Kiran Bedi has been an outstanding police woman and has had a reputation that been celebrated in an otherwise rather dismal moral space. She had discharged diverse duties here and overseas, has wide experience, and even has an international overview, having been privileged to absorb ideas and techniques of operation from across many cultures and nations. She is sharp and intelligent, active and innovative, and a people?s person. Why was she superceded in the race for the Commissioner of Police, Delhi?
As a standalone example, it is interesting, in today?s context, to consider what went against her. The person who got the ?top job?, as it?s called now, is an officer with a good professional reputation and adequate experience, but not as wide-ranging as that of Bedi. To pit the two contenders against each other and generate a ?pro? and ?against? public debate in the wider media, based merely on the issue of gender bias, is a trifle simplistic.
An insecure leadership and its insular bureaucracy usually feel threatened by the few out-of-the-ordinary individuals within the fraternity who step beyond the corroded and often archaic system, and make an impact in the larger public domain. The insecurity of the average drones in power begins to override all else because it is safer for them to endorse the ordinary and maintain the status quo. That is the root problem, one which needs to be weeded out of our administration.
This love for the status quo and protection of a system that has failed is a disease that consumes the body politic when it reaches a point of rejecting the wrongs of governance that have worked to destroy the fabric of integrity, truth and dignity in society.
What we are witnessing is an inability of a government to reconstruct the norms that determine the discipline of an administration and therefore, every move is suspect and criticised for being based on nepotism, be it related to gender or other factors. Frankly, the government should bring in a team of its own selection to deliver on its mandate and not have to work with a ?committed? bureaucracy that has its own biases. With its command economy and governance in the first few decades after 1947, the so-called ?committed? bureaucracy only managed to stall entrepreneurship wherever it could. It has been the single most unappealing assault on a new generation of Indian achievers. The operating system must be overhauled to allow for the fresh air of excellence.
Kiran Bedi epitomises the crisp attitude that Indian governance needs to be forcibly injected with. She does not break the rules, but operates within its constraints with vitality. She is not insular and isolated. She reaches out and accepts defeat when she fails. She is perceived, even by some of her critics, as a transparent officer of government who has the necessary and important skill to reach out and be inclusive. That is what government must be?and sadly is not.
Over the last few decades, the Indian Administrative Service, in its entirety, has succeeded in isolating itself from the citizenry, except when it is being coercive, threatening and extortionist, and has, because of that alienation, lost its true position of power. It does not command the respect and awe it once did. The administration today is characterised by insecurity and widespread degradation of norms and ethics, and this has diluted its respectability far more grievously that it acknowledges. It has become deeply politicised. The edifice of government, its archaic methodology, its unchanged systems, are all out of sync with an India that has moved on and is raring to soar.
The anarchy that envelops us is a direct result of this corrosion. Kiran Bedi is one victim of the deep systemic insecurity about calling a spade a spade. Overwhelmed by the guilt of having failed to deliver, and its intellectual inability to trigger an active process of change, the ivory tower closes all its doors and allows only those who belong to the exclusive club to attain new heights. Speaking out is taboo.