In New Delhi, regional capitals and far-flung districts, it is known which member of the IAS falls in which category. Their reputations precede them, and their daily actions are up for scrutiny. Who is fronting for which political or business interest, who is on the take, what are the sweepstakes for jobs at the Centre or for post-retirement baksheesh? In the digital age, accounts of the IAS biradari travel much faster because it is not a very big club: a total of 4,373 officers currently constitute the "steel frame". In 2011, of the 425 top-ranking candidates in the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) exam, 370 put down the IAS as their first choice. Was it for all the wrong reasons?
Apparently not, given the flow of information made public since the political assault on Durga Shakti Nagpal and Ashok Khemka started. The scale of punishment delivered to IAS and IPS officers sounds like the Dark Ages equivalent of being shunted to the wastelands, deposited in dungeons or, now and then, being driven to the gallows. Thousands of transfers in Uttar Pradesh alone are reported each time the government changes, or in the event of suspensions, inquiries and the occasional suicide or murder. Some suffer for standing up to political pressure and others because they were openly complicit in political corruption. There is the unspoken case of a civil servant in Uttar Pradesh not long ago who allegedly took his life because he had turned investment banker to a leading politician - and was unable to deliver profitable returns!
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The factual evidence has lately been backed by a series of candid personal memoirs published by retired IAS officers such as T S R Subramanian, Bhaskar Ghose, Javid Chowdhury and Robin Gupta of the treachery and interference they faced while doing their jobs honestly and judiciously. Oddly, however, no remarkable history of the IAS has emerged since Independence to compare with the sweep and insight of Philip Mason's The Men Who Ruled India (Rupa; Rs 261). Published in 1953-54, together with its companion volume The Guardians, this remains, despite its whiff of colonial patriarchy, the classic study of the old Indian Civil Service - one reason it has never gone out of print. Mason returns, by example and inference, to the abiding dharma of the civil servant: authority and dignity. By the first he means the executive power to enforce decisions impartially for the public good, by the second a clear detachment from the spoils of office.
Many in the IAS agree that their authority has gradually been eroded by politicians, but they are at sixes and sevens to pinpoint the periods of decline, or the processes to blame. Some argue that it was administrative reforms in the 1970s to create a "committed bureaucracy" by Indira Gandhi, during the Emergency for instance, that turned legions of guardians into palace guards; others say that emerging regional leaders, on cue from New Delhi, helped in reducing civil servants to servile courtiers and corrupt conspirators. Mrs Gandhi was known to shrug off corruption as a "global phenomenon". P Chidambaram feels much the same, in his interview to this paper last weekend: "You go to the website of any country, and you will see there is a revolt against corruption and bad governance" (Lunch with BS, August 10, 2013).
It could be said that the more things change, the more they deteriorate. Tales of bureaucratic sycophancy make juicy reading. In visual terms, my favourite indelible image is of a former chief secretary of Tamil Nadu who would await the arrival of Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa with a welcoming bouquet in the porch - every time she deigned to visit the secretariat.
He hadn't read Philip Mason. Nor is there an Indian successor to Mason to record how the guardians become palace guards.