A stage comes in a bureaucrat’s life when creativity gets buried under the dunes of monotonous official and domestic chores. The tragedy of being’ inconsequential angels’ is writ large on the faces of those who once solemnly resolved to act as the catalysts of change. The idealistic individual gets haplessly sucked into the gutter of the system; a whirlpool that takes him to the brink of abyss. About the politicization of the services, I find it an inevitable consequence of the strings of power firmly woven around the deft fingers of the political know-alls, who have the final word in all matters, ranging between irritating trivialities to infinite significance. In the post independence era of Indianized democracy, we have also learnt to face lethal shots from bunkers of extra – legal authority. I proceed to write a few words about the alleged lack of commitment of the bureaucracy. Often accused of systematically reducing their involvement of ‘head and the heart’ in discharging duties, it appears the bureaucracy has purposely shrugged off its accountability in the absence of any real responsible decision making authority allowed to remain with them. Inducements or veiled threats of backlash tend to preempt the expression of honest opinion. Whatever a bureaucrat opines can be effortlessly brushed aside by recording a custom made jugglery of words conveying a make belief justification of something which must not happen, Is it not indeed a solemn virtue to calculatedly drift away from the toxic affluents of the systemic opportunism ?Why not, then, a policy of ‘masterly inactivity’? Political governance, without an exception, swears by its conviction to acquire transparency, but goes all out to frame such Conduct Rules for the Civil Servants that render it as opaque as possible. Where is the necessity to prevent the civil servants from commenting in the media about policy matters which are substantially significant in public interest? The bureaucrats, publically blamed in the media for ‘inefficiency, corruption and noncooperation’, are gagged by the conduct rules and end up as mute victims of schematic character assassination leading to social disgrace. Where do we stand today?
Pavlov showed that if he rang a bell each time a dog was fed, it would start salivating at the sound, even without the presence of food. These reflexes which constitute the basis of animal behaviour, now form the basics of our cadre management. With the bureaucrats intermittently hearing the transfer bells all through the year, Pavlovian response has by and large become the’ reflex response’ of our service. This is due to the fact that the work distribution and duty assignment between the one bureaucrat and the other have been cleverly tampered to generate artificial imbalances and inequalities which are systematically exploited. As the inequalities are so prominently accentuated, an apparently’ routine’ transfer can now be clearly defined either as a ‘punishment’ or a ‘reward’. On the threshold of the new millennium and faced with the obvious level of redundance of our service, a bureaucrat can ill-afford to have a “wishful dream” at this juncture. The following few lines I wrote in 1980s sum up what I may not have been able to convey today:
“Thoughts Shudder my Body
The heaven of my heart;
Caught in a whirlpool
Rendering me a spool
Churning my mind
Sucking in into black depths
While body staggers
Whirls with the wind
Laughing at my plight
To a devil’s delight
A scared moon
Staring in gloom
At its own shadow
On marshy muck
Once a lush meadow
My Heart attempts a convulsion
Victim of fortune’s cruel revolution
Buried under fathoms of water
That has mooted as cruel lides
Reflecting merciless strides
Of vanquisher of peace
Of a broken heart
Shattered will
And wishful dreams”
