Feb 22, 1999

Officials are devious but political appointees are inept.

By Swapan Dasgupta

When he visited Delhi last summer, economist Jagadish Bhagwati suggested that Indian political parties consider adopting the American system of political appointments in government. His reasoning stemmed from a realisation that the so-called professional bureaucracy had little sympathy with this regime and, in fact, were positively hostile to it.

What took the Columbia University professor an instant to grasp is fast becoming conventional wisdom with the BJP and some of its allies. India's steel-frame has become so intensely politicised and identified with the ancien regime that it has actively subverted many of this Government's initiatives. So much so the impression has gone round that this Government is a pushover. Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha was stumped by the in-built booby traps in last year's budget but even stalwarts like Home Minister L.K. Advani have been casualties of bureaucratic subversion and stonewalling. Tensions between the PMO and the Home Ministry are more often than not intra-bureaucratic one-upmanship games.

Take the case of Human Resources Development Minister M.M. Joshi who is one of the few ministers with a clear idea of what he wants to pursue. At every stage of his crusade to curtail Left stranglehold over academic institutions, Joshi has found his orders either not acted on or diluted by wilful bureaucratic lethargy. The ministry's deliberate mishandling of a PIL concerning the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, for example, would prompt the inevitable conclusion that the Culture Department is still being run as an extension counter of 10 Janpath. No wonder Information and Broadcasting Minister Pramod Mahajan's sledge-hammer approach is appreciated in BJP circles.

Piecemeal attempts to parachute political appointees into ministries have had mixed results. Mohan Guruswamy, who was both sacked and resigned from the Finance Ministry this month, was a casualty of his own bluntness and the permanent bureaucrats' envy. As was Jairam Ramesh who was eased out of P.V. Narasimha Rao's office after a very short stint in 1991. Guruswamy undoubtedly cut corners and short-circuited procedures in following a political agenda. In a Congress government, it was the bureaucracy that performed this dirty work for their political masters. Witness the scandalous ease with which the Rs 133-crore urea scam was effected in the last months of the Rao government. Now, it is left to the odd Guruswamys to do it in the face of hostility from the permanent bureaucracy. Very few manage because ultimately the American and Indian methods of governance are incompatible.

The additional tragedy is that Indian politics hasn't generated the requisite political culture to nurture the American system of political appointees who come and go with each government. The right sort of people are just not attracted to politics. Some of the so-called politicos who have been drafted to bolster the PMO have scored more self-goals for the Government than even Jayalalitha. The onion crisis and the prime minister's media projection speak volumes of their blundering ineptitude. So when George Fernandes talks of a "conspiracy" to undermine this Government, he is right. It's a system built by and for the ancien regime. You can either accept it or abolish it. There is no half-way house.

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