On a few occasions in the past, I have written about bureaucrats who write novels and how good some of them are. And, thanks to the marketing skills of the LitFest-walas – not to mention the vacuity of English TV news – it is these people who become the toast of the town.
Not all of them, of course, but the ones who manage to cultivate the media. In fact – and perhaps I am just being very mean – there almost seems to be an inverse relationship between media adulation and the quality of writing.
But hiding in the corners of bookshelves in shops and libraries are members of another category of civil servants. Their excellent work, comparable to the best of any academic research, goes largely unrecognised by those who ought to be raising a toast to them — the academic community whose small-mindedness has always baffled me. Perhaps Henry Kissinger was right when he said that academics are mean because the stakes they play for are so small.
Be that as it may, it is my happy duty to report that there are several dozens of civil servants who have produced excellent academic research. I wish I could mention them all. But thanks to the constraints of space here, we will have to be content with just a few of the latest ones.
These are the newest and the best I can think of. Of course, in the past, too, there have been writers from the bureaucracy who have written serious non-fiction. Some of these books are really very good indeed and should be read quite widely. No harm will come of it.
Boffin babus
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Each one of these books has been an exceedingly pleasant surprise. For example, I came across a book called The Status of Muslim Women in Medieval India by Sudha Sharma. Not in a million years would I have guessed what her actual job was: She was an officer of the Indian Revenue Service who retired as the Chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes! She has written an excellent book and I hope Jawaharlal Nehru University, if it hasn’t already, will offer her a visiting professorship.
There is Debtoru Chatterjee as well whose book Presidential Discretion I had reviewed some time ago. He likes to hide his light under a bushel. The book jacket describes him merely as “a civil servant”. When I Googled his name it said there was someone of that name in the IPS! If Mr Chatterjee is indeed a policeman, well, we could surely do with some of them in that service.
Then there is T V Somanathan of the 1987 batch. He is a joint secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). Along with the distinguished, not-academic economist V Anantha Nageswaran, he, too, has written a solid academic treatise on derivatives called The Economics of Derivatives.
Another sahib who has written a tidy little book – again along with Mr Nageswaran – is an IAS officer of the 1999 batch. He has a most engaging name: Gulzar Natarajan. The book is about India’s growth prospects and takes quite a gloomy view of the future. I think it is available only in electronic form but don’t let that prevent you reading it.
Unique skills
These babu writers comprise a unique skill set: They have run things, which the academics haven’t; and they can think like academics, a rarity in the bureaucracy. They are also unlike the other academics – remember one Manmohan Singh – who wandered into government and never produced anything academically worthwhile research thereafter. They did, however, supervise a lot of excellent research, at least in economics.
As Prime Minister Narendra Modi begins to gear up for a second term – or at least dream of it – he has a huge opportunity before him to harness the brain power of these bureaucrats, serving and retired, into something other than routine administrative work and dealings with ministers and politicians. That part is also required but it can be left to the others in the civil services.
In fact, Mr Modi has just the man in the PMO to spot this talent: Pramod Mishra of the 1972 batch of the Delhi School of Economics and of the IAS. To begin with he can ask just one question: Have you written a worthwhile book?
Having got by so far without giving much thought to policy, the time has perhaps come for the prime minster to start drawing policy papers with the help of these bureaucrats. They can be attached to the Cabinet Secretariat and posted far away from Delhi where they can work undisturbed.