For the past two months all that the public of Meghalaya have been reading about and hearing are vicious tirades by political parties targeted at their opponents. The Trinamool Congress has laid bare the scams of the outgoing MDA government and so has the BJP. But if these parties believe that such revelations matter to the voting public of Meghalaya they are mistaken. In no other election has money power played such an overarching role. For the first time ever, assistance meant for farmers’ collectives under the aegis of the Farmer’s Collectivisation for Upscaling Production and Marketing Systems (FOCUS) programme have been disbursed to non-farming individuals who received Rs 5000 in their bank accounts. Even the PRIME (Promotion and Incubation of Market-driven Enterprises) scheme has been randomly distributed with the intent of garnering public support. Needless to say this would not have been possible without the active assistance of the bureaucracy. No wonder it is said that a politically aligned bureaucracy is a danger to democracy and how!
In India today we are witnessing the erosion of virtues that the IAS/IPS officers were imbued with during their training period. Virtues such as integrity, political neutrality, courage not to stray from the path are showing signs of rapid decay. Civil servants are seen to be involved in partisan politics because they have developed an easy relationship with their political bosses. Its also true that civil servants have often had to pay the price for their integrity and those involve punishment postings. So what’s the incentive for them to walk the straight and narrow path? Also there’s no transparency involved in transfers and postings especially when it comes to police officials. Hence many have lost the spine to take on the system. It’s easier to go with the flow. The transfer of the above benefits to non-deserving individuals could not have happened without cooking the books and that’s not the job of politicians but of the bureaucracy. Here lies the rub. It’s a systemic fault and it’s the reason why administrative reforms are stymied at every occasion.
There’s only four more days to go before the people of Meghalaya will elect their next government. All talk about change and about cleansing the system will remain rhetoric because the more things change the more they remain the same. About the only respite that citizens will have after March 2, is the silence they long for. Needless to say, ‘thinking’ and ‘voting’ are poles apart. Voters appear to have decided to keep their thinking under temporary suspension. This is what democracy has done to the cognitive domain of the voters. Partly it’s the noise and din and the largesse that has robbed people of the ability to make an informed choice. It will be no surprise therefore to see the same set of people back at the helm.
