If there is one, just one, lesson to be drawn from the disclosures before the Shah commission, it is that the top, and indeed not so top, civil servants must never again be placed in a position where they feel obliged to obey patently unfair and inhuman orders. Yet this is one conclusion which hardly anyone has drawn from them. On the contrary, the civil servants continue to be forced to take and implement decisions which they must find abhorrent and even risky.
Pending the report of the Shah and other commissions of inquiry now at work, it is not possible to say for certain which of the officials arraigned before them cooperated with the emergency regime willingly and enthusiastically either out of conviction (one could, for instance, genuinely believe in forcible sterilisation as an unpleasant necessity) or natural wickedness or desire for quick promotion. But it is doubtful that the list of such men can be very long. The others in all probability fell in line because they saw no other choice before them. While some of them might have grumbled and tried to do an essentially unpleasant job in as humane a manner as possible, the others might have submitted quietly. But this is a relatively minor distinction.
It has, of course, been said and it will continue to be said that the civil servants should have summoned the necessary courage to defy orders which, in their opinion, violated the letter and the spirit of the laws of the land. But this is an utterly simplistic view even if it has behind it the authority of Mahatma Gandhi and Mr Jayaprakash Narayan. The fact that hardly any civil servant responded to Gandhi’s call during the British period or Mr Narayan’s during the emergency itself should suffice to show that the issue is more complicated.
REBELS
Men who are rebels by temperament and are inclined to run serious risks for the sake of their convictions, do not as a rule join the civil service. Generally civil servants look for security above all else and tend to rationalise whatever they have to do. And thank God for that. For no government, however just and honest, can hope to function if its civil service contains too many potential rebels.
Equally, if not more, important is the fact that while there are always in every country and situation some individuals who are naturally courageous, courage in the sense of defiance of authority is essentially a function of organised groups. The role of the Church in Communist Poland and racist South Africa and of communist parties in the resistance movement against the Nazi rule in France and Italy during World War II and against the Franco and the Salazar regimes in Spain and Portugal amply illustrate the point. In India during the emergency the CPM could have been fairly active if it had not been thoroughly demoralised by the beating it had received in 1971 and 1972.
A basic contradiction is built into the situation. For a democratic polity requires a civil service which is at once obedient to the political masters and able to uphold certain norms and standards of professional ethics which the latter are not willing to respect in practice if not in theory as well. And it would be idle and naive for anyone to suggest that there is an easy solution to this problem.
In India’s case the problem is as old as independence. The attack on norms, standards and rules which, in the light of their experience during the emergency, many people now think it is the duty of civil servants to uphold, began on the morrow of independence. This had the support of large sections of the political class because it had by then become a common practice to run down the bureaucracy as a creation of the British intended solely to hold down the people.
EXCEPTIONS
There were doubtless exceptions, Sardar Patel for instance, who realised the importance of bureaucracy and were willing to uphold its right publicly. But they, too, had their favourites and the favourites were those civil servants who were willing to bend the rules in the service of the new master or masters. Mr Nehru’s attitude was ambivalent. As Prime Minister he condemned bureaucracy again and again though he respected certain individual civil servants and wanted them to continue to function according to their professional ethics as during the British period.
The erosion of the autonomy of the civil service did not provoke any resistance on the part of civil servants and it caused no concern among the people. The top bureaucrats were clearly too anxious to prove their bona fides and buy peace to protest. Among the political class the opposition parties were even more condemnatory of the civil service than the Congress, little realising that they were playing straight into the hands of the ruling party.
In course of time, this trend enabled Sardar Pratap Singh Kairon in Punjab and Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad in Jammu and Kashmir, to cite the two best known examples, to establish almost personal rule, subject, of course, to Mr Nehru’s acquiescence which was available to them on the plea that Mr Kairon was “indispensable” in the struggle against the Akalis and the Bakshi in that against Sheikh Abdullah. Mrs Indira Gandhi was watching the scene and drawing the appropriate conclusions. And for her West Bengal served as the dress rehearsal.
It is open to question whether Mrs Gandhi could have promulgated the emergency if she had not installed in Rashtrapati Bhavan a man who was ready to play to her tune. But it is self-evident that she could not have enforced the emergency with the ease she was able to do if she was not assured of obedience on the part of the bureaucracy.
During the last phase of the emergency and immediately after the March elections, the issue was confused by the incessant talk of the “extra-constitutional authority.” But surely Mr Sanjay Gandhi’s lack of official status was less important than the fact that the then Prime Minister had succeeded in establishing personal rule all over the country with the help of a pliant bureaucracy. For once she had done so, it was no longer particularly pertinent whether she used her son as her principal lieutenant or someone else.
Mr Om Mehta or Mr VC Shukla, for example, could have filled the bully boy’s role as well. The critical question in Mr Sanjay Gandhi’s case was not the abuse of the official machinery by him but his projection as the leader of the Youth Congress which was sought to be built up as a substitute for the allegedly decadent Indian National Congress. The two things were interlinked but they need not have been.
The tragedy was complete because the politically conscious and articulate people themselves by and large did not expect the civil servants to behave differently. They expected the judges to uphold their rights and defy the executive when it transgressed even the emergency laws and they were appalled when the government decided to transfer some high court judges as a punishment for the inconvenient judgments they had delivered.
Contrary to the popular view, the executive in a democratic polity is not one integrated whole. Broadly speaking, it consists of two parts – the politicians in office and the bureaucrats – and the latter can be wholly subordinated to the former, as it has happened in this country, only at the cost of impartial, fair and competent administration in normal circumstances and of democracy itself in abnormal circumstances. All the measures that are sought to be devised to protect the “basic structure” of the Constitution against encroachments by future parliaments and to uphold the rights and powers of the judiciary will not avail in a new crisis if the bureaucracy continues to be emasculated as it has been all these years.
‘BROKERS’
It cannot and need not be denied that large sections of the bureaucracy are corrupt and tend to act in an arbitrary fashion or that politicians serve a useful role as “brokers” between the administration and the people. But there is another side to the picture which is that over the years, interference by politicians in the administration has made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for honest and competent civil servants to tender frank advice and act impartially between rival claimants. Many of them entered into a partnership with the ruling party to their advantage. But many more would have resisted such a temptation if there was public support for an autonomous civil service which, alas, has been wholly lacking. Political corruption, too, would not have assumed the magnitude it has, specially in recent years, if the civil service had not been reduced to the status of hand-maidens of the previous ruling party.
The Times of India, 28 December 1977