Ashok Khemka And The Good And The Bad In The IAS
By Vidyadhar Date
17 October, 2012
Countercurrents.org
There are a few whistle blowers among IAS officers like Mr Ashok Khemka who is in the limelight currently for his exposure of the land scandal in Haryana involving Robert Vadra.
Mr Arun Bhatia of the Maharashtra cadre was among the first. He exposed the corruption in the employment guarantee scheme in Dhule district in 1980. He was also transferred many times because he stood up to corrupt politicians..
After retirement, he joined the campaign against corruption much before the current agitation began. As part of the drive to cleanse the system, he took to politics but lost by a large margin to Mr Suresh Kalmadi, of all politicians, in the Lok Sabha election in Pune in 2009. But that was a year before Mr Kalmadi gained notoriety for corruption in the Commonwealth Games. Mr Bhatia had also lost to him in the 2004 general elections.
But the number of pliant or corrupt bureaucrats is also very large. Mr V.S.Gopalkrishnan, a former IAS officer from Maharashtra, commented best on the meekness of bureaucrats in a cartoon which was carried in Harmony magazine of bureaucrats some yeas ago.
It shows a minister asking a bureaucrat ` How come you are suffering from spondilitis ?. You are known as a spineless bureaucrat.”
Former cabinet secretary T.S.R. Subramanian, who intervened very effectively on Times Now television news channel on October 16 on the Vadra issue and the bureaucracy has an interesting observation on the spinelessness of bureaucrats. This was visible, he says, at a meeting the then U.P. chief minister Mulayam Singh had with officers of the IAS officers association. After praising the officers he asked them how they could demean themselves by falling at his feet and licking his boots for personal favours.
Another interesting point Mr Subramanian mentions in his autobiography is that politicians routinely show sensitive files to the private sector, particularly those sections in which a bureaucrat has raised objections to particular projects. This point is of considerable relevance in the context of the reported collusion between politicians in Haryana and Robert Vadra and the objections raised by IAS officer Khemka.
As a journalist for many years I have noticed a steep decline in the level of the bureaucracy. But the standards in the past were not always high. . This is what the chief secretary of Uttar Pradesh government told a young IAS officer some years ago. `It is o.k. if you sleep with gramsevikas but do it discreetly.’
This shocking disclosure is made by Mr T.S.R. Subramanian in his autobiography ` Journeys through babudom and netaland. Governance in India.’
The author narrates this as part of the advice he got when he called on the then chief secretary , who belonged to the I.C.S. cadre , in 1965.
Mr Subramanian mentions this in a rather lighter tone but the observation, even if conveyed in a jocular manner, indicates how old the problems are in our system..
It shows apart from other things the totally disrespectful attitude of the highest in the land towards women, the issue of sex and sexual exploitation. An IAS officer sleeping with a gram sevika has a grave connotation, beyond lack of propriety and breach of service rules. It means exploitation of the worst kind by a high official of an employee at the lowest rung in government.
In Maharashtra I have heard of only gram sevaks and they are very poorly paid. I remember covering their agitation some years ago. The gram sevikas in U.P. too obviously are poorly paid and increasingly at the mercy of higher officialdom.
Mr Subramanian’s book is highly readable and it shows him to be an honest and efficient officer. He attributes his honesty to the fat pension he receives regularly for the post he held in a U.N. organsisation.. He was chief secretary in U.P. before becoming cabinet secretary.
He expresses sympathy for the poor , is commendably very critical of the America’s dictating trade policies and agrees that our officialdom and politicians have miserably failed the people.
But then it is very odd that in the same vein he constantly gloats over golf . He pays a tribute to golf in the very first paragrah of the preface saying `the therapeutic green of the golf course brings me peace and solace.’ .
Elsewhere he mentions how he got Mulayam Singh to sanction Rs 10 lakh fom the chief minister’s discretionary fund for the golf course in Lucknow.
Some times he did stand up to those high in authority like former president Narayanan when he wanted special Air India aircraft to go for a foreign visit. After this he never got an invitation for a function at Rashtrapati Bhavan.
It is sad to find more and more IAS officers colluding with corrupt forces during their tenure neglecting their basic job of serving the people. It is also sad to find quite a few of them doing little jobs for big industrialists after retirement. In fact, there could be a bar on bureaucrats taking up private sector jobs after retirement because such considerations are bound to compromise their decision making while in service.
Their pay is not bad and after retirement they can certainly lead an honest, comfortable life. If they want to remain busy, there is scope for any amount of public service in a poor country. But now with increasing alliance between big business and the government, people’s interests are bound to be relegated unless people become more alert and active.
Why do IAS officers, many of them idealists early in life, become conformists and make so many compromises later in their careers,one always wonders. .
Many of them know what it means coming up the hard way. Look at the experience narrated by Malini Shankar, an IAS officer of the 1984 batch of Maharashtra, written in Harmony, a bulletin of the IAS fraternity edited by senior bureaucrat Dr Rameshchandra Kanade, in 2004.
She talks of her days as an IAS probationer in 1984 in Mumbai when ` we were relegated to the PWD rest house across the then VT station, two or three to a room with bedbugs for company. The area was not the most decent by night and we had to do with common bathrooms.’
And the daily allowance was just Rs 23. So, several probationers thought of the bright idea of walking into the cabins of seniors at Mantralaya and being treated to lunch to save some money. And that was a special allowance for Mumbai. Malini recalls that the probationers woke up at 4.30 a.m. or so to beat the strange influx of people who took over the bathrooms later in the morning.
Sometimes batchmate Vijay Satbir Singh had to stand guard outside their room to deter strangers.
In the same issue former chief secretary J.B. D’souza poses an interesting question. He says that the newsletter is largely a celebration of IAS postings, promotions, marriages,retirements etc. Surely, he says the IAS officers are concerned about the condition of the service and whether it is fulfilling its role as a premier civil service.
Such questions disturb me when I realize how the reputation of the service has fallen so badly , Mr D’souza says. Many of IAS senior officers are pursued by the central vigilance commissioner and other investigations including police inquiries. In our state one of the most conspicuous service positions is that of the municipal commissioner, Mumbai. Should not the fact that the Lok Ayukta is demanding action against five of the officers who have held that position in the last nine years for serious financial delinquencies be a source of disturbance to the IAS association, he asks. Mr D’souza, one of the most upright officers, passed away a few years ago.
Mr D’souza says officers should feel disturbed about the situation and this concern should be visible, there should be some search for causes of deterioration, some reflection on ways to restore the reputation of the service. Mr Madhav Godbole, a distinguished alumnus of our service, joins me in this appeal, Mr D’souza says.
Mr Rameshchandr Kanade has made a valid point that IAS officers should not accept awards or other forms of recognition from private bodies. The job of the civil servant is to act in a fair manner within the framework of the policy and not to seek publicity or public recognition, he says.
Mr Michael Pinto, former secretary, union shipping ministry, has some interesting observations about the back-stabbing and such things that go on in the IAS.`How many times has overweening ambition caused officers to stab each other in the back, to plot against colleagues or even batch mates and to adopt any method to reach the top, he asks.
Having reached the top we make every kind of compromise because the price is being extracted from us. Whenever this happens, we tend to blame the system, the politicians, the decline in standards – everything except ourselves, Mr Pinto says.
Vidyadhar Date is a senior journalist and author of the book Traffic in the era of climate change. Walking, cycling, public transport need priority. [email protected]
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