Communications Minister Ram Vilas Paswan's surrender to the employees of his department is not at all surprising. His response to last week's `strike' was a giveaway. For three days, telephone subscribers all over the country had a harrowing time, whether it was in getting a connection, surfing the Net or receiving a fax, while calls from land phones to mobile phones or vice versa were almost impossible to make. Officially, no strike notice was given, nor did employees go on a cat-call strike.So why did this breakdown in the communications' network happen? All that the minister, who is ever-protective of his subordinates, was prepared to say was that he would inquire into how services were disrupted. The minister may not have realised it, but the rest of the world knew that the disruption was caused because 35,000 telecom employees had gone on casual leave. Subscribers may have been more sympathetic, had they been fighting for a genuine cause. This was certainly not the case. What provoked the staff was the posting of an IAS officer as secretary to the Department of Telecom Services (DTS), instead of a Telecom Service personnel. What a reason to immobilise the whole telecom network for three days and cause a national loss running into crores of rupees!The least that was expected of the government was to come down heavily on the `strikers'. Instead, the minister chose to wave the white flag of surrender at the first available opportunity. As a face-saving device, Paswan bifurcated the department. The new Department of Telecom Operations, which has been carved out of the DTS, will be headed by an officer who belongs to the Telecommunication Service. If this is not surrender, the word `surrender' will have to be redefined in the lexicon of the administration.Needless to say, the minister is oblivious of the cost his decision entails. The creation of a new secretary-level post, with its natural ripple effect, will have disastrous consequences for the government's much-touted plans to `rightsize' the bureaucracy. It will only complicate the government's plan to corporatise, if not privatise, the telecom sector, which the employees are resisting with all their might. This itself should have been sufficient reason for Paswan to act tough with the recalcitrant staff. But if the minister thinks he has bought peace in this manner, he is sadly mistaken. His capitulation sets a very unhealthy precedent.It was not long ago that Paswan sought to buy the employees' loyalty by offering them free residential telephones with a certain number of free calls. While accepting the offer, the employees' unions made it clear that the largesse did not oblige them to accept the `corporatisation' of the telecom sector. While figures vary as to how much this bonanza cost the nation, there is no mistaking that it will have a negative fallout on all government departments with employees' unions raising various demands. But all this is unlikely to bother Paswan, who is bent on going down in history as the most placatory minister the country ever had.It's a different matter that his espousal of the employees' cause when he was part of the National Front government had made the Centre virtually bankrupt.
