Alapan-Centre row reminder that the civil servant is the boss

The fracas over Alapan Bandyopadhyay was highly avoidable.

Beyond this, however, is the big question: Who orchestrated the attack? It was a bunch of civil servants who read the rules to the political executive at the Centre.

To say this is an alarming tendency within the civil services in India is an understatement. For decades, the civil service in India has ceased to be an apolitical institution and it shall be useful if policies are now made acknowledging this position.

Almost the first order issued by the Narendra Modi administration when it came to power was an ordinance. Nripendra Misra was appointed the principal secretary to the prime minister. But his previous appointment, as the chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, had barred him from holding any subsequent position under the Government of India.

The ordinance amended the rules to drop the restriction and was issued late in the evening. It was quite possible for the BJP think tank to have not noticed this restriction before they appointed him. The officers could not have been unaware, and it was they who decided how to erase the rules and set a bad precedent.

It is not just the IAS. There is another unsavoury example, again from the Centre. The Income Tax Department has in the last few years combined the role of Member (investigation) with the post of chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes. There has been no official order for this, yet the past three incumbents, including the incumbent chief election commissioner, Sushil Chandra, have continued with it.

There was a reason why the two posts were separate earlier. If a member had been, say hasty, the chairman had time to undo the damage. Once the posts were combined, as former election commissioner Ashok Lavasa discovered when his family received an income tax search operation, there was no chance to rectify the damage. To my knowledge, this was done by civil servants, without prodding from the political executive, just as the details of how to rescue Mishra’s appointment were devised by them. Politicians in power do far less but invite stronger opprobrium.

Let us go down to Telangana. Since the formation of the state in 2014, virtually no senior civil servant has retired. As a result, there is a principal secretary to the chief minister, there is also a chief advisor to the chief minister who was the first chief secretary of the state, and then there are seven advisors to different ministers of the state government, all retired IAS and IPS officers. This is besides the retinue of officers.

When the current chief secretary was appointed, jumping over several seniors, Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao met each of them to assuage their feelings. When was the last time a chief minister of any state met miffed MLAs to tell them why they did not get a ministership! Instead, in Punjab, ministers “boycotted” a cabinet meeting to protest comments made against them by a former chief secretary. Who wields the power baton?

If you still imagine these are one-off phenomena, look at another statistic. Chief secretaries and DGPs are the two senior-most administrative positions in any state government. But in each of the 28 states, thanks to rapid and time-bound promotions, there are at least a dozen or more of them sitting in the state secretariats.

In Uttar Pradesh, there are now 30 such officers, Karnataka and West Bengal have 20 each. Even smaller states like Punjab have nine each. It means all the key departments of these state governments are headed by officers with the same seniority.

This means the additional chief secretaries have no particular reason to obey the orders of anyone who is just notionally deemed superior. This means officers can only aspire to the key posts if they are close to the current political administration. Else as it routinely happens, officers in states like Tamil Nadu operate by turns the key departments depending on who is in power.

We have heard a lot about the 360-degree evaluation of senior officers at the Centre. States do the same, except they offer no names for it. This makes it essential to consider that a certain percentage of civil servants should come and leave with the political party in power. It shall help prevent obfuscation.

Returning to the incident of the West Bengal chief secretary, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was obviously directing his ire at the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee. As the elected leader of the people, there was little he could do to diminish her position. Instead, Bandyopadhyay has become a new power centre and re-established the pre-eminent role of civil servants that was on the wane in West Bengal. Don’t be surprised if, like Punjab, miffed ministers of the state complain soon.

An enhancement of the role of civil services was anyway bound to happen, as the issues of statecraft become more complicated. Just survey the themes being examined even in the current Covid pandemic. For instance, who really decides agendas at the GST Council meetings? Yet while we know the political stance of a party, we do not know that of a civil servant, and that is the bigger risk.

(The writer is a business journalist and can be reached at [e-mail])

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.