puzzle

Had they heeded the Leader of the Opposition and probed deeper into the background of Mr Thomas, they could have saved themselves from all the legitimate criticism now heaped upon them and saved the nation from the troubling feeling of the grave let-down caused by their sticking to their choice of Mr Thomas on specious grounds.

At the same time, it is a great puzzle how the elementary principle escaped the Prime Minister and the Home Minister that the CVC, who is seen as a moral and ethical ombudsman of the nation and on whom is cast the sacred responsibility of enforcing probity, propriety and prudence in respect of the various grades of functionaries in the Central Government, should himself be a person of impeccable integrity.

Even if they were forgetful for some reason, there was the judgment given by the Supreme Court in another case some years ago in which nothing short of ‘impeccable integrity' was set out as a paramount qualification for the CVC's post.

Shouldn't they have known that this means that the person selected must have an unblemished background, giving no room for even the slightest whisper of misgivings on any count whatsoever?

In a statement which, incidentally was at variance with that of the Prime Minister, Mr Chidambaram has admitted that Ms Sushma Swaraj did bring to the notice of the Committee the tainted antecedents of Mr Thomas arising from the charge-sheet in the palmolein case.

And yet, inexplicably, in the face of the surge of resentment, Dr Manmohan Singh, took it upon himself to make an unambiguous public assertion of the individual's integrity and the Home Minister, Mr P. Chidambaram, categorically testified to his exoneration in a case that was still pending.

Monstrous outrage

By summarily brushing aside the dissent of the Leader of the Opposition and selecting someone who was, and still is, the eighth accused in a case of criminal conspiracy, they became parties to the damage to the credibility and the esteem in which the post of CVC ought to be held, and have given further fillip to the pervasive cynicism about the subversion of institutions by the political class for feathering its own nest.

Out of evil cometh good. The monstrous outrage has resulted in a verdict by the highest Court in which it has explicitly come out with its cardinal pronouncement that preservation of institutional integrity is as important as the criterion of personal integrity of the candidate as the touchstone for the appointment of the CVC.

Its dictum that any future appointment should not be restricted to civil servants alone but people of impeccable integrity from other fields should be taken to have general application to appointments to other top sensitive posts as well.

The verdict will also have the salutary effect of restoring to the Leader of the Opposition the right to insist on selection by consensus by accommodating his or her opinion in case there is a disagreement.

The best course is to amend the Act itself to provide for selection by agreement among all the members of the committee. It will be wrong on my part, as a former bureaucrat, to let go l'affaire Thomas without referring to the ugly manifestations of the rot that has crept into bureaucracy. Mr Thomas made a spectacle of himself by parroting the alibis and excuses in words identical to the ones trotted out by deviant and errant politicians as if to the manner born. Is this what civil service has come to?

Curious facet

More crucially, I take a very dim view of the role of the Cabinet Secretary and the Principal Secretary to the Prime

It is evident that if only they had been scrutinising and alert, they could have averted all the ignominy to which the Prime Minister and the Home Minister have been exposed.

There is, in addition, one curious facet of the shoddy processing that causes profound disquiet about the health of bureaucracy at its highest reaches.

Of the three officials short-listed by the Cabinet Secretary for consideration by the Selection Committee, Mr P. J. Thomas of the Kerala Cadre of the IAS, besides being involved in a criminal case, was also subsequently Secretary in the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology; the second (Mr S. Krishnan of the Uttarakhand cadre of the IAS) had retired as Secretary, Department of Fertilisers; and the third (Mr Bijoy Chatterjee of the West Bengal cadre of the IAS) is the Secretary in the Department of Chemicals and Petrochemicals.

Intriguingly, all the three are from Ministries headed by the nominees (Messrs A. Raja and M. K. Alagiri) of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam as Cabinet Ministers.

The Cabinet Secretary and the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister too should take the blame for mishandling the matter and gracefully put in their papers accepting constructive and moral responsibility.

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