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CIVIL SERVANTS: How Civil? Whose
Servants?
WSN Bureau
Bureaucrats in
Punjab are clearly divided in two camps. When the government's hue
changes from Congress to Akali, Punjab witnesses a shuffle in
bureaucracy. By now, the circle has become so common and regular
that even sections of civil society have become immune to it. The
media has stopped even commenting on the fact that the political
parties in
Punjab
have clear and blatant favourites in bureaucracy and police.
We all saw the
Badals, Parkash and Sukhbir, making overt and covert threats to
officials in Punjab when they were in the Opposition. The same thing
now happens and an Amarinder or a Bhattal keeps shooting off his/her
mouth, telling officials to stay objective and not to become part of
a witch hunt of political enemies of the Badals.
The fact remains
that a powerful permanent civil service, selected on merit, was one
legacy of colonial rule that
India’s
post-colonial political leadership consciously chose to preserve
after Independence. More than six decades later, the higher
bureaucracy retains many of its colonial cultural legacies of
conspicuous trappings of power. Babus living in sprawling bungalows,
liveried staff, flashing car beacons and peremptory sirens also
belie the supposition that after 1947, there was supposed to be an
epochal transformation of the permanent bureaucracy, at least
theoretically, from masters to servants.
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The
Afsar-shahi in Punjab, like in rest of India, found it more fruitful
to collude with the political masters, the official establishment
and the brahamanical levers of power and thus become a stake holder
in status quo. The bureaucracy in Punjab has refused to become
progressive and has instead become part of the problem. It, in fact,
is the problem. |
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In today's
Punjab, people are not sovereign, they do not exercise their
sovereignty through public representatives, and the bureaucracy is
not the servant of the people. In fact, it remains their remote and
unaccountable master.
Even the idea
that there should have been a metamorphosis and the officials should
have turned from being masters to servants of the people is no more
talked about even in the quality media.
One would have
thought that the civil servant would not only have become "a servant
of the people and the Constitution" but even more; his or her
highest duty should have been not of obedience but of conscience. A
democracy guarantees to civil servants not only the right, but even
enjoins on them the duty to dissent in response to the call of their
conscience. And they could have grown only bigger in profile had
they learnt to stand up to their political masters and spoken about
Constitutional morality in dealing with people and issues.
Unfortunately,
the so-called "afsar-shahi" in
Punjab,
like in rest of
India, found it
more fruitful to collude with the political masters, the official
establishment and the brahamanical levers of power and thus become a
stake holder in status quo. The bureaucracy in Punjab has refused to
become progressive and has instead become part of the problem. It,
in fact, is the problem.
How could
Amarinder use the Vigilance Bureau so ruthlessly against political
opponents? How could Badal do the same, albeit with a different set
of people? Why was it possible for men like KPS Gill and Ajit Singh
Sandhu to kill so many with such impunity in a set up that was not
only being run by police officers but also by tens of civilian
officers, some of the very senior IAS men and women? How does it
become possible for hundreds of people to enter into such a
conspiracy?
 India has seen
the IAS failing time and again. The cadre has failed the people, the
common, weak, marginalized, victimized people, again and again. You
can pick up any instance, be it that of various riots in the country
or the Ayodhya district magistrate opening the locks of the Babri
Masjid for Hindu worship in 1949, laying the foundations for a
communal dispute three decades later, the IAS failed the people as
much as the politicians.
The reality of
communal partisanship in religious and ethnic disputes, and many
other betrayals and failures, including growing corruption, is there
for all to see. The one big example was the mass betrayal of the
civil service during the Emergency imposed in India in 1975 by
Indira Gandhi. She suspended the Constitution and its guarantee of
fundamental rights, and threw tens of thousands of opponents to what
they believed to be her corrupt and oppressive regime into jails on
openly trumped-up charges. A judicial commission led by Justice
Shah, which later investigated these traumatic and shameful 18
months of suspended freedoms, famously observed that during this
phase, when the civil service was asked to bend, it crawled. In
other words, its fault was not that it failed to obey, but that it
obeyed too uncritically and unresistingly illegal and venal
instructions of its political masters.
The same failure
to resist illegal orders with devastating consequences marked
official behaviour in virtually every later hour of major crisis,
such as: the active complicity of the permanent executive in the
denial of human rights, fake encounter killings and suppression by
brute force of militant Maoist Naxalite uprisings and separatist
insurgencies in the North East and later in Punjab and Kashmir; the
1984 massacre of more than 3000 Sikhs in 1984, when the ruling
Congress party openly engineered the massacre for partisan political
gains; failures to hold criminally accountable the Union Carbide in
the poisonous gas leak which killed thousands in Bhopal in 1984; the
slaughter of unarmed Muslim youth at Hashimpura by paramilitary
soldiers in 1987; the riots in Bhagalpur in 1989; the demolition of
the Babri Masjid in 1992 and the slaughter that followed in its wake
in Mumbai and Bhopal; and the state-sponsored massacre in Gujarat in
2002.
With the
exception of a few solitary – and sometimes heroic – voices of
conscience and dissent from within the ranks of the bureaucracy, as
a rule the civil services willingly capitulated and unresistingly
obeyed instructions to deny people their constitutional rights,
including to life, liberty and democratic dissent, and failed to
extend equal protection of the law to people because of their
religious or ethnic identities or economic powerlessness. The unsung
and mostly unknown heroes from within the bureaucracy who refused to
obey unjust and illegal orders could never gather sufficient
critical mass for the permanent bureaucracy to act as a decisive
bulwark against divisive and communal politics. The bureaucracy must
carry, therefore, the greatest historical blame for failures of the
state in these times to extend equal protection of the law to
religious and ethnic minorities and to impoverished people in
general.
No wonder, the
politician loves the compromised, or ready to become compromised
babu. That explains why men like Badal are in love with officials
who display the one quality they admire most: Obedience.
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Bureaucrats in Punjab have long stopped listening to the voice of
conscience. And it is no different in rest of India. True, the Sikhs
are justifiably angry at the way their aspirations for a
self-respecting way of life have been bull-dozed by entrenched
powers, but the lot of the rest of the common people is no better.
At every turn, officials stop listening to their conscience, and
instead carry out illegal orders. Examples abound: The active
complicity of the IAS and IPS in the denial of human rights, fake
encounter killings and suppression by brute force of militant Maoist
Naxalite uprisings and separatist insurgencies in the North East and
later in Punjab and Kashmir; the 1984 massacre of more than 3000
Sikhs in 1984, when the ruling Congress party openly engineered the
massacre for partisan political gains; failures to hold criminally
accountable the Union Carbide in the poisonous gas leak which killed
thousands in Bhopal in 1984; the slaughter of unarmed Muslim youth
at Hashimpura by paramilitary soldiers in 1987; the riots in
Bhagalpur in 1989; the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and
the slaughter that followed in its wake in Mumbai and Bhopal; and
the state-sponsored massacre in Gujarat in 2002. |
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Time and again,
whether it be the Congress or the Akali Dal, the best postings, the
rewards, the spoils of the regime go to those display loyalty.
Obedience is repeatedly upheld as the paramount virtue of a civil
servant. It is commonly advocated by official and political
superiors that the duty of a civil servant is to obey orders of
political masters without questioning their dictates, and to find
ways to most efficiently implement these. Officers who dissented
were not just being inconvenient, but were actually stepping outside
the boundary laid down for the permanent unelected executive in a
parliamentary democracy.
There is little
place in the system for someone who takes a legally sound position
in consonance with one’s conscience. Such an officer finds himself
tossed around from posting to posting, suffering heartbreaks, and
made to understand that listening to your inner voice is a known
hazard of the profession. Even senior officers who know well the
validity of such an officer’s stand feel no shame in saying that
they hail the bravado but cannot protect such a person.
Various regimes
in Punjab have made it clear that they only want and will encourage
officials who agree to faithfully obey political and official
superiors, no matter how ethically flawed were the orders.
The Amarinders
and the Badals do not understand that it was exactly a paradigm of
this kind that allows massacres like 1984 to happen. The officials
refuse to stand up to the politician. Instead, they become a willing
weapon in the hands of the politician and do his dirty work. That is
why across India, the officials have for years been refusing to defy
politicians and have been encouraging leaders of the Hindutva
organizations to dangerously inflame passions.
It is a shame
that the media has stopped questioning the highest duty of a civil
servant in a democracy. Is it obedience or conscience? Does a civil
servant have the right to dissent and even refuse to comply with
orders that violate what he/she believes to be lawful, just and
humane?
If obedience
indeed is the highest ethic of a civil servant, then in the excesses
of the Emergency, or indeed the violation of human rights in
insurgencies, or majoritarian partisanship in communal violence,
civil servants could honestly plead that they were just faithfully
implementing orders from their ‘political masters’. How could they
be held guilty of complicity in grave injustice against defenceless
citizens? Yet these were shameful, criminal, abdication of duty by
civil servants, with catastrophic outcomes for the people and the
country. Where then was the moral paradox?
If there is
indeed a duty of obedience, then it can only be to the lawful
officially stated and publicly espoused objectives of the
government, not the unlawful unstated directives of elected
political or superior administrative actors in the executive.
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A story is told
of the training of youth recruits by the Nazis. They were given
puppies when they joined, and encouraged to develop bonds of
affection with these little creatures. One day the commanding
officer would order them to strangle the animal to death. Only if
they complied, and that too without flinching, did they pass the
test of being reliable Nazi workers. On the contrary such a person
is reliable, not only the officer who would flinch, but one who
would stoutly refuse to obey such an order. Only such an official
would have had the strength of character to defy, say the Emergency
of 1975-77 or the 2002 carnage in Gujarat. Only such an officer
would have stood between a mob led by the likes of Sajjan Kumar or
Jagdish Tytler and the innocent Sikhs of Trilokpuri. |
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Here is an
illustration. The official position of government is that legislated
land reform laws should be faithfully implemented. But the unstated
orders of political superiors are almost invariably that powerful
landowners should not be dispossessed of their land holdings. But if
officials were to distribute ceiling surplus agricultural land to
the landless, or restore land illegally expropriated from tribal
land holders, ministers and local elected representatives would
react with horror as though the officer was a closet Maoist.
The same chasm
between the stated legal policies and the actual will of the
executive can be found everywhere. The stated policies are for fair
and non-partisan action in communal, caste and gender violence, but
the unstated political or administrative directives often advocate
biased action against vulnerable and oppressed castes, religious and
ethnic minorities and women. The law enjoins respect for human
fundamental rights, but there is often open and unapologetic
political endorsement, even at the highest levels of the executive,
for torture and encounter killings. The law makes corruption a
criminal offence, but in practice this is endorsed as the grease
that makes the giant sluggish state machinery function.
Of course, it is
the duty of public officials to faithfully implement orders of the
political executive and the administrative hierarchy when these are
lawful orders, in conformity with the official stated policies of
government. In fact if officers are faithful to the stated policies
and laws of government, then they are bound to implement land
reforms and other progressive legislation, to protect oppressed and
dispossessed minorities, castes and women, fight corruption and
respect human rights. But the reality is that in obeying and
implementing in letter and spirit these stated lawful policies, the
officer will frequently be disobeying the unstated unlawful goals of
the superior executive.
The civil
servant who chooses to obey these unlawful directives cannot claim
ethical defence in the duty of obedience of civil servants in a
democracy, because even if faithful obedience is the highest duty of
the official, it cannot be obedience to unlawful orders.
But the problem
is even bigger: Not all statutes or government policies are just and
conforming to the interests of disadvantaged citizens. There are a
whole body of laws and policies that are wholly unjust, such as
those that vest security forces with special powers in troubled
regions, laws that enable involuntary acquisition of land, laws that
criminalize beggary and destitution, and policies to demolish urban
slums, to name only a few. Does the civil servant have the right to
dissent and refuse to implement laws and policies which contravene
his or her conscience?
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There
is little place in the system for someone who takes a legally sound
position in consonance with one’s conscience. Such an officer finds
himself tossed around from posting to posting, suffering
heartbreaks, and made to understand that listening to your inner
voice is a known hazard of the profession. Even senior officers who
know well the validity of such an officer’s stand feel no shame in
saying that they hail the bravado but cannot protect such a person.
Various regimes in
Punjab
have made it clear that they only want and will encourage officials
who agree to faithfully obey political and official superiors, no
matter how ethically flawed were the orders. |
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Why have Indian
bureaucrats surrendered this inalienable right to individual
conscience? Why do IAS officers in Punjab not stand up to a Badal or
an Amarinder to say that they cannot become a tool of the politician
and they cannot become a tool of a badly acting legislature? That
they will only be the instrument to implement the will of the
sovereign collective of people?
Any suggestion
of this and there starts in India so much brouhaha about the ethical
duty of all civil servants to act in obedience to their conscience
rather than the directions of the political executive, even when
these conform to the law and the stated policies of the government.
It can be argued that if every public official was free to disobey
laws and policies which they regarded to be unjust, this could
ultimately be a prescription for anarchy. But consider this: if
every civil servant was bound to obey every official law and policy
even if this contravened her conscience, then this could ultimately
lead to fascism. And if the ultimate choice is between anarchy and
fascism, the men and women with conscience must chose anarchy!
If a nation
state violates its own Constitution, as
India
does every single day, then it is legal and morally right to stand
up to those who claim to rule. If the state fails to provide equal
protection under the law and equal legal citizenship rights to all
regardless of their faith, gender, caste, language, ethnicity and
wealth, then it is itself against the Constitution. Who is violating
the Constitution more in India’s naxalism hit areas: the Indian
state or the Maoists? The state has failed to intervene to defend
the rights of disadvantaged people, including through affirmative
action; and the Maoists have got their thesis all wrong. Both are
guilty. But the officialdom is siding only with Indian nation state.
In Punjab,
in the early 1990s it sided with the Indian state to kill innocents
in fake encounters.
Today, the
Punjab politician is doing exactly what his national counterpart
does at the federal level: the deployment of violence against
political opponents just as CRPF and Army is deployed against the
other enemy, the people.
It is time for
the officialdom to think why must it be expected and why has it
agreed to give up the right of conscience and dissent against
illegal orders, and even against lawful orders, policies and
programmes that are unjust.
Will Punjab also
get to see bureaucrats standing up to political power and saying,
“Sorry, I cannot do this. I am sworn to protect the people, the
common simple people, and I will not do this. I will sit on a file
for appointing teachers to schools because the minister says so.
There are kids out there who need teachers. I will not hold back
funds from a poor school because the kids of the rich and the
influential do not study there. I will not tolerate the state’s
schools run by the government to have only scheduled caste children.
I will not tolerate such a rotten education sector. I will not
tolerate the lack of medicines in sarkari hospitals. I will not
stand by and witness all policy making happening in favour of the
rich and the powerful. I will not have all road user policies being
drafted with the cars in mind. I will not allow police to lathi
charge the teachers, the nurses, the farmers because all they are
doing is demanding that the government must do what it was in fact
its duty to do in the first place.”
Please stand up
for your self, stand up so that your daughters and son respect you,
stand up so that you can face yourself in the mirror, stand up so
that the judgement of history on you is not so harsh. Stand up
because you are still not alien to the idea of Shame. Stand up and
state your reasons for doing so. Say that the state cannot be a moot
witness for a quarter of a century after the killings of 3,000
Sikhs. Say that you shall not be honored in asking your men to give
respect to killer politicians who preside over massacres of Muslims.
Stand up and say that you shall not wait for politics to take a turn
and then think of registering a case against someone who says the
entire India must call itself Hindu.
Have we got even
a single officer in
India
who could say that he seriously considered filing a case against RSS
chief Mohan Bhagwat for saying at so many forums that he would like
to see all of
India as Hindu,
that everyone who lives in
India
has to and must consider himself a Hindu? Is there a more serious
violation of the Constitution?
India and
India’s bureaucracy tolerates this none-sense and it is this that
then leads to massacres of the Sikhs and the Muslims and atrocities
on Christians.
24
February 2010
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