Does bureaucracy improve governance?

Modern Indian bureaucracy completes 160 years soon yet it is unclear if it has served its purpose over the decades

The modern Indian bureaucracy turns 160 in a few weeks. Hurray. Of course, nobody actually plans on celebrating it because the bureaucracy, especially the lower one that citizens interface with, is a terrifying thing in our parts and has always been. 

One hundred and sixty years ago, and a year after the Mutiny, the Government of India Act of 1858 transferred rule from a private corporation’s board of directors to Queen Victoria’s government and its civil servants, the Indian Civil Service (or ICS) (later renamed as Indian Administrative Service or IAS). 

But much before that, the Mughal higher bureaucracy had been equally terrifying. European travellers have described it to us in detail. The emperor sat on a platform behind a series of barricades. Entry into the spaces between the barricades was restricted by rank and only the highest were allowed to stand before the final barrier. Petitioners and justice-seekers and favour-askers were held by the hand by one of the nobles (to communicate closeness and trust) and taken before the emperor — or as close as they could get. Once there, first they had to perform the kurnish, the Persian three-step bowing salute that Alexander the Great was enamoured enough to adopt, upsetting the Macedonians. And then they had to hope the emperor actually took notice. Gifts usually helped, as we know even in our time. 

Transfer to the ICS made things less arbitrary for the Indian citizen. But things were not necessarily made more efficient. 

Lord Curzon, who came 50 years after the Mutiny, likened the Indian bureaucracy to an elephant: “Very stately, very dignified, but very slow in its movement.” To make it move faster, Lord Curzon said he was “prodding the animal with the most vigorous and unexpected digs, and it gambols plaintively under the novel spur.” He said nothing was done in less than six months. “When I suggest six weeks, the attitude is one of pained surprise; if six days, one of pathetic protest; if six hours, one of stupefied resignation.”

John Stuart Mill described bureaucracy as “that vast net-work of administrative tyranny... which leaves no free agent in all France, except for the man at Paris who pulls the wires.” Ronald Reagan said that “the 9 most terrifying words in the English language as ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

It is easy to see why the civil servant inspires feelings of such dread. The suffix ‘-cracy’ denotes a particular form of government: Democracy, autocracy, plutocracy and so on. A bureaucracy is rule by ‘desks’ (the meaning of the French word bureau). By definition it announces its interference in the everyday life of the citizen. And who can deny that in India this interference is true? The bureaucrat is a potentate with the power to deny without reason your right to travel, eat, drink or even be free. This may seem an exaggeration to the outsider, till she notices how important an influence the bureaucrat is in the issuance of passports and Aadhaar cards, licenses and ration cards and the other paraphernalia through which the bureaucrat is kept busy.

Illustration by Ajay Mohanty

Gandhi thought the Indian bureaucracy was “top heavy and ruinously expensive”. He felt it had no use and “even law and order and good government would be too dearly purchased if the price to be paid for it is the grinding poverty of the masses.” S R Maheshwari in his book Indian Administration tells us that Indira Gandhi thought the bureaucracy was a “stumbling block” on road to economic and social progress. In 1969, the Congress complained: “The present bureaucracy under the orthodox and conservative leadership of the Indian Civil Service with its upper class prejudices, can hardly be expected to meet the requirements of social and economic change along socialist lines. The creation of an administrative cadre committed to national objectives and responsive to our social needs is an urgent necessity.”

Both Gandhi and Indira knew a thing or two about statecraft, but those who have been in positions of governance in the subcontinent have developed a healthy respect for the frame that is the IAS. Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf once proudly described to Atal Bihari Vajpayee his new system of local democracy where the bureaucrat would be replaced by an elected Nazim or mayor (unelected Mr Musharraf would continue holding the presidency, of course). Mr Vajpayee was in fact horrified that the scheme involved dismantling the system the British had created. “This is our steel skeleton” that holds the nation together, he cautioned. Narendra Modi famously governed Gujarat directly through the IAS going over the head of all his ministers. Even Amit Shah was only minister of state and never in the Cabinet during his decade in office. But he is an exception.

Usually the Indian politician has always regarded the bureaucrat with the same suspicion that the bureaucrat has returned to him. Both claim to be protecting the interests of the people, but both suspect the other is up to mischief. The power is somehow balanced between them. The politician has the legitimacy and the authority but the bureaucrat has knowledge of the system and tenure. He will remain no matter who his next political boss is.

Stephen Cohen, the scholar of Pakistan’s and India’s armies, once wrote that there were two differences between bureaucrats in India and those in the United States. For the Indian, rank was important. He would refuse to meet anyone lower than his direct counterpart even though the official assigned was empowered to decide on the issue. And second, Mr Cohen noticed, the Indian immediately regurgitated the history of the issue, going back decades, while the American was concerned only with the contours so far as they affected the current position. 

The bureaucrat sees himself as the guardian of the administration and also its conscience. He knows he is indispensable and not easy to replace systemically (Mr Musharraf’s plan collapsed in time). The bureaucrat is in not a few ways more important to the citizen than the politician.

Historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar has an interesting theory on the decline of the Mughal empire. The incompetent Jahangir lost Kandahar to the Safavids in 1649. This stopped the Mughals from using the land route west to Mecca (empowering the Europeans because of their naval dominance). And it stopped the highly sophisticated Persian Shias from travelling east for bureaucratic work in India. According to Sir Jadunath, the Persian Shias could not be replaced by local Indian talent and the empire began to be mismanaged and declined quickly.

For 160 years, the ICS/IAS has tried to show that Sir Jadunath’s observation about the Indian administrator’s quality was not true in perpetuity. Whether they have succeeded or not is, I think, still up for debate.