Too Many Yes Men!
The Supreme Court’s severe castigation of the bureaucracy on Thursday is a reiteration of the politicization of the civil service and its utter decline, calling for immediate bureaucratic reform and restoration of the “steel frame’s” neutrality. It was a complete exposé of the kind of officers the government chooses to surround itself with and relies upon ~ mostly “yes men” who leave little room for the competent and meritorious.
The rebuke was telling for the fact that the Supreme Court underlined the lack of neutrality, which it observed, had telling consequences with the “entire country getting chaotic”, though the reference was to Goa bureaucracy and its handling of mining operations. It elucidated how the civil servants circumvented the law to allow mining, while referring to the legal opinion given to the State government by the Advocate General regarding allowing mining operations within one km of Wildlife Sanctuaries.
The Supreme Court metaphorically reopened the classic Public Administration debate about the essence and neutrality of bureaucracy while referring to it as the steel frame.
By this it implied that the essence of bureaucracy was uprightness, fairness, political neutrality, social character, sympathy towards the minorities and the poor. In the Weberian sense it implied that it (should) decide by rules rather than personal opinions, that as functional specialists they should give their frank opinion based on merit of the issue, irrespective of their political masters, and should be impersonal in dealing with individuals.
This steel frame, the apex court said, was crushed broken and its backbone finished and that civil servants put up notes as desired by the government of the day (irrespective of what is right and what would promote public welfare). “This is how the entire governance is getting chaotic,” the Court observed. It is heartening to read that the Court observed how laws of the land are seen as inconvenient are set aside, bypassed, or misinterpreted by the bureaucracy. In the Goa mining case, Justice AK Patnaik implied that the law of the land should be sacred and that the bureaucracy has become a law unto itself. The central bureaucracy including the Ministry of Environment and Forests too came in for severe criticism in issuing environmental clearances. And all this, despite the Right to Information and public interest litigation.
Post Independence, under the towering leadership of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and imbued with the Independence fervour, the then elite bureaucracy provided the Supreme Court cited “steel framework” to make the tumultuous transition from a colonial state to the fragile free Indian Republic, while doomsday prophets had already forecast that India would not survive for long, as a united nation.
But since the 1970s and especially under Nehru’s daughter, former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the image of the higher civil services in India has plunged. The democratization of the services, ironically, hastened the decline in the 1980s as civil servants came from a broader social base, and brought in caste, communal and nepotistic considerations which compromised rationality and fairness of decision-making. Today, the bureaucracy’s complicity is seen in communal riots and caste pogroms, and its integrity has taken a beating from which it is unlikely to recover without radical changes. It was hoped that the process of economic liberalization would end the licence-quota raj and loosen bureaucratic controls over industry leading to a brave new era, but two decades of crony capitalism and bogus socialism since 1991 have dashed these hopes.
The age of the “yes man” is truly upon us!
