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Being uncivil to civil servants

Just as the most incandescent rows in the family are between husband and wife, so the most flaming quarrels in governance are between senior civil servants and their ministers. And for the same reason. For familiarity breeds irritability and abrasion scrapes the scabs off old wounds.

This is part of the game. It is the job of senior civil servants to tender advice. It is the job of the minister to take decisions. The decision the minister wishes to take might well fly in the face of the advice he has been given. The civil servant, then, is likely to baulk at the decision taken since it would subsequently be the responsibility of the civil servant to implement a decision he has warned against in the first instance. The civil servant's stake in this is great because, whether he has warned against the decision or no, he will be considered party to the consequences of the implementation of the decision long after the minister has been consigned to the dustbin of history. Which is why civil servants are called "permanent." To distinguish them from ministers who are temporary.

A civil servant does not want to be told ten or fifteen years down the line that he (or, in the instant case, she -- that is Kiran Aggarwal, IAS, secretary, urban affairs) cannot be promoted to Cabinet Secretary because her boss made a boo-boo a decade earlier. If she protests that she tried to stop the boss blundering, she will then be held responsible for having failed to stop a blunderer. Hence, the civil servant's stake in ensuring that the minister remains the surrogate for what the civil service decides.

If you don't believe me, read Yes, Minister.

Ram Jethmalani, our minister for urban affairs, clearly has no time for fiction nor to waste it seeing the television version on his VCR. Which is, of course, why he has landed himself so comprehensively in the soup. He is the first minister in the history of Independent India to have been publicly rebuked, reprimanded and repudiated by none other than the prime minister.

Jethmalani's problems began with the shenanigans that accompanied the formation of the Vajpayee government last March. To secure confirmation as prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee had to accommodate the wildest wishes of those on whose back he had ridden to power. No back was broader, or more capable of giving him a rough ride than that of his southern ally, AIADMK General Secretary J Jayalalitha. He, therefore, had to accede to her demand that the law and justice portfolio be allotted to her nominee so that she might keep an eye on the sahasrakoti (roughly translated as the thousand and one) cases wending their way in the courts against her and her associates.

So, criminal lawyer Ram Jethmalani lost the one job for which he had any expertise. Not knowing what to do with the extra baggage, Vajpayee then shunted this supernumerary to the outer boondocks of the ministry of urban affairs. There, Jethmalani decided to bring his forensic skills into play. So when his secretary put up to him a note explaining why it would be imprudent and worse to hand back seized prime property in Delhi to MS Shoes, an indigent promoter who is under investigation and trial for mulcting hordes of small savers of their carefully husbanded crores, a wise and experienced minister would have decided to either (a) play it safe and go along with his secretary or (b) bring his political masters on board so that when he over-ruled his secretary, the political establishment would back him.

Jethmalani did neither. Overawed as he is with his own legal skills, Jethmalani wrote a long brief on file rebutting his subordinate point-by-point and putting forth his own convoluted explanation as to why, M'Lud, MS Shoes deserved to have their property back. This brief was then leaked to a vicious political rival, Subramanian Swamy and from there into the press. People began wondering whether Jethmalani was counsel for the defence or minister of urban affairs.

At which point , the smart thing for Jethmalani to have done would have been to put the hounds of the Central Bureau of Investigation on to the tail of his secretary. Instead, he divested her of her work. Sentence before verdict, like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland.As any half-baked law faculty paapecould have told Jethmalani, that is guaranteed to get you deeper into the excreta. So, a howl of protest has gone up from the assembled ranks of the babus that no minister has the right to decide the allocation of work of his secretary. He can dislike his secretary, he can try to get her removed, he can over-rule her, he can persecute her till she quits crying, but he cannot deprive a secretary to the Government of India of her right to work.

The callow, inexperienced Jethmalani, OK in the corridors of the Supreme Court but floundering in the corridors of government, bids fair to render this government just as disreputable as the incumbent of the White House. Neither seems to know how to behave with subordinates. One loved her too much; the other too little.

It is now Vajpayee's turn. He has publicly rebuked, reprimanded and repudiated his minister. Why has he not asked Ram Jethmalani to go? It is the BJP which endlessly disrupted Parliament these last many years insisting on what they called ministerial "accountability." It is they who endlessly abused others for wrecking the "institutions of our democracy." No voice was louder in this than Jethmalani's. If he is a man of honour, surely he should not be waiting for the sack.

That will increase his income (for he is losing millions in lost court appearances). And improve governance dramatically.

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