A civil servant remembers: Of Badal who lost 14 kilos under house arrest and Maharaja Jagatjit who believed in ‘mulakat karamat’

It was during the pandemic-induced lockdown that Kashyap, an avid note taker during his service, decided to pen down this account. “Ralph Waldo Emerson had famously said there is properly no history, only biography,” he chuckles. That’s what his book is, as it takes you through Punjab down the ages. Kashyap, whose grandfather worked in the princely state of Kapurthala, gives a child’s insight into the reign of Maharaja Jagatjit Singh. He liked to visit schools and interact with students, writes Kashyap, telling you how the Maharaja, a polyglot, detested people who mixed languages. And how he believed in the “mulakat karamat” (the miracle of face-to-face meetings) in governance.

Then there is the late chief minister Parkash Singh Badal. Kashyap fondly recounts his visit to Badal saab under house arrest at the Raja Ji National Park in Dehradun. Kashyap’s sister-in-law, then the deputy commissioner of Dehradun, had her misgivings about the meeting but Kashyap prevailed. “Badal saab was in high spirits. He told me how he had lost 14 kilos. He was a model prisoner, all that he asked the DC was to send him a badminton racket and agricultural implements so that he could grow vegetables and play badminton with his jailers”.

It is these nuggets that make the book a treasure. From the various chief ministers and governors to Dr MS Randhawa, Dr BN Goswami and Milkha Singh, we run into a host of iconic figures in the book. Then there are forgotten leaders like former chief minister Lachhman Singh Gill, who Kashyap describes as “energetic”. He survived by making all his loyalist MLAs ministers. He also established a network of roads linking villages.

Another chief minister, Capt Amarinder Singh, he says, won over people by friendly persuasion. “He would go to Delhi and transact so much business over a friendly dinner.” Then there is his encounter with then Union finance minister Manmohan Singh in Delhi.

“When I called on him and asked what he could do for the state, he called the director of the Public Finance and Policy and said, ‘Sir, you have to take up this task’. They spent many months drawing up a strategy of reforms. But Punjab government did the exact opposite”.

Dr BN Goswami, who spurned the IAS to become an art historian, did not know how to ride a scooter when he ordered one. It fell upon his wife to call on Kashyap to do that. Then a student at Panjab University, Kashyap recounts how he took petrol in a bottle to the railway station.

Speaking about scooters, he writes how he and his family did a fair bit of walking during his posting in Delhi in the late 1970s. And how he would often hop on his Bajaj to go to the office. It also came in very handy to reach a group of striking roadways employees at Pathankot in the 1960s. Kashyap got their attention by climbing atop a bus. Those were simpler times. In the chapter titled “A Path Charts Itself”, Kashyap paints a picture of an era when many youngsters aspired to become educators since lecturers earned a monthly salary of Rs 350, which was only a tad lesser than an IAS officer’s pay packet of Rs 400. The respect they got was the same.

Kashyap, a bureaucrat with the fastest MPhil from Cambridge, also takes the reader to the dawn of Green Revolution when the government of India had banned interstate movement of wheat. The book also transports readers back to the Chandigarh of yore, when it was a part of the Ambala district. And when all aspiring civil servants from Punjab had to flock to Patiala to sit for their exams.

What makes the book truly charming is its non-judgmental tone. Ask Kashyap about the bureaucratic shifts he’s seen, and he remarks, “Politicians should be making policies and bureaucrats should be implementing them. ow politicians are consumed by transfers etc while bureaucrats are charged with making the policy. This is not good”. His advice to serving bureaucrats is simple: “Use the power you have to help others instead of merely enjoying its trappings.” And to those who are about to hang their boots, he assures there is life beyond the salaams and the laal batti. He is a living testimony.