Bureaucrats now have a new formulation to describe a policy u-turn.
“Kejriwal!”This isn’t just a joke (I read it in a column by the redoubtable Ram Jethmalani). A serious point is embedded.let me explain.
The other day, lead anchorman and former colleague Rahul Kanwal of TV Today, invited me to participate in a town hall with Finance Minister P Chidambaram.
While the spotlight was on the FM, my show-stealer was former Finance Secretary CM Vasudeva. Seated to my immediate right, Vasudeva gently asked Chidambaram for a comment on ‘over reach’ by various institutions and the consequent fear plaguing India’s top bureaucrats.’They aren’t just frozen about taking honest decisions in the present, or even the future, but what they’ve decided in the past too!’
‘How can India function if our top bureaucrats have become risk averseIJ’FM’s admission stumped me.
‘There is no other country where the judiciary intervenes ever so regularly – including directing government that this should be the policy not that!’ Chidambaram said.’There’s also an increasing notion of uncertainty infused by regulators.’
He probably meant the three dreaded ‘Cs’ - CBI, CVC, CAG.The babu’s abdication and risk averseness lies in the manner the last 10 years have played in UPA I and UPA II.
Thank to a curious dyarchy, political legitimacy shifted to 10 Janpath and the Prime Minister and bureaucrats assisting him were reduced to note takers.
The most alarming downgrade of professional civil servants can be traced at the top. “The office of the Cabinet Secretary to Government of India has been eclipsed,” TSR Subramanian, a former Cabinet Secretary, told me confirming the missing vertebra in the steel frame. Indeed, Ajit Seth, the urbane Cabinet Secretary of the day, is being involved not as a CEO of the administrative machinery that he’s meant to be, but as Subramanian put it, on an ‘as and when’ basis. ResultIJ Ministers of the Union now sit in absolute judgement over who will be made secretary in their ministry and his/her life thereafter.
Gone are the days where, say, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi or Atal Bihari Vajpayee tactfully played the arbitrator and, in fact, stoked a healthy dissent inside a ministry between the minister and the secretary in his charge.
Is it without reason that a Secretary is described as ‘secretary to Government of India’ not even ‘secretary to xyz ministry.’
But with the PM and his cabinet secretary in an abdicating mode, most secretaries to GOI are beholden to the minister right from the time they are ‘picked up’ from the ‘offer list.’
This is a bad idea. A secretary acting purely on the instructions of the political master, as Siddhartha Behura, the former Telecom Secretary under disgraced A Raja, wiped off a good career.
But with no air cover from the head of the civil service, did Behura have much of an optionIJ
If the next Government doesn’t end the eclipse of the cabinet secretary, every secretary will be left rudderless within the system.The earlier dispensation that allowed him/her to initiate a note of dissent to the Cabinet Secretary and effectively kill what the minister might be wanting illegally needs to be rediscovered. For example, Anand Sharma, the then Minister for Information and Broadcasting, wanted to salvage some news channels for wrong reportage they did during 26/11. But he was torpedoed by his secretary through the ‘Cabinet Secretary system.’
The principle still exists. But mostly in theory!Caught in a pincer of over-zealous regulators, the comptroller and auditor-general (read: the self-righteous and ultra-active Vinod Rai), the maze of parliamentary committees, and, of course, their lordships presiding over the courts, isn’t policy freeze the obvious outcome. Political parties should tell us what they intend to do about this.The other option is to throw away the notion of ‘neutral’ bureaucracy.
(Follow the columnist: @therohitbansal).