Angling for top posts: Rot in IAS has set from within

Avay Shukla

When I joined the IAS in the 1970s, the service commanded genuine respect and admiration, and I remember proudly wearing my blazer with the IAS crest on social occasions. Today, things have come to such a pass that one goes to great lengths at dinners and parties to conceal the fact that one was in the IAS. The service is no longer respected (feared, yes, regrettably): it has become tainted with politicisation, self-serving opportunism, rent-seeking; it is reviled for having jumped into bed with the politician and is therefore held in the same contempt that Indians generally harbour for all politicians. After all, as the saying goes, if you lie down with dogs you will get up with fleas. Is this reputation deserved? I really can’t tell, there are many fine, upright officers in the service. 

We, as a service, have come a long way — and fallen a great distance — since the days of our ICS precursors. The IAS would have disappeared into the mists of time after 1947; such was the near unanimous demand then for abolishing this all-India service that had served the British so well. It was only the enlightened obstinacy of Sardar Patel that gave it a new lease of life. He had the prescience to realise that if the country was to exist as one entity in those turbulent times, an all-India service was essential — the common thread that tied the states to the union. And so the ICS survived as the IAS, the progeny of the former but with a DNA that has mutated beyond recognition.

The hankering for posts and re-employment has destroyed the moral fibre of the service, its independence of thought and action, its probity and sense of fairness. Worst of all, the espirit de corps that binds any organisation together has all but disappeared, as the ongoing backstabbing and leg- pulling in Shimla demonstrates. One can understand the politician trying to fracture the service into manageable parts, but our own acquiescence to this is less comprehensible. It’s every officer for himself and the devil take the hindmost.

Looking back, one can see that the rot set in in Himachal in the mid 1990s. Before that, chief secretaries were appointed by seniority, not by today’s norm of “acceptability and suitability.” Those who support this concept argue that the CS must be “acceptable” to, and “suit”, the Chief Minister’s style and way of thinking. This is nonsense. The Chief Secretary is not a piece of footwear that must match the size and contours of the Chief Minister’s feet: he is a government servant who has sworn his fealty to the Constitution and not to a party manifesto or an individual. Therefore, the only criterion for selection of a CS should be seniority, subject only to a vigilance clearance. Himachal was one of the few states to follow this rule, till the supersession of an outstanding officer, Mrs CP Sujaya in the 1990s, perhaps because she was nobody’s fool. This has had two unfortunate effects: one, the politician has realised that he can get away with this version of “cronyism”, and the IAS fraternity has realised that there is now scope for jumping the queue. 

This has opened the floodgates for all manner of unscrupulous manoeuvrings, scheming and propitiation of the politician. It has been downhill all the way for the service since then.

If you sup with the devil at his table, you can hardly criticise the food he dishes out: you must not only eat it, but must also praise it. An officer who is elevated before his turn on considerations other than merit is compromised for the rest of his career. He can never thereafter take a stand against a Chief Minister, no matter how wrong the latter may be. He loses the respect of both his peers and the politician, and becomes essentially ineffective. He can no longer provide the leadership required in any organisation. And yet, we continue to hanker after the post, unwilling to wait for our legitimate turn, using every means, fair or foul, to pull down our “competitors”, kow-towing to politicians in order to curry favour for our cause. 

According to all reports, this is what is happening in Shimla these days, notwithstanding that there should be no confusion about the matter at all. 

I have always advised my younger colleagues to read one book, if they wish to learn what the ethos of the IAS used to be — and should be. It is titled, “A tale told by an idiot,” and is the autobiography of RP Noronha, an ICS officer who retired as the Chief Secretary of Madhya Pradesh in 1968. As a young Collector of a district, he was once struggling to control a major communal riot when the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru himself, arrived at the spot to take stock of the situation. At one point, Nehru insisted, against Noronha’s advice, that he wished to go into the mob to talk to them. He refused to heed the young Collector’s pleas that it was too dangerous. Finally, Noronha drew a line on the road and told Nehru that if he stepped across that line, he would be arrested. Nehru did not cross that line: he went to the Circuit House, met the leaders of the communities there and the rioting subsided. An instance, according to me, where a decisive civil servant confronted a wise political leader and both emerged victorious! Noronha lived up to this promise. On his retirement as Chief Secretary, when he was leaving the Secretariat for the last time, the then Chief Minister met him and offered him an important post. Noronha got onto his motorcycle (he had already returned his official car), and said, “Thanks but no” to the Chief Minister, revved his bike and drove off.

It is this set of values, and a sense of pride, which made the steel frame. 

(The writer is a former Additional Chief Secretary to HP government. Views are personal)