India’s Civil Service, fashioned on the world’s best administrative system perfected by the British, still retains a halo around it even as every system in Independent India experienced shocks and rusted over time. Instead of injecting new vigour to the governance system, successive governments since the 1970s did their best to undercut the authority of the bureaucracy, bent them to their will or colluded with them for mutual personal gains. The much-less-educated political class derived a vicarious pleasure from belittling the bureaucracy and turning them into their orderlies. Many bureaucrats who started off with good intentions got corrupted to extremes either on their own or under the influence of the political leadership. Their sense of discipline got limited to obeying their political masters. The ugly public spat between two women bureaucrats – one IAS and the other IPS – in Bengaluru is a sign of the times and has drawn much public attention. So far, the male bureaucrats were seen pulling the legs of their colleagues, at times, publicly. Between the IAS and IPS cadres, there always existed an uneasy calm.
The Bommai-led BJP government in Karnataka, in response, issued a warning to both Roopa Moudgil IPS and Rohini Sindhuri IAS against “further violation” of service rules and transferred them. The former has released personal pictures of the latter – where she shares a coffee table with a ruling party MLA at a restaurant. Allegations of corruption by the senior official were already doing the rounds on social media. Socializing by itself is not a rule violation but a public spat is. The entire row helped only to further bring down the image of the bureaucracy. Unholy links between bureaucrats and politicians are common. In the interiors of the power edifice, they might operate to their mutual advantage. Fact is, when the political bosses who sit on a pedestal higher than the bureaucrats err, they lose the moral courage to discipline the bureaucracy.
Disciplining the bureaucracy is no small job. They are well-entrenched, organised under various overt and covert shades and enjoy the protection of service rules. To add to this is the political patronage at individual levels. Most inquiries against bureaucrats for wrong-doings are seen as a sham. Officials investigating the officials tend to adopt a sympathetic attitude. Most such inquiries so far ended up in no action as there is no will on the part of the political bosses to act. In most cases, after a suspension, the accused official sits back at home for a couple of years and returns to service with full back-wages for the suspended period. Political bosses running governments for five years are game to these shenanigans.