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B. S. Raghavan

IT was hitherto assumed as an immutable axiom that the organised services constituting especially the permanent bureaucracy and the police were the only sure and firm prop that people have in a parliamentary system of democracy for safely negotiating the shifting sands of political shenanigans and chicanery. Whatever else happened or did not, the people believed civil servants would not prostitute themselves for a mess of pottage. That they, despite the constitutional protection and various kinds of perks they enjoyed, were persons who would crawl, when only asked to bend by their political masters of the day, became evident in 1975 when many of them happily became the stooges of Indira Gandhi's overbearing son, Sanjay Gandhi, who ran a coach and four through the till-then well-oiled administrative machine.

There appears to have been has since then a steady and irreversible deterioration in the calibre and conduct of public servants. Officials holding top sensitive positions, including the IAS which once prided on its incorruptibility, were caught in the dragnet of Central and State investigating authorities, bringing their honest colleagues also under a pall of suspicion. A very senior bureaucrat while still holding an exalted position accepted the offer of the private plane of a leading industrial house for undertaking a personal trip; when this became public, he made it known that he had paid a lakh of rupees by cheque to the industrial house. The thought that a senior official should be pure as driven snow and never compromise himself this way appears never to have occurred to him.

Another official who served at the highest level came under a dark cloud, post retirement, when a business person told the CBI that he had paid large sums to meet the expenses incurred on two gala parties at the officer's residence while he still held office and under an obligation to set an example.

If the number of police officers found to be transgressing laws against corruption and disproportionate assets appears to be far less than what widely prevalent public perception about their misdemeanours would lead one to believe, the explanation, perhaps, is that the investigative machinery is exclusively peopled by them and some sort of a camaraderie inhibits them from showing the same zeal in nabbing their colleagues as they show in going after other delinquents.

The Chief Justice of India himself has made a public statement that 20 per cent of the higher judiciary is corrupt. Now come reports from Gujarat that the members of the IAS/IPS and other officials in administration there let their loyalty to the Constitution and the country be suborned by the powers-that-be, leading not only to their failure to put down the violence with an iron hand, but going to the extent of playing the role of passive spectators, if not accomplices and instigators.

These are ominous signs of the crumbling of institutions that were once held in high esteem as people's mainstay.

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