gfiles Magazine November Issue 2011

MANDARIN MATTERS

secrecy

 

Do we need a tight upper lipped Indian bureaucracy?

An analysis of a dilemma: What comes first? Devotion and loyalty to the service along with the accompanying concept of discipline, or devotion and loyalty to society and the nation?

 

 

by AMITABH

 

THE State of Gujarat has been thrust in the news by some of its IPS officers. It all began probably when RB Sreekumar, then Additional DGP in the Intelligence Department, supposedly said something which was considered as being against the conduct rules prescribed for an officer of the All India Services. Another case is that of Rahul Sharma, then Superintendent of Police of Bhavnagar district when the infamous Gujarat riots of 2000 took place. He came into the limelight when he was said to have procured certain documents and evidence, including phone tapes, telephone records and emails, in his personal capacity – which the Service rules did not permit. Again, when he apparently handed over these documents to an inquiry committee looking into the Gujarat riots, the matter was taken seriously by the State government as being against the conduct rules. Recently, the matter has again come to the fore with the Sanjeev Bhatt case. Here, the concerned IPS officer, at present in jail for alleged criminal misdemeanour, was given a show cause notice and later suspended for reasons probably related to his putting some facts on record through an affidavit before the Supreme Court and then before the Gujarat High Court on his own initiative and then interacting with the media about these affidavits.

 

The conduct rules that apply to Sreekumar, Sharma and Bhatt apply as much to me and hence it would be highly inappropriate for me to directly comment on the appropriateness or otherwise of these individual events. I also make it very clear that the facts being stated by me are only those gathered through various media reports and I cannot vouch for their veracity beyond what the media has been telling us.

 

To me what is more important is an academic analysis of the entire affair. What it involves is the presence of two aspects – one is devotion and loyalty to the service along with the accompanying concept of discipline and the other of similar devotion and loyalty to society and the nation, along with breach of the conduct rules. Theoretically, the two concepts should not have any divergence and dichotomy between them as devotion and loyalty to the service should naturally correlate with devotion and loyalty to the larger societal interest. Unfortunately, in recent times, more and more incidents are coming into the public domain where it is perceived that the two interests are diverging. Thus, we sometimes see government officers bemoaning some action of theirs, saying they were forced into it even if they knew that it was not correct legally or was against the larger national interest. But the fact is that the public does not seem to have sympathy for such officers because it feels that they come up with all this repentance only on getting caught. This belated rise of spirit does not seem to convince the public.

 

The IPS officer was given a showcause and suspended for reasons probably related to his act of putting some facts on record through an affidavit before the Supreme Court.

 

Another phenomenon seen quite often is the appearance of reminiscences and statements by retired officers. We have dozens of memoirs and autobiographies of retired IAS, IPS and other officers who come up with startling revelations of how something wrong was done by their political masters and the senior bureaucratic fraternity.

 

But the first thought that arises in everyone’s mind is, “Why was this man silent all along? What was he doing when the entire thing was actually happening? Where was his conscience at that time?” Thus, the credibility of the officer is often hugely diminished and people also start searching for reasons for this sudden awakening.

 

Hence, the issue involved here is the conflict between an officer’s responsibility regarding discretion and silence, and his responsibility to society to tell it the truth and to save the nation from inglorious and self-motivated acts.

 

The legal provisions regarding officers of the All India Services, i.e. the IAS, IPS and Indian Forest Service, is provided in the All India Services (Conduct) Rules, 1968. Rule 7 says, “No member of the Service shall, in any radio broadcast or communication over any public media or in any document published anonymously, pseudonymously or in his own name or in the name of any other person or in any communication to the press or in any public utterance, make any statement of fact or opinion which has the effect of an adverse criticism of any current or recent policy or action of the Central Government or a State Government.”

 

Similarly, Section 8(1) says, “Save as provided in sub-rule (3), no member of the Service shall, except with the previous sanction of the Government, give evidence in connection with any inquiry conducted by any person, committee or other authority.” Rule 9, related with “unauthorised communication of information”, says that no member of the Service shall, except in accordance with any general or special order of the Government or in the performance in good faith of duties assigned to him, communicate directly or indirectly any official document or part thereof or information to any government servant or any other person to whom he is not authorized to communicate such document or information.

 

THUS we see an almost clear-cut position of the conduct rules, which possibly match the “tight upper lip” typically related with Britain. But the question that complicates the entire issue is the change in the circumstances in which current bureaucrats are serving vis-a-vis those that prevailed in the days when these rules were formulated. Thus, today more and more government servants are finding themselves in a fix as to whether to follow the conduct rules and keep a tight upper lip or open their lips and lose so many comforts of life, besides exposing themselves to the accusation of being indisciplined. This is a conflict that is bound to escalate in days to come and thus the norms of the administrative structure need to be restudied and reevaluated with the changing times and circumstances.

 

To me, the larger societal and national interests would any day count far more than the conduct rules of the Services because ultimately any law and rule is formulated for the larger societal and public interests and nothing can take supremacy over this. g

 

The writer is an IPS officer of the UP cadre and President of the National RTI Forum, a society working for transparency in governance