The Indian civil services enjoy enormous goodwill and clout but recent incidents threaten to tarnish its image. The entire nation witnessed Karnal Sub-Divisional Magistrate Ayush Sinha ordering cops to break the heads of protesting farmers who breached a security cordon. In May, DM Ranbir Sharma of Surajpur in Chhattisgarh was similarly caught on camera, slapping a biker for violating lockdown guidelines. In April, West Tripura DM Sailesh Kumar Yadav was seen shoving out the bridegroom and arresting everyone present including the bride and groom’s family while enforcing a Covid curfew.
In the 2020 Hathras gang rape and murder case, DM Praveen Kumar Laxkar disgraced himself on national TV, threatening the victim’s family. Worse, the UP chief secretary and the director-general justified the cremation of the rape victim in the dead of night while keeping her family confined to their house, leading the entire nation to wonder whether civil servants were caretakers or undertakers. A public uproar saw Sinha, Sharma, Yadav and Laxkar being transferred.
Now, we have four serving IAS officers and a retired one sentenced to varying jail terms and fined by the Andhra Pradesh High Court. The order came after a six-year-long legal fight and a contempt petition filed by a 62-year-old widow, Savithramma, who wasn’t compensated for her land by the revenue authorities. Surely, so many instances cannot be ignored as the odd bad apple case. Especially, if one adds the story of deposed Mumbai police Param Bir Singh, who is now a wanted man. All this calls for introspection by everyone, especially civil servants.
Not for nothing is it said that the three engines of India’s governance are the DM, the CM and the PM. It is with their help that PM Modi envisioned ‘minimum government and maximum governance’. So, how is it that the 24-carat gold of our country behave like ruffians and mafia dons? Who can forget the UP government’s move to name and shame anti-CAA protesters while gangsters such as Vikas Dubey were being wooed. Also fresh in memory is the midnight lathi-charge on sleeping supporters of Baba Ramdev at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan in 2012, which resulted in a stampede leading to a woman’s death.
The classic case though remains ‘nasbandi’, the forcible sterilisation drive during the Emergency. Forget the big moments, our bureaucrats can’t stop corruption in midday meal schemes for poor children, they can’t ensure that orphans in shelter homes are not raped, they can’t implement even dog sterilisation projects. All they can do is to lock up one actor on drug charges while providing ‘Y plus’ security to another actor. How do we expect them to curb crimes against women when the cop in charge of law and order in UP displayed his ignorance of the post-Nirbhaya definition of rape on prime time while trying to deny that the Hathras girl was raped.
Why do we expect bureaucrats to do anything about gangsters, illegal quarrying or encroachment of mangroves, forests or salt pans by land sharks or to take steps to curb air pollution? Our civil servants are not running the country but ruining it. And they are getting away scot-free. In 2019, the government told the Rajya Sabha that two IAS officers had been dismissed from service on corruption charges in the last three years and that sanction had been granted for the prosecution of 16 IAS and two IPS officers.
To be fair, all civil servants are not civil serpents. Julio Ribeiro and K P S Gill ended terrorism in Punjab. When he had a free hand as Chief Election Commissioner, T N Seshan put the fear of god into politicians; Surat municipal commissioner S R Rao transformed the plague-scarred city from ‘badsurat’ to ‘khoobsurat’; Mumbai Customs Commissioner Daya Shankar was a terror to gold smugglers; Satish Sahney applied the healing touch to Mumbai as police chief after the post-Babri riots and serial blasts; N Vittal as Central Vigilance Commissioner posted on the CVC website the names of 85 IAS and 22 IPS officers against whom the commission had sought criminal/departmental proceedings for major penalties; Rentala Chandrashekhar and J Satyanarayana pioneered e-governance in the country… However, officers such as these are rare.
Savithramma’s case exposes how anti-people the system can get. Even when the Lok Ayukta had ruled in her favour, the revenue authorities issued her an antedated notice to her asking her why the land granted to her should not be cancelled, as she was not cultivating it. The authorities even ignored the 2018 high court order directing payment of compensation to her within three months. The judge who handed out the punishment to the five IAS officers rightly called it a “classic example of the lethargy of the bureaucrats in attending to the problems of the common public and their wilful disobedience towards the orders of the constitutional court”.
On the whole, bureaucrats seem to have given up the fight against illegal orders by politicians. In the wake of the Hathras episode, 92 former civil servants collectively lamented “the meek surrender of the Uttar Pradesh bureaucracy and police, especially its All-India Services, to political diktat”, adding that it had “shamed all of us who deem it a badge of honour to belong to these services”. It is time we started demanding accountability from bureaucrats and handing out exemplary punishment to the rogues among them.
