The recent spate of transfers, suspensions and actions against administrative and police officers by the UP Chief Minister, Mayawati, have been discussed at length. But what hasn?t really been gone into is why a popular politician, with her finger on the pulse of the people, would do this, and that too as she prepares for possible mid-term polls.
Could acting tough with babus (read bureaucrats) be a popular thing to do? There is, and has always been, a complex relationship between the ?babu? and the politician in India. The tension between the two is very well captured by the side-splitting Yes, Minister TV series, but in India, it is more complex than even that.
Before Independence, the ICS, the Imperial Civil Service, represented exactly that?the Empire. The common Indian, the aam aadmi, led a life defined by Imperial restrictions and saw Babudom to represent unbridled and unelected power. The local neta at the time, with his likely origins in the anti-Raj movement, was someone much more approachable?not an outsider reporting to the Crown.
When Independent India decided to keep the system, and change ICS to IAS or Indian Administrative Service, the country envisaged bureaucrats as the ?steel frame? of modern India and as a tool to deliver on promises made to the people, not as danda wielders to report insubordination and quell rebellions.
Yet, six decades later, that transition from ?authority? to ?delivery mechanism? has not happened. Even attempts by Rajiv Gandhi in the late 1980s to empower Panchayats, the other local bodies for governance, did little to change the attitudes of civil servants to their job, and consequently, of people towards them.
If the Right to Information Act is truly revolutionary, it is because it challenges this very authority and opaqueness of the ?steel frame?. It hasn?t been as easy journey to infuse transparency in the system at all. People who claim to live by the statute book have done everything to stall and trip up the revolution?by fighting to preserve the right to not allow ?file notings? to be made public, for example. Despite jholawala pressure, file notings by bureaucrats still remain outside the ambit of queries.
Several powerful babus, sensing that politics may be the real thing, have made the leap. The legendary PN Haksar, Indira Gandhi?s trusted civil servant remained an officer, but many others have turned politicians. Mani Shankar Aiyar, Natwar Singh and Brajesh Mishra are ex-foreign officers. Syed Shahbuddin is also from the foreign service. TN Chaturvedi was a bureaucrat and BP Singhal, brother of VHP leader Ashok Singhal, a former police officer. Many of these could make the jump as they found mentors in politicians they had advised as professionals. TN Seshan, who once created a stir as the chief election commissioner, could not resist the charms of fighting an election himself, though he is now happy to be running a successful school for administrators in Chennai.
Despite there being several ex-officers desperate to get their place in the sun (a Rajya Sabha seat), there remains a divide between those who believe that politicians are worse than babus, and vice-versa. Those who despise politicians argue that at least babus are ?competent?, ?literate? and are the tools that enable the delivery of political promises. Those who despise babus for the status quo they represent are equally sure of their belief that the politician is at least elected and therefore a shade more sensitive to people?s concerns than those who are there just by virtue of clearing an examination.
Whatever the arguments, what is clear is that as long as babus don?t begin to represent effective delivery at the district level, it will be popular politics to damn the official, at least occasionally.