Now why can’t India do a Senegal? Ask our babus, and the British

No, I am not mad. Hear me out. The British Raj bequeathed us a civil service trained to serve our colonial masters. This meant the creation of a system of governance whose primary purpose was to serve the interests of the rulers and not the ruled.

It should have been our first task after Independence to change the training of our civil servants as it would have led automatically to a de-colonisation of our police forces, our education system and our attitude as a country. For reasons that remain a mystery nobody thought of changing anything and the Indian Administrative Service continues to churn out officials who think of governance as something designed to serve the interests of the rulers and not the people.

So, as far as the Sports ministry is concerned, the people are irrelevant. If the people mattered we would have in 55 years of Independence had, at the very least, sports stadiums and training facilities in every district of the country.

From these would have come our soccer and hockey players, our athletes and swimming champions.

Instead, what do we have? A Sports ministry so bulging with officials that the team we sent to the last Olympics had more officials in it than sportsmen.

We have built our stadiums and sports facilities almost entirely in the big cities so that only the urban middle classes—and naturally the children of our bureaucrats and politicians—have access to them. Since this is not usually the gene pool from which great sportsmen come India has so few that we must be the only country in the world that celebrates bronze medals instead of being ashamed that we did not win the gold.

The Sports ministry is far from being the only one infected with the debilitating scourge of colonial governance.

There is not a single government department in the country, whether at the central, state or municipal level, that is unaffected and this is why even a Chandrababu Naidu can barely change things. But, because he is a young and aggressive leader he demands, and sometimes gets, a better standard than our poor, old Prime Minister.

I know this is the week when he is already upset over that Time magazine article that made him sound like a senile, drunken, old fool, but it has to be said that the true colours of our bureaucracy have come into sharper focus since he came to power because the political leadership is so weak. In the days when we were ruled by one or another member of the Gandhi family, our bureaucrats behaved like docile domestic servants. They never cared much for the people even then but at least did as they were told out of awe of the Nehru-Gandhis. They might go back to servility and obedience if Sonia becomes Prime Minister, but at the moment they are dangerously disobedient and out of control.

Let me give you two examples I have personally been witness to. One happened last week when I went to the magnificent, colonial office of a high official in Delhi in the company of a group of supplicants.

One of them pointed out that the Prime Minister supported their cause, to which the high official said rudely, ‘‘What has the Prime Minister got to do with this? Keep him out of it’’. Would he have dared take this tone if it was Indira Gandhi who was Prime Minister?

On another occasion, I went to meet Jagmohan when he was still Minister for Urban Affairs to draw attention to an illegal block of flats that the municipality was building in the street in which I live. He agreed it was illegal and wrote to the head of the New Delhi Municipal Committee pointing this out. The NDMC ignored his letter and the block of flats is now ready for its officials to occupy. When asked how this had happened, the head of the NDMC said, ‘‘Jagmohan may be the boss in his ministry but I am the boss here’’.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, when it was only an opposition party, liked to boast about its commitment to ‘‘good governance’’. They even had an election slogan about it. If the Vajpayee government has failed singularly to do this it needs to ask itself why and it might discover that it is because it made no effort to de-colonise the bureaucracy.

Perhaps, it is too late now and what we need to do instead is simply to make it possible to sack civil servants for incompetence and insubordination.

Taking away their colonial residences and magnificent offices may also help cut them down to size to make it easier for them to observe how we, the people, live. From their high perches they see nothing.

Tavleen Singh can be contacted at tavleensingh@expressindia.com