N Gopalaswamy is not your usual bureaucrat. At least, he is known not to run after the visible symbols of power. When he was appointed the Home Secretary, he was staying in a C2-type government flat — not small, but not palatial either.
Now that he was Home Secretary, a colleague suggested, maybe it was time for him to move to a bigger house, maybe with a larger estate and garden. Gopalaswamy thought about it, shook his head, and said: “We’re just the two of us, me and my wife. We don’t really need a bigger house. This is fine.”
In a city where real estate is a symbol of power, Gopalaswamy let it go. By contrast, one of his predecessors, T N Seshan, whom he followed into the Election Commission many years later, armed himself with not just real estate but also physical security every step of the way. A colleague of Gopalaswamy’s laughed off the comparison: “There cannot be two more different people.”
But the comparison cannot be avoided. Not since the days of Seshan — barring a short spell of government-Election Commission standoff when James Lyngdoh was Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) — has Nirvachan Sadan been so much in the news.
Gopalaswamy was widely regarded as a model civil servant: Constructive in his criticism, rather than obstructive. An Indian Administrative Service officer of the Gujarat cadre, who joined the service in 1966, he is trained chemist. He has held various top-level posts including that of the managing director, Gujarat Communication and Electronics Limited; member (administration and purchase) in the Gujarat Electricity Board; secretary to the government (science & technology) in technical education; and secretary, department of revenue.
Posted in Delhi between 1992 and 2004, he was the Union Home Secretary and, prior to that, secretary in the department of culture and Secretary-General in the National Human Rights Commission. At no stage did any of his contemporaries get even a whiff of tendencies to subvert the system. If anything, he was considered god-fearing and deeply religious.
What appears to have set tongues wagging is his stint as the Home Secretary, when he served Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani. Is it just a coincidence that his current observations about the conduct of his colleague Navin Chawla should be based on a complaint filed by the party whose Deputy Prime Minister he had served as Home Secretary?
The fact is that concerns about Chawla’s credentials were first raised by BJP leader Jaswant Singh. BB Tandon, the CEC at that time, said he did not have the authority to recommend suo motu action against a colleague. In doing so, he avoided a controversy.
The matter went to President APJ Abdul Kalam, who sent it to the Prime Minister’s Office, who in turn directed the Law Ministry to give an opinion. Anxious to let sleeping dogs lie, the law ministry said the CEC could not make a suo motu reference to the President.
If Gopalaswamy had taken that route to keep the CEC and Nirvachan Sadan out of controversy, no one would have objected. But he chose the other path.
Come April 20, Gopalaswamy will walk out of Nirvachan Sadan for the last time. He won’t need to go to a doctor to confirm that he has a spine.
