Posted: Sat Oct 15 2011, 01:38 hrs
On the last working day of September, the Nandan Nilekani-led UID Authority received a rather clinical-sounding communication from the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), informing him that he was sending in a team to conduct a performance audit of UPA 2’s flagship programme. This was to be a performance audit. Now, UID was not due for audit this year, so this was some kind of special initiative. And sudden too. Because on the morning of the very next working day, October 3, Monday, the CAG team was sitting in the UID offices. It was almost like a tax or CBI raid.
Now, you could argue either way on the constitutionality or justification behind such a sudden move, particularly when there hasn’t been even a whiff of any financial wrongdoing on the part of the UID. Even in terms of performance, its work has hardly gathered pace, so it may be much too premature for audit evaluation. But while there are no charges of wrongdoing of any kind against the UID yet, it has been dragged into a bureaucratic turf battle with some sections of the Planning Commission, and it is no secret on Raisina Hill that the opposition to the project (and the relative financial autonomy given to it) is led by Sudha Pillai, a redoubtable IAS officer now serving as secretary to the Planning Commission.
To be fair, she has been open in questioning certain aspects of the way the project is being run. And it is probably only a coincidence that the current CAG, Vinod Rai, not only happens to be her 1972 batchmate, but also shares with her their parent cadre of Kerala.
We have no evidence at all of the two working in concert in any way, and so let us simply presume that each one has been acting on his/ her own, driven by bona fide doubts about the project. But what is evident is that each of them is at least individually challenging a programme so precious not only to this government, but also to the UPA’s top leadership, the Gandhis. Let’s not take a position on whether this is a good or a bad thing. Let us simply say that such things are nearly unprecedented in New Delhi.
If you’ve been observing our politico-bureaucratic complex closely over the past few months, you will find many such things that were hitherto unthinkable, or at least extremely rare. Some examples:
On July 29, Ashwani Kumar, minister of state for science and technology, threw a dinner party in honour of the new cabinet secretary and CVC, to which other senior political leaders and even top diplomats were invited. Now, how often have you seen ministers holding parties to welcome new bureaucratic appointees? In the British system we follow, in fact, the cabinet secretary is the clerk of the cabinet.
Just a fortnight back, the Indian Coast Guard took out advertisements (including in this paper) announcing the launch of two new ships. One of these was launched by the wife of the secretary, defence production, and the other by the wife of the joint secretary. So far, you thought these ceremonial, publicised launches were the privilege of the political class. With the politicians hiding in bunkers now, came the bureaucrats. And now their wives have joined the party too.
Almost every day now, you see civil servants, particularly those from economic ministries, on your TV screens. From finance to power to coal to oil and gas, almost all key economic ministries have seen their top civil servants emerge as their most visible spokespersons. On top of this bureaucratic star cast was, of course, our former home secretary G.K. Pillai. In fact, the only truly invisible civil servant is the seniormost of them all, the cabinet secretary, who, such a nice, self-effacing man, will most likely tell you that that is the way it is meant to be.
This government is under a legal assault of sorts from more civil servants retired from top positions than any in India’s history. At least three former chief election commissioners, one former cabinet secretary, 17 former Central government secretaries or equivalent and four former DGPs are in court, mostly with PILs, against this government.
This list also includes a real surprise, a former air chief, Air Chief Marshal S. Krishnaswamy, who has joined a PIL questioning the appointment of directors to SEBI. And as this is being written, a group of former high-ranking government officials, led by former Union cabinet secretary T.S.R. Subramanian, and including former CEC N.
Gopalaswami among others, have filed a petition in the Supreme Court challenging the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010. It seeks a stay on all proposed nuclear plants till a safety reassessment of all nuclear facilities in India and a cost-benefit analysis of nuclear plants are carried out.
As they would say in bureaucratese, this list is by no means conclusive, or even exhaustive. But it does give you the picture. That with the weakening of the political authority of UPA 2, with its ministers hiding in fright rather than going out to explain, support and be accountable for their decisions, our civil services are enjoying a golden era of unfettered, unquestioned power. They are controlling their ministries, with the political bosses afraid of questioning any bureaucratic input as it would later be seen as a scam by a regulator or anti-corruption watchdog (CAG, CVC, even the CBI), all totally manned by brethren in the same civil service. The result is indeed an unprecedented civil service coup.
You may also want to add to it the fact that most of the civil society groups — on all sides — are led by former bureaucrats (N.C. Saxena, Aruna Roy and Harsh Mander of Sonia Gandhi’s NAC; Kiran Bedi and Arvind Kejriwal of Anna’s team; and E.A.S. Sarma, B.D. Sharma and others of the anti-big project opposition loosely built around Medha Patkar). From all formulations it now also seems that the new Lokpal, whatever the nature of the final bill, would also be mostly manned by former bureaucrats, selected by a committee with a preponderance of their own former colleagues.
Can you blame the bureaucracy for this? Maybe not, because they are simply walking into a vacuum left behind by a political leadership which is not willing to stand up for its beliefs, convictions, or even bona fide decisions. This is the main reason it has got itself into such a jam on the 2G scam.
With no real centre of gravity in UPA 2, its ministers are caught in an every-man-for-himself mindset. It’s been ceding ground which legitimately belongs to an elected government, to all claimants: the judiciary, civil society, RTI leaders, and now its own civil servants. The net result is this creeping acquisition of state power by the civil service. The state of this government is best characterised by that brutal, if sexist, old saying from the Hindi heartland: garib ki joru, sab ki bhaujai (a weak man’s wife is everybody’s sister-in-law).
Is this is a good thing, or a bad thing? Many, in fact most, of these civil servants are probably honest, well-meaning Indians — so what is wrong if they displace our bumbling politicians?
I am reminded of a story that former US Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill says he would tell routinely to his students at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. Bureaucrats, he said, were like doctors and nurses in the emergency ward of a hospital. When a patient was wheeled in, their job was to follow Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and wait for the specialists (the political leaders) to arrive next morning. The politicians would then decide what to do with the patient, and the bureaucrats would, in turn, implement those instructions.
But you can imagine what would happen if people trained to follow SOPs took over the job of the specialists in a country as challenging to govern as India. The result would be a government in deep freeze, incapable of taking decisions, running on mere SOPs. In brief, a government in the emergency ward, which is as good a way as any to describe UPA 2 today.
sg@expressindia.com
