Sarkari beasts of burden

Rajasthan has its annual festival of donkeys. A TV channel once aired a satirical programme, ‘Gadha Sammelan’, even as the then Uttar Pradesh CM, Akhilesh Yadav, advised Amitabh Bachchan not to do a promotional campaign for donkeys in Gujarat. I, too, have had encounters with beasts of burden — of the two-legged kind.

About four decades ago, I was deputed as a trainee with a tehsildar for a fortnight. I would sit behind him in his room, which also functioned as his courtroom. Many times, the tehsildar’s reader would put miscellaneous papers before him, which would make him lose his cool. He would say, ‘Have these ministers no work to do except going to the field time and again?’ He would expedite the hearing of partition, girdawari or nambardari cases and, at the same time, tell his peon to call the naib tehsildar, the registry clerk, the city kanungo, the patwari and the jamadar of the tehsil. He would then abruptly adjourn the cases and start discussing the arrangements for the visiting VIPs with the staff. In between these discussions would come the SDM’s peon to say, ‘Sahib yaad kar rahe ne.’ He would go to his boss and return with more wrinkles of fury on his forehead.

Then he would tell me, ‘Remember the first and foremost quality of a good tehsildar: he will have to always work like a gazetted khota. You have seen me for more than a week. Am I not a donkey who is saddled with the entire extra work of all departments and private work of officers, day in and day out?’

After joining the provincial civil services, I was posted as a general assistant to the Deputy Commissioner. In those days, cement was rationed. At some places, SDMs or Executive Magistrates were given powers to issue cement permits. Incidentally, my boss would himself issue the permits. The entire day, the DC would do this work and at the end of the day, pretending to be very tired, he would say with pride, ‘Bahut kaam hai, bahut kaam hai.’ We would nod repeatedly.

One day, the rush was unusual. Even at 8 pm, the work of hundreds of people was still to be disposed of. He asked his orderly to tell them to come later. The orderly came back and told him, ‘Huzoor, oh nahi jaa rahe.’ Hearing this, he flew into a rage and said, ‘I am not a donkey to be loaded with work!’