When bright young Indians write the civil services examination they opt for security of tenure and an assured pension that comes with the requirement that they observe service discipline, respect the principle of seniority and remain self-effacing till retirement. For years that is how the Indian Administrative, Foreign, Police and other Services (IAS, IFS, IPS, etc) functioned. Over the years the principle of seniority has become so much of a mantra that governments are increasingly scared of using competence as the measure for promotion, shying away from deep selection and sticking to the rule book. However, for their part, civil servants are neither adhering to established practices of service discipline nor are they any longer self-effacing, seeking publicity for themselves every which way. The recent controversies surrounding the retired police officer Kiran Bedi and a former income tax officer Arvind Kejriwal were waiting to erupt, given that both of them flouted rules in service and, at the same time, sought personal glory and publicity for themselves. But theirs is the more high-profile example for understandable reasons. On a routine and regular basis many civil servants happily flout rules and norms and go scot free as long as they remain on the right side of the powers that be. Thus, IFS officers refuse to take up postings they do not like, IAS officers appear on television, write columns and give interviews as if their personal views matter for anything, and IPS officers bend rules and curry favour, ingratiating themselves with politicians of dubious repute.
The willingness of some civil servants to kneel when asked to bend enables politicians to subvert established systems and become democratic despots. Where a chief minister has become a despot, as is the case in so many states in India (Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, to name a few), officers routinely flout civil services procedure to genuflect and do the bidding of their political masters. This type of conduct is, however, the more visible example of flouting bureaucratic norms. What about the routine stuff, the kind that has invited disciplinary proceedings against Mr Kejriwal?
Government officials becoming non-government activists is a new form of civil service indiscipline. It ranges all the way from government officials running NGOs in the name of a spouse or relative and siphoning off public money to them, to government officials using the media to exert pressure on their superiors and project their own personality. Even as the government becomes more liberal, offering civil servants the space and freedom to express their creativity and talent, mixing the principle of seniority with that of competence and performance to reward good officers, it must also become stricter in ensuring that officers adhere to services discipline. Corruption is not the only affliction of Indian bureaucracy. Indiscipline, on the one side, a rigid adherence to seniority, on the other, and partisan favouritism on the third have all combined to make a mockery of the so-called ‘steel frame’.