The rise and fall of the sahibs of Raisina Hill

INDEPENDENCE SPECIAL/ GOVERNANCE

BETWEEN MEMORY AND HOPE, GOPI ARORA UNCOVERS A MILLION MUTINIES.

It never helps to allow nostalgia for a golden age of the civil service to govern judgement about the present. For the fact of the matter is that such an age never did exist.

Of course, we can't forget that there was the fabled Indian Civil Service, which Nehru thought was neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service.

On the other hand, Niall Ferguson advises America to follow a muscular imperial policy, taking a leaf out of the British experience of conquering other countries and running colonies. The ICS was a cardinal element of the British policy.

He is not the only admirer of the legendary service. The redoubtable Sardar Patel, in 1949, felt it constituted "a ring of Service that will keep the country intact". He went on to assert in the constituent assembly that "these people are the instruments of (national unity). Remove them and I see nothing but a picture of chaos all over the country."

How does the service, used as generic category to embrace all higher services dealing with political, social and economic aspects of State policy, measure up?

Perhaps most people would agree that the civil service has done reasonably well in preserving the sanctity of the electoral process, the very foundation of the rather imposing democratic edifice of India.

Supervised and guided by the Election Commission, which has very senior civil servants as its members, it has been largely instrumental in organising constitutionally mandated elections to enable people to choose their rulers, both at the Centre and in the States, from time to time.

This is indeed a remarkable contribution, of which it can be legitimately proud. But when it comes to the human development side, the narrative takes on grim overtones.

As it does in regard to maintaining the secular fabric of the Republic, where the premier elite services are in the driver's seat and where their values, fealty to the law of the land, organisational skills, and human sympathies come into play. The default is staggering.

When a new government came to power in 2004, it declared that the governance in the country needed a radical overhaul. The officialese means that in a large measure the services had failed to perform and that something has to be done to see that they start ticking again.

The Second Administrative Reforms Commission has endorsed government's judgement. It says that the general perception is that bureaucracy is "tardy, inefficient and unresponsive". Bad enough. But worse is to follow. It adds that there is "virtually unchecked"' abuse of authority "in pursuit of pelf, privilege and patronage".

There couldn't have been a stronger indictment. What has happened? Has the quality of candidates being recruited suffered an incalculable decline? It is hard to believe this. A fair proportion of the best and the brightest from our universities still join the services after what is arguably one of the toughest competitive examinations in the world.

They include graduates from the prestigious IITs and IIMs. Have the reservations diluted the quality, to tackle a politically incorrect question head on? There is no such evidence.

They also come through this gruelling test. For a satisfactory answer, we have to look a little deeper. The modern age heralded separation of realms and laying down of boundaries and jurisdictions. Not only was the Church separated from the State, major spheres of activity "" economic, social, scientific, academic, literary "" gained a certain autonomy from an overarching control.

That was the secret of advance of knowledge and of improved performance. Bureaucracy also acquired a self-managing status with its own hierarchies, codes of conduct and rituals and ceremonies to bind its members together.

This happened in India too. And the elan, the espirit de corps, the commitment to some ideals of public service, the larger intellectual and moral range of sympathies and interests, that were readily imbibed by the generations growing in the shadow of the towering Nehru, had their impact on the work they did.

This alone can explain a Dharam Vira, an L P Singh, a Sivaraman, a Vithal, a Krishnaswamy Rao Saheb, an Appu, a Bandophadhyay, a Buch, an Abid Husain and many others who have left an impression on the administrative scene.

Undoubtedly gifted, they were still the products of an environment that did not stand in the way of initiative and display of energy. Somewhere in the seventies, coincidentally with the awareness of stagnation in the economic sphere, this larger trend of autonomy began to give way to a creeping encroachment on boundaries. It was nibbling of territory to begin with, but now it is a full scale invasion of jurisdictions by whoever has the muscle power to do so.

The judiciary wishes to govern, the executive wishes to ride roughshod over all established norms and values in the name of the popular mandate, the legislature wishes to leave no sphere of autonomy intact in the name of sovereignty, the religious organisations wish to demolish the notion of the secular sphere with the active support of one political party or the other, and so on.

In this process, the civil service has completely lost its self-management attribute. A similar fate has befallen the universities and other centres of knowledge.

However, one area where the civil service must squarely take the blame is its failure to equip its members to face the challenge of meeting the complex tasks of managing diverse subjects such as agriculture, industry, finance, trade, social services, science and technology policy, security and geo-political strategy.

L P Singh regretted this singular lack of professionalism in the mental make up of the men and women composing the service. His advice fell on unreceptive soil. A huge weight of unrealistic expectations has rested on the shoulders of the civil service in this regard. And when these have been belied, as they had to be, critics have turned on the civil service to tear it apart.

It is blaming the wrong instrument, like criticising a butcher for failing to perform a complicated surgical procedure. What of the future? Ultimately the stimulus for change will have to be provided by political processes of the mobilising kind, just as the huge momentum for political, economic and social change was provided by the mighty national movement for liberation from colonialism.

Do we see any signs of it happening? One has to remember that history is open-ended. There is very little that is predictable about it. There is an intellectual and moral stir. There are a million mutinies. Some have lasted a fair amount of time in the jungle fastnesses of Andhra. Every little bit adds up to a critical mass. We live between memory and hope.

The writer is former finance secretary and an IAS officer, 1957 batch