Elite Irk Even Gandhi : Civil Service: India’s Bane, Backbone

They are the royalty of regulation, the barons of bureaucracy. Without their permission, ships would not sail, planes would not fly, trains would not leave the station, contracts would not be let, licenses would not be issued.

They are the 5,000 or so men and women who make up the elite of the Indian civil service, the famous “steel frame” that holds the country together.

The Indian Administrative Service, together with its sister institutions, the Indian Foreign Service and the Indian Police Service, are the backbone--and the bane--of Indian government. Prime ministers and governors, members of Parliament and the state assemblies, mayors and village chiefs--all depend on this cadre of elite civil servants for quick, accurate, sophisticated advice.

Frustrated Politicians

But they all complain of the civil service elite’s haughtiness and power. In the red sandstone corridors of government ministries here in New Delhi, frustrated politicians sometimes refer to the Indian Administrative Service, the IAS, as the “I’m Arrogant Service.”

The power of the elite civil servants, who control an apparatus of 3.3 million office workers and other central government underlings, a force three times the size of the Indian army, is immense and undisputed.

Until Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister in 1984, after the assassination of his mother, Indira, no Indian prime minister had dared to challenge them. But almost immediately after taking office, Rajiv Gandhi took to scolding the bureaucracy, consistently and publicly, for delaying his economic and social reforms.

Gandhi Oversteps

His criticism won considerable support, particularly from businessmen who feel trapped in the red tape they must deal with in even the simplest transactions. (India’s official file folders are still bound with the red tape that gave rise to the term).

But Gandhi’s scolding has come to an abrupt halt. Not long ago, he tangled with a senior civil servant and lost, and he was compelled to seek peace with the bureaucrats by making what amounted to an apology before a special meeting of senior government secretaries, the deans of the civil service.

In the course of a press conference, Gandhi publicly humiliated a respected diplomat, and the incident not only put him at odds with powerful bureaucrats but produced the most bitter criticism of his government yet from opposition parties and the Indian press.

The offended diplomat, Foreign Secretary A.P. Venkateswaran, resigned from the government on Jan. 22 after Gandhi, in the presence of several hundred Indian and foreign journalists, told a questioner, “You will speak to a new foreign secretary soon.”

This came as a surprise to Venkateswaran, a veteran of 30 years with the Foreign Service, who was sitting in the front row. It also surprised almost everyone else there and obscured all the other topics that came up.

The incident quickly snowballed into the worst public relations setback of Gandhi’s 2 1/2 years as prime minister.

Assailed in Press

“An utter disgrace,” the Times of India said in an editorial. “Deplorable,” the Indian Express said. (In India, the bureaucratic elite is closely allied with the press, which depends on the senior civil servants for information and the supply of newsprint, which is regulated by the government.) More important, the incident brought into the open differences between Gandhi and the civil service elite.

“A wave of resentment has spread through the ranks,” an official involved in the training of new officers said. “All are equally touched by this incident. They say, ‘If it can happen to him, it can happen to me.’ ”

The elite services are the modern extension of the famous Indian Civil Service that essentially governed India for two centuries, first under the East India Co. and then as an arm of the British Empire. In practice, the civil service is one of the three main branches of power in the Indian government, along with Parliament, headed by the prime minister, and the judiciary.

For Gandhi to challenge the senior bureaucracy, whose members are the working executives of every department in the central government, and in the state governments as well, is the equivalent of an American president attacking every Washington bureaucrat, every state administrator and every police chief in the land.

Could Affect Teamwork

“The Venkateswaran affair has certainly agitated and demoralized the services,” said Dharma Vir, 81, who before his retirement was private secretary to Jawaharlal Nehru and Cabinet secretary to Indira Gandhi. “If such incidents go on, there is a danger of the political bosses losing the cooperation of the services.”

For the first time in history, the Indian Foreign Service Assn. met to protest a prime minister’s action. The association adopted a resolution praising Venkateswaran’s record, which includes a term as ambassador to China from 1982 to 1985. Venkateswaran, the resolution states, “epitomizes the finest traditions of the civil service--integrity, intellectual honesty, courage of conviction, diligence, dedication and inspiring leadership which he combined with considerable personal charm, wit and humanism.”

Venkateswaran, a vegetarian who smokes cigars and sips an occasional brandy, has advanced degrees in economics and political science. In 1974-75 he studied as a fellow at the Harvard University Center for International Affairs. His overseas assignments included Prague, New York, Addis Ababa, Moscow, Bonn, Damascus, Washington and Beijing.

Critics have used the controversy to bring up other confrontations between the prime minister, who is 42, and senior bureaucrats, including an episode, five years ago, in which Gandhi allegedly berated a senior police official in front of his men at the scene of a fire.

Seized Upon by Foes

Before the Venkateswaran incident, opposition leaders were frustrated with Gandhi’s seeming invulnerability. He was, in Indian terms, the man in the Teflon Nehru jacket. Nothing stuck. Thus the opposition was quick to jump on the Venkateswaran incident as exemplifying Gandhi’s arrogance and insensitivity. They portrayed him as a youthful ingrate insulting his elders. This is a serious charge in India, where respect for advanced years is traditional. The word immature appeared in nearly every opposition statement.

“The country can no longer afford an immature prime minister,” leaders of the Lok Dal party said in a joint statement. “In our opinion, the prime minister humiliated the foreign secretary.”

Chandra Shekhar, the Janata party leader, said, “By humiliating the foreign secretary publicly, and especially in the presence of the world press, the prime minister has only exposed his immaturity and autocratic attitude.”

Since the press conference, Gandhi has reportedly apologized to Venkateswaran. In an attempt to explain the gaffe, it was said that Gandhi assumed that the foreign secretary had already been advised of his imminent dismissal.

‘Exceeded His Brief’

The Indian press reported that Venkateswaran had “exceeded his brief” on a recent trip to Pakistan. Gandhi aides are reluctant to discuss the specifics of the case, although they indicate that the prime minister felt the foreign secretary had become too self-important.

They stress that Gandhi respects the civil service and the senior secretaries who serve as his advisers.

“There are a lot of people in the civil service for whom he has a great deal of time,” said one Gandhi aide, himself an official of the Foreign Service. “I don’t think there has ever been a prime minister who consults as much as this prime minister does.”

The main resentment in civil service ranks, Gandhi defenders say, comes from civil servants who are either not willing or not able to take part in policy changes, particularly in science and industry, instituted by the Gandhi government.

They said Gandhi has faced serious opposition from the bureaucracy in charge of science programs because of his emphasis on practical instead of theoretical research. Despite having more science and engineering graduates than any other country except the United States and the Soviet Union, much of the scholarship here is still at the theoretical level, where India has traditionally excelled.

Criticizes Scientists

“Many of these guys,” a Gandhi aide said, speaking of scientists connected with the civil service, “would rather go to Vienna once a year, to present a paper or write an article for a Harvard journal, than devise a way to provide drinking water for every village. Because of this, the reaction time of the bureaucracy has been less than satisfactory.”

On the other hand, he said, many bureaucrats have adapted enthusiastically to new management systems introduced by the prime minister. He dismissed reports of widespread disenchantment in the civil services, saying:

“There is no revolt in the bureaucracy. There are many, many in the bureaucracy who are responding well to the new ethos. It is a widening circle, too. Those who are being left out of the circle are the ones who are complaining.”

From its earliest days, the civil service earned a reputation for being rigorously fair and intellectually acute--the “steel frame of India.” It is still the dream of millions of Indians that one of their children will qualify for “the service.”

Major Role at Partition

At the time of partition in 1947, when British India was divided into two independent nations, India and Pakistan, the civil service was widely credited with saving India from disaster as millions of refugees, Hindus and Sikhs from areas included in the new Pakistan, descended on the cities, more than a million of them in Delhi alone.

Govind Narain, 69, a retired civil servant, recalls the aftermath of partition as one of the service’s proudest moments.

“During partition, man became a beast,” he said. “Men were killing each other in the streets. It caused the biggest refugee migration the world has ever known. Yet the Indian Administrative Service was able to solve all these problems without a fuss.”

In the early decades of independent India under Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi, the services worked smoothly with the national leaders, in part perhaps because they came from the same class and background.

Nehru, for example, graduated from elite schools in England, including Cambridge University, so he was a match for the usually well-educated civil servants who worked with him.

Quality Decline Seen

Since then, Govind Narain said, “there has been a progressive deterioration in the quality of leadership.” Narain studied at the London School of Economics and served as home secretary and defense secretary under Indira Gandhi.

“Under Nehru and Shastri,” he said, “the relationship between the Indian civil servant and the leaders was one of great understanding and mutual respect. The practical aspect was that political masters welcomed criticism, even from junior officers. This has completely disappeared.”

According to Vir, the retired octogenarian who served Nehru and Indira Gandhi and is still a sort of guru for many Indian bureaucrats, the post-independence leaders have been replaced by “new people who are more like professional politicians, not those who grew into politics like Nehru.”

“The new ones,” he said, “are not highly educated, and I wonder if quite a few of them have the capacity to deal with India’s problems. . . . A certain inferiority complex develops when they deal with civil servants who are much more knowledgeable than they are.”

His Credentials Questioned

Privately, some civil servants criticize the credentials of Rajiv Gandhi to function as prime minister. Gandhi, who attended a private school in India before, as he puts it, “flunking out” of Cambridge University and becoming an airline pilot, has many advisers with advanced degrees from leading British and American universities.

Inevitably, the bureaucrats compare Gandhi unfavorably with his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, the author of several books and a man famous for the quality of his letters and interoffice memoranda.

One senior diplomat recently complained that Gandhi goes home for lunch with his family instead of using the time, as Nehru did, to confer with his senior secretaries.

Such comments, Gandhi’s defenders say, reflect the intellectual arrogance that has long been a hallmark of the Indian Administrative Service and which keeps it from performing in the interest of all Indians.

In fact, in the top ranks of the civil service there is a feeling that governing the country is too important to be left to the politicians. Their attitude suggests that ruling India would better be left to men like Venkateswaran. It rankles them that the fate of a Venkateswaran could be decided by a politician.