Hearts of steel
By Jawhar Sircar
18th May, 2020, The
Telegraph
If John Kenneth Galbraith’s description
of India as a “functioning anarchy” held, we should have collapsed before the
coronavirus by now. Instead, it is Galbraith’s country and other developed and
largely homogeneous nations in the West that appear to be blundering through
unprecedented losses of precious lives. India’s less erratic handling of the
crisis can perhaps be traced to its legacy of a colonial administration that
was designed to pull through an impossibly problematic and chaotic country.
Resources were always woefully short and despite chronic slackness in speed and
response, the ‘steel frame’ of bureaucracy managed to deliver.
This machinery appears to have
found its feet, once again, in spite of the years of battering by every
political regime. To be fair, India today has not been held to ransom by policy
paralysis and administrative logjams that rack the United States of America. A
faceless nationwide fraternity trained to work quietly is holding things in
place in India the bitter inter-ministerial and federal power relations
notwithstanding. Sometimes, officers do take sides in confrontations engineered
by their political masters but the training and the ethos of the members of the
bureaucracy ensure that a basic working relationship prevails. In the US, where
no such cohesive network cuts through the mesh of federal and state
governments, a garrulous president and state governors are locked in a damaging
contest. Its greater resources notwithstanding, deaths in the US have run into
tens of thousands and accountability appears to be less even though it is a
much older democracy. In India, however, each death is being accounted for and
then factored into an adaptable combat policy. It is the civil services that
rise to the occasion during national crises, natural disasters and elections.
Three circumstances appear to have
favoured the return of the bureaucrat to the centre-stage. The prime minister
and the chief ministers realized that crises of the scale of the coronavirus
have a history of decimating regimes and decided that Covid-19 is too serious
to be left to the ministers. This brings us to the second reason that favoured
the primacy of the bureaucracy during this crisis — its unique pyramidal
structure, binding the subdivisional officers and district magistrates to the cabinet,
chief, home and health secretaries. The third factor is unpalatable but true:
most administrators work better under a less democratic environment even though
it is undeniable that several generations of post-Independence-era IAS officers
have given their all to developmental activities.
Ministers have been marginalized
by the prime minister in this regime. Narendra Modi insists on ruling through a
hand-picked set of officers. The crisis has provided a golden opportunity to
further strengthen his top-down model of administration. Modi trusts but a few
and does not need too many confidantes. He just needs compliance. The prime
minister is confident about his communication skills but has little patience or
respect for the constitutionally-mandated layers of democracy. This is evident
from the one-way communication he has established with the states. As a chief
minister, however, Modi was fiercely protective of the autonomy of states. The
IAS officers of his state fought as his proxies, much like their brethren in
Kerala and West Bengal have done for decades. Bureaucrats fight for those whose
brief they hold, shuttling between the layers of the federal structure,
ensuring that the game is played by the rules.
Returning to the coronavirus. It
is possible that health ministry officials attempted to draw the prime
minister’s attention to disturbing reports from the World Health Organization
and other sources. But Modi was busy courting Donald Trump. It was only after
the felling of the Madhya Pradesh government that he found the time. By then,
the murderous virus had entered India. The crisis was yet another opportunity
to centralize authority. The swiftness with which the prime minister invoked
powers made available to him by a piece of colonial legislation to control
epidemics reveals that the bureaucracy had already formulated a plan of action.
So far, the management of the
crisis in India has been better than that in the West. But the clumsiness with
which protective gear and testing kits were procured speaks volumes about the
bureaucracy’s obsession with slow-moving rules. The bureaucracy, evidently, is
attracted to the idea of ‘order’, thereby weakening provisions that ensure
plurality, autonomy or federalism. It is time for civil society and the sensible
section of the political class to step in to ensure that the Constitution
prevails.
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