Opinion When a hero comes along…
Our political and administrative structures,geared to preserve the status quo, make sure he is cut down to size
In his piece,The power of one (IE,July 31),Shekhar Gupta has highlighted the role of heroes in public service. When he argues that all it takes to transform an institution is one person with no past and no greed for the future,he is seeking people who will emerge from anonymity to perform the necessary act of heroism,and then disappear into noble obscurity.
He has cited the examples of T.N. Seshan and J.M. Lyngdoh as election commissioners,and how they built and ensured the credibility and impartiality of the election commission. Certainly,the country owes them an enormous debt of gratitude. At the same time,one should not overlook the way the executive has tried to ensure that there will be no future Seshans,by expanding the commission into a three-person body,and making sure that no chief election commissioner gets a long enough term to strengthen the commission further.
The same is true of our Supreme Court. While the US has had 17 chief justices in 221 years of its history,India has seen 36 chief justices in 63 years since Independence,with an average tenure of a mere 21 months. The tenures of secretaries to the government,chiefs of armed forces,and heads of departments have progressively shrunk to ensure that the chances of an incumbent attempting radical reforms in the institution he is in charge of,is minimal. The generalist philosophy of our administrative culture ensures that in a majority of cases,by the time the office-holder learns the intricacies of his job,it will be time for him/her to retire. The entire Indian political,administrative and judicial system has been structured to maintain the status quo.
When T.N. Seshan and James Lyngdoh were appointed chief election commissioner and member of the three-person election commission respectively,the calculations of the powers-that-be,based on their past records could not have been that they would carry out their tasks in the spirit and style they did. T.N. Seshan had been defence secretary and cabinet secretary and was known for his loyalty to Rajiv Gandhi. Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar appointed him on the recommendation of Rajiv Gandhi. When he took charge of the election commission,he was a pillar of the establishment. He was an ambitious,brilliant,hard-working civil servant who reached the top of the hierarchy as an efficient manager,not an innovator. He was known for his loyalty to the current boss,assertiveness in his dealings with colleagues and his reputation of being a hard taskmaster to his subordinates. For the first time,as chief election commissioner,he found himself with the Constitution as his boss and not a bureaucrat or politician. It was a case of the man and the moment coming together to produce a beneficial result for the nation.
James Lyngdoh reached the top of his career as a civil servant as secretary (co-ordination) in the cabinet secretariat,not a highly fancied post among IAS officers. That would indicate that he was not a high-flier as a civil servant. Whatever the reasons for his appointment,perhaps nobody expected his stubborn streak and his capacity to resist bullying. As election commissioner,he was his normal self,but refused to budge to political pressure.
This interpretation of the personalities and roles of the two election commissioners is not intended to diminish the sterling roles they played. But election commissioners and the judiciary operate in constitutional enclaves which provide them a splendid autonomy,and which these two officers used creatively.
The posts of central vigilance commissioner and director of the Delhi Special Police Establishment,to call the CBI by its appropriate name,do not enjoy that constitutionally-guaranteed autonomy. The enactment governing the CVC clarifies the limits of his supervisory functions. The CBI is not under the administrative control of the CVC but of the department of personnel. While the Central government preaches to the state governments to reform the police and make crime investigation autonomous,the Centre itself has not shown any inclination to make the CBI autonomous. A single person without any past and no greed for the future can follow the Seshan-Lyngdoh model only when the CVC and CBI become constitutionally,or at least legally endowed autonomous enclaves.
Let us look at the irony of the situation today.That qualification of a man without a past and one without any greed about the future will not fit anyone more aptly than our prime minister,Manmohan Singh. Is he able to make the office of the prime minister what he himself would like it to be? He had to threaten to resign to get his way on the Indo-US nuclear deal,a threat he cannot hold up for every issue he wants to promote. As an accidental PM with no career in the party,his powers and ability to innovate are circumscribed. It is highly doubtful,if he had risen through the party hierarchy,whether he would have still been a man without a past or greed for the future.
We have the examples of Khrushchev,Gorbachev and P.V. Narasimha Rao as men who rose to the top because they played a very conformist role vis-a-vis their leadership,and concealed their individual views to advance in the party as useful and efficient tools of the leadership. If they had exhibited any signs of independent thinking,the leadership would have parked them somewhere on the wayside. The same fate overtakes non-conformists in the bureaucracy and armed forces and any other large organisational structure. But these three were not men without a past. They had many IOUs to discharge. They ended up without a future not because they had no greed,but because but they lost their fight with the system.
In spite of all this,there is no denying that the role of the individual is very important in day-to-day good governance. An index of good governance is the average tenure of people in important offices. Shuffling people in high offices and ensuring they do not stay long enough to assert their autonomy is the surest way of ensuring centralisation and stunting institutions. That is the state of Indian misgovernance today.
The writer is a senior defence analyst
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