Hearts of steel

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.

(Please Click here to read the article on Telegraph’s Website)

Powers That The Corona Has Conferred

                    Powers That The Corona Has Conferred

           

                                                    Jawhar Sircar  

                               New Indian Express,   14th May 2020

               

          It is debatable whether any intervention earlier than March 21 would have helped combat the depredations of the coronavirus. To the government, the Parliament session and Madhya Pradesh obviously mattered. In any case, a janata curfew was observed the very next day to test the waters before a total lockdown. While people stayed indoors and came out only at 5 pm as advised, to clap hands and bang pots, officials were feverishly working behind closed teak doors to finalise the operational details of how to seal a nation so large, unmanageable and rather restless. Two days later, the prime minister announced, in his dramatic style, that everything would remain shut down for the next three weeks to halt the deadly dance of the virus.

           The curtailment of civil liberties is, of course, an essential ingredient of every battle, but questions arose immediately about the timing, length, effectiveness, proportion of penalties, human rights and so on. The next morning and thereafter, these weighty issues were resolved by long sticks that the police wielded quite effectively all over the nation, in a synchronised demonstration of state power. Despite audio-visual clips in social media and top billing in the mainstream media about ‘police high-handedness’, citizen-state relations were established unambiguously. What most observers missed was the smoothness with which the home ministry appropriated all powers overnight, almost like during the much reviled ‘Emergency’ of 1975-77.

        Two laws that mattered were obviously tilted in favour of the home ministry, which, incidentally, is headed by the prime minister’s most trusted colleague. A cryptic colonial law of just one and a half pages called The Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897 was pulled out of some mothballed locker as it empowers the Centre to check inter-state and international movement of vessels and passengers. Section 2, however, declares that state governments could practically suspend the operation of normal laws and liberties. The other Act that actually came in more handy was passed in 2005 during the regime of a more peaceable prime minister and is meant to tackle exigences like cyclones, floods and earthquakes.This Disaster Management Act is a rather verbose piece of literature, rife with good intentions, so typical of a bureaucracy that dreads making any mistake. But if one looks at it from the angle in which it is used in its finest hour, the underlying theme is clear—the total centralisation of power. Under a liberal regime, such megalomanic sections would, of course, be justified as “enabling provisions”. These were enough to subordinate the ministries of civil aviation, railways, shipping and transport and others, transforming them into mere departments under the home ministry.

            Under the 2005 Act, a central secretary can and does tick off state chief ministers and directs them on what to do in their own localities that babus of Delhi would not even find on a Google map. One wonders whether bureaucrats could think of bullying a CM like Narendra Modi in 2001, when he was handling relief operations after the Bhuj earthquake. Well, Section 6(2)(i) of this Act does empower the home secretary, surely a very harassed officer, to issue his regular fatwas but consultations with either states or central ministries appear to have disappeared or are acts of tokenism.

           This is just one more example of the complete arrogation of all powers that this government has perfected. Its slogan of “Minimum Government, Maximum Governance” disappeared somewhere along the way, much before corona hit. The home secretary is, of course, only the front face of an ever-advancing regime and is surely acting on behalf of his minister, who remains in the shadows, as the Act has left him out. In fact, Section 6(3) of this Act empowers the PM to effectively centralise all decision-making with himself, in his capacity as chairman of the National Disaster Management Authority. This, he has surely done, even without invoking this section.

           But Acts passed by Parliament after due consideration also enjoin responsibilities, and so does this one. Section 11 mandates that a ‘National Plan’ has to be made out, which has not been done. The health ministry is almost invisible and apparently demoralised, which is not good. It came in, however, for adverse publicity when its procurement of life-saving protective equipment for doctors and very critical testing kits was unduly delayed. This was where the PM could have used his powers under Section 50(a) of the Act to cut through the bureaucratic tangles.

             Besides, if Donald Trump can appear with an independent expert like Dr Fauci, it appears odd that updates and briefings in India are mainly by civil servants, however competent they are. Comments and advisories by senior doctors and scientists would certainly be more credible than ludicrous statements made by a paediatrician with no epidemiological exposure who is now a Niti Aayog member. Besides, the cavalier and insensitive handling of the problem of migrant labourers may have been exacerbated as public representatives and civil society are excluded from decision-making.

              The jealous guarding of the Centre’s fiefdom and its constant self-glorification can only jeopardise very-necessary relations with subjugated and fund-starved states that are on the front line. The virus does not discriminate and the much promised ‘cooperative federalism’ would surely have produced better results.

               The point is that bureaucrats will definitely carry out orders, and more effectively so if the boss is really powerful, but they can never acquire the natural sensory nerves that grassroots politicians inherit. After all, in an excitable federal democracy, only hard top-down orders may not suffice.

(Please Click Here to read the article on The New Indian Express’sWebsite)

Hari Vasudevan: Historian, Gentleman and Beloved Teacher

        Hari Vasudevan: Historian, Gentleman and Beloved Teacher

                         

  Jawhar Sircar

 The Wire, 10 May 2020

           

               It was only late last night when the hospital sent me a short report on Hari’s precarious condition that I realised he had a middle name as well, Sankar. Caught between a more placid Vishnu and a temperamental Shiva, Hari must have opted quite early for the tranquil deity, for everything about him was so unflappably cool, soothing and gentle.

          Hari did his Tripos at Christ’s College, Cambridge and then earned his Master’s and Doctoral degrees from the same university. Along with history, his years in Cambridge ensured that he spoke the real English. No airs, no acquired accent, just a gentle insistence on speaking the language as it should be spoken. Our good-humoured mimicry had absolutely no effect on him and he continued to give his students the additional advantage of being trained, rather inadvertently, in correct spoken English, at no extra charge. His marriage to Tapati Guha Thakurta, his outstanding student, five years younger, incidentally, followed a rather hallowed tradition in his discipline where Presidency and Calcutta universities were concerned.

               Hari Vasudevan earned for himself the distinction of being accepted by academics and policy makers as a reliable expert on Russia and East European states. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he utilised his specialisation to also focus on the Central Asian republics that had broken off, as a new fertile area of research had opened up. He extended his beat further to East and Southeast Asia as well. Central ministries dipped into his knowledge of these territories quite freely and frequently, and I remember how more than one professional diplomat told me in confidence about his remarkable grasp. I stand accused of similar unpaid exploitation of Hari Vasudevan’s expertise, when I was secretary of the ministry of culture. But he did not mind as it was for a national cause and there was always the India International Centre where such debts could be sorted out.

         Except for a three year stint as professor of Central Asian Studies in Jamia Milia Islamia, between 2003 and 2005, Hari spent almost his entire academic career in Kolkata, right from 1978. He taught for decades at Calcutta University where he was certainly one of most popular teachers. Hari will always be remembered by several generations of students and scholars as a very accessible and warm person.

          In Kolkata he served and excelled as director of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, an autonomous centre of the Union culture ministry, between 2007 and 2011. In fact, the-then prime minster, who was also in charge of this ministry at that time, expressed his unequivocal satisfaction when he came to Kolkata in 2010 to formally inaugurate the new campus of this institute.

          In 2005, Hari was invited by the Union human resources development ministry to chair the textbook development committee for the social sciences of the National Centre for Educational Research and Training (NCERT). This meant skating on thin ice. While he worked with a large team and consulted widely to produce a set of textbooks that were applauded by teachers and students, he was incensed when changes were made later without his knowledge. First, some cartoons removed by busybodies during the UPA regime. Worse was to follow, however, when the NDA arrived and went on merrily distorting history with their saffron hues. As an honest academic, Hari was not one to put up with this.

           Hari ended his teaching career at Kolkata university, as UGC Emeritus Professor of history. Needless to mention, Hari worked and taught for short spells at several universities and academies abroad — from Cornell to Uppsala, and many others. He was Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Development Studies, Kolkata, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi, till his untimely death due to Covid 19.

           Hari doted on his daughter Mrinalini, and was a devoted husband to Tapati, an internationally-acknowledged professor of art history. Both are in a state of shock at how this very lively, humorous man could just disappear forever in four short days. The Coronavirus does not even give a chance to say goodbye. His countless friends and wellwishers will surely miss him for years to come. Hari Vasudevan was among the last few upholders of a dying legacy of Calcutta University, to enrich the faculty with teachers from ‘outside the state’. How he managed to thrive for full four decades in the present increasingly-parochial era remains a wonder. But he did so with elan, holding his own among rather argumentative Bengalis spluttering loudly in Bangla, while Hari kept talking in his very soft, proper English, laced with his very sweet accented Bengali.

             

(Please Click Here to read the article on The Wire’s Website)