(Dr. Shashi Tharoor, a two-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram and the former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Human Resource Development, is the author of 14 books, including, most recently, Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century.)The news that the Government of India has amended the All India Services (Conduct) Rules, 1968, by inserting assorted sub-rules, is rather piquant.
First of all, what do these amendments require civil servants to do?
Under sub-rule (1A), every member of the Service shall maintain:- (i) High ethical standards, integrity and honesty;
(ii) Political neutrality;
(iii) Promoting of the principles of merit, fairness and impartiality in the discharge of duties;
(iv) Accountability and transparency;
(v) Responsiveness to the public, particularly to the weaker section; (vi) Courtesy and good behaviour with the public.
Under sub-rule (2B), every member of the Service shall:- (i) Commit himself [yes, good old linguistic sexism continues in the Government of India] to uphold the supremacy of the Constitution and democratic values;
(ii) Defend and uphold the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of State, public order, decency and morality;
(iii) Maintain integrity in public service;
(iv) Take decisions solely in public interest and use or cause to use public resources efficiently, effectively and economically;
(v) Declare any private interests relating to his public duties and take steps to resolve any conflicts in a way that protects the public interest;
(vi) Not place himself under any financial or other obligations to any individual or organisation which may influence him in the performance of his official duties;
(vii) Not misuse his position as civil servant and not take decisions in order to derive financial or material benefits for himself, his family or his friends;
(viii) Make choices, take decisions and make recommendations on merit alone;
(ix) Act with fairness and impartiality and not discriminate against anyone, particularly the poor and the under-privileged sections of society;
(x) Refrain from doing anything which is or may be contrary to any law, rules, regulations and established practices;
(xi) Maintain discipline in the discharge of his duties and be liable to implement the lawful orders duly communicated to him;
(xii) Be liable to maintain confidentiality in the performance of his official duties as required by any laws for the time being in force, particularly with regard to information, disclosure of which may prejudicially affect the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of State, strategic, scientific or economic interests of the State, friendly relation with foreign countries or lead to incitement of an offence or illegal or unlawful gains to any person; and
(xiii) Perform and discharge his duties with the highest degree of professionalism and dedication to the best of his abilities.
Phew! Quite a list. But is there, in fact, anything new about them? Wasn't the civil service always supposed to behave this way? After all, were our civil servants ever meant to be discourteous, partial, corrupt or anti-national? There was a time when the colonial-era Indian Civil Service was neither Indian, nor civil, nor imbued with any spirit of service; but that was all supposed to have changed with the advent of Independence and the creation by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel of an indigenous "steel frame" for the Government of India. Very clearly, all that these amendments do is to make explicit what has always been implicit.
Perhaps it is a reflection of our times that the Government feels the need to spell out the obvious in such excruciating detail.
But that's hardly a crime, and the list of prescriptions and proscriptions is in itself quite unexceptionable - what the Americans call "motherhood and apple pie", things that no one can oppose. All Indians would want their civil servants to adhere to the code spelled out in Mr Modi's 19 commandments. (Though nineteen does seem a bit much: as Clemenceau remarked in a different context, "even the good Lord only needed ten!")
But there's more than a bit of irony to the fact that it's a BJP government that, under sub-rule (1A), point (ii), urges "political neutrality" on the civil service. After all, it is this very government that - in an action unprecedented in the history of Indian democracy - issued a circular decreeing that any civil servant who had served on the personal staff of a UPA minister was ineligible to serve in an NDA government. While the UPA had earlier issued rules saying that no officer could serve more than 10 years on any minister's personal staff, the NDA circular made length of service, or indeed competence, irrelevant in its instruction: any personal staff who had served the UPA government in such a capacity for any length of time had to be removed from the offices of NDA ministers.
As a result, many officers of unimpeachable integrity and impressive service records were rusticated from the personal staffs of NDA ministers.
Their only sin was not a negative performance report, or excessive length of service on personal staffs - no, their only deficiency was that they had been tainted by association with the preceding government.
This decision by Mr Modi's government represents the worst politicization of the civil service in living memory, and a betrayal of the fundamental principles of our civil service. After all, governments may come and go, but the civil service is meant to be permanent, and immune to the vagaries of changing political fortunes. Some senior civil servants in the mid-1990s ended up serving four Prime Ministers in five years, without ever changing their own jobs!
As for myself, I had no hesitation in blessing my former aide's wish to serve an NDA Minister: his duty was, after all, to the Government, not to me or my party, and I did not begrudge him the recognition of his administrative talents by a different party. This was as it should be. In any government, ministers will naturally exercise their powers in a politically partisan manner, because that is what they have been elected to do - they arrive in their jobs on platform that requires them to cater to their political constituency and voter preferences. But our system of democratic government, as the founder of the IAS, Sardar Patel, made clear, requires that laws and rules be administered without prejudice. Politicians make policies, but the actual application of laws or rules underpinning those policies is meant to be done by civil servants without any political bias.
That is the logic of our bureaucracy: a new government can announce a new benefit it has advocated politically, but once that benefit is established and funded by the Government of India, it must be given fairly to all eligible beneficiaries, whatever their political persuasion. That's why we are supposed to have politically neutral civil services which are only accountable to the Constitution and the laws for their execution of policies - and to their political masters, the ministers, for their conduct and their impartial functioning.
The NDA's decision to make service to UPA ministers the sole grounds for transferring officials is a disgraceful violation of that principle. It establishes a new principle, that bureaucratic service will henceforth be seen as evidence of political allegiance. When the NDA loses power, as it surely will in five years, the bureaucrats who served them will, by the same logic, be seen as having been politically committed to the Modi government - because the NDA chose them on that basis.
How hypocritical of the very same government to mouth pious homilies about civil service neutrality!
These new rules appear to be a fresh example of the politicians' PR disease, "watch what I say, not what I do". What the NDA says is civil servants must be politically neutral; what it has "done", in fact, is to move no fewer than seven senior civil servants from Gujarat to the Prime Minister's office in New Delhi, presumably for having shown their political commitment to Mr Modi while serving under him there.
We are learning to get used to more and more examples of the gulf between proclamation and actual implementation in the Modi era. For a Prime Minister who professedly admires Sardar Patel, it is a pity that Mr Modi has trashed one of the doughty Sardar's most invaluable legacies while issuing rules codifying his adherence to it. One can only hope that the bureaucracy will live up to the new amendments and not to the hypocrisy of those who have issued them.
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