India After Independence: 1947-2000 (78 page)

The Indian bureaucracy is, moreover, rigid, basically conservative, pro-status quo, and resistant to social change, especially in regard to empowerment of the poor or redistributive measures. It favours the dominant social groups and influential persons, especially in rural areas. With its non-performance character and ‘file-pushing’ procedures, it is also not geared to take, on the new task of economic development and involving the people in its processes. Moreover, even for routine work the administrative system has hardly any mechanism for enforcing discipline and punishing inefficiency and poor performance or checking corruption and rewarding meritorious work and honesty.

Perhaps the worst feature of Indian administration is revealed in its dealings with common people. Government servants, especially policemen, are generally discourteous, domineering, unhelpful, corrupt, inefficient and arbitrary in their approach towards the ordinary citizen. And, of course, the question of their accountability to the citizen cannot even be raised. This relationship of the government servant with the citizens goes some way in explaining the anti-incumbency voting in recent years. Using democracy and their voting power, the people, in their desperate quest for a friendly, honest, cooperative and minimally efficient administration, have been changing governments at every election.

Even at the middle and higher levels of bureaucracy, because of complex rules, regulations and procedures, especially under the licence-quota system, and the increased personal and discretionary powers, there prevails inefficiency, undue delays, low standards of integrity and corruption. The number of capable efficient and honest officials may, however, be larger than popularly believed.

At the same time, there has been an inordinate expansion of bureaucracy, which is completely out of proportion to its usefulness or productivity. Consequently, the central, state and local government bureaucracies have come to claim too large a share of public expenditure and government resources, leading to the neglect of developmental and welfare activities.

One positive feature of Indian bureaucracy that still holds is its tradition of political neutrality, with bureaucrats implementing policies of the government in power irrespective of their own opinions. It is noteworthy that the Communist governments in West Bengal and Kerala have not complained of the higher bureaucracy obstructing or sabotaging their policies on political, ideological or class grounds.

The partisanship that has been increasingly betrayed by the bureaucracy in recent years has not been on ideological or political grounds but has been ‘functional’ in character. Because of their dependence on ministers, MLAs and MPs for their appointment to plum postings, promotions,
transfers, extensions in service, post-retirement employment, protection from disciplinary action against misuse of authority and corruption, and, in the case of lower levels of bureaucracy, for recruitment in the first place, many in the bureaucracy and the police have been increasingly enmeshed in political intrigue and in implementing the personal or political agenda of their political masters. Political interference with bureaucracy and the police has led to the undermining of their discipline and effectiveness and the promotion of corruption among them. A result of this is that ‘the vaunted “steel frame” has come to resemble porous foam rubber.’ The bureaucracy no longer possesses that old pride in its service and an
esprit de corps
or a sense of solidarity, derived from common interests and responsibilities.

It is true that the overthrow of the existing inflexible bureaucratic administrative system is not possible; to be rid of bureaucracy is utopian. Nevertheless, the need for its radical reform, regeneration and restructuring, so as to make it a suitable instrument for good government and development and change has now acquired an urgency which can no longer be ignored. Interestingly, the ills of the administrative structure, as well as the required remedial measures have been repeatedly studied by several administrative reform commissions and a galaxy of public administration experts and experienced and knowledgeable bureaucrats. Only the political will to undertake these measures has been lacking so far. Two other aspects of the role and impact of bureaucracy may be referred to here. The bureaucratic values, mentality and structures have spread to nearly all spheres. They pervade India’s academic and scientific institutions and are largely responsible for the incapacity of our scientists and academics to realize a large part of their potential. Similarly, bureaucratization and bureaucratic control of the public sector undertakings, combined with political interference, has come in the way of their healthy development and functioning.

The Indian police, showing all the weaknesses of the bureaucracy, suffers from certain additional maladies. By any criteria, it is in a bad shape. Its degeneration is largely responsible for the marked deterioration in the law and order situation. This is despite a more than hundred-fold increase in expenditure on the police and its sister para-military forces over the last fifty years. As a result the state has routinely to rely on the latter or sometimes even call in the army for maintaining civil order. The Indian police does not adequately perform its conventional role of crime prevention and investigation and the punishment of criminals, who readily assume that they will not be apprehended and if apprehended will not be successfully prosecuted and punished; in many cases even complaints against them will not be registered. All this happens partly because of police inefficiency, poor training of policemen and their ostensible
connivance with the criminals and partly because of the slow-moving courts and the reluctance of the ordinary citizen to give evidence against criminals because of the fear of unchecked reprisals.

One of the worst features of the Indian police is the negative attitude towards the common people which it has inherited from the colonial period. The poor not only get little help from the police when they need or seek it, but are often met with a certain inhumanity, ruthlessness, violence and brutality. People encountering the law and order machinery in the course of their struggles for social justice and enforcement of laws and policies existing for redressal of their grievances are frequently subjected to lathi-charges, tear-gas attacks and at times unprovoked firing. Moreover, because of the spread of communalism in its ranks, the police bias against the minorities gets reflected in partisanship during communal riots. The Indian police has also gained notoriety for brutality against undertrials leading sometimes even to deaths—the number of reported custodial deaths in 1997 was over 800. The overall result is that people view the police with fear, resentment and hostility.

Political interference and manipulation and use of the police by politicians has made matters worse and has led to its corruption and demoralization and the spread of indiscipline in its ranks.

On their part, ordinary policemen and policewomen are quite discontented because their pay and service conditions, promotional chances and social status are quite poor. The necessity to rescue the police as a crucial institution of the state from utter degeneration, and to restrain, reform and restructure it, besides altering its attitude towards the common people has perhaps been perceived by successive governments as the most urgent administrative task for the last several decades. Yet, till now, no government has made even an attempt in that direction. One example of this neglect has been the failure of all the central and state governments to implement or even pay serious consideration to the National Police Commission Report of 1979.

The Indian military has continued to be a highly disciplined and professional non-political force and has maintained the tradition of respecting democratic institutions and functioning under civilian supremacy and control. While the military advises on defence policy and has full operational authority during an armed conflict, the basic contours of defence policy are determined by the civil authority.

This development of military-civil authority relationship was not fortuitous; it was carefully thought out by the national leadership of independent India from the beginning, worried as it was that India might also go the way of most of the Third World countries in falling prey to some form of military domination. This, along with the desire of not wanting to divert resources from the urgent task of economic development,
was a major reason why Nehru and other leaders kept the size as also the profile of the armed forces quite low till 1962. After the India-China war. the size of the military was increased though in terms of the country’s population it continues to be smaller than that of China and Pakistan or even South Korea, Indonesia, the US and most of the European countries. India has also kept its defence budget low in terms of its ratio to the national income. The aim has been to ensure that India’s defence forces are adequate to meet threats to its security while not letting them become an intolerable drag on economic development.

Indian political parties have also kept up the tradition of not letting defence affairs and the military become a matter of partisan political debate or inter-party struggle. The apolitical role of the military has also been strengthened by the stability of India’s democratic institutions and the high level of legitimacy they enjoy among the people, including the armed forces.

Moreover, since immediately after independence, the class and regional bias from colonial times in the recruitment of both the ranks and officers of the armed forces has been given up. They have been recruited from diverse social strata and castes, religions and regions. This has given the Indian military a heterogeneous, all-India character, and along with its training has imparted it an all-India, national perspective, and made it a force for national unity and integrity. This has also made it difficult for any section of the military or its officer corps to think of staging a coup by mobilizing and consolidating the armed forces behind a single unconstitutional political centre.

While there is little danger of military intervention in political affairs, a disquieting feature that has emerged recently is that of the glorification of the military and the military ethos by certain political forces and in the media.

In the long view, Indian federalism with its fine balance between the powers of the Centre and the states, as envisaged in the Constitution, has stood up well despite occasional hiccups. It has succeeded in conforming to, as well as protecting the diversity of the Indian people.

It is, of course, true that from the beginning India’s federal system has been based on a strong Centre as carefully provided for in the Constitution. In the actual working of the system, the central government gradually acquired greater influence over the states because of the pattern of economic development adopted, which was based on planning, public sector, central funding of anti-poverty programmes, and central financial disbursement to the states from its greater tax resources. Besides, in the first decades after independence, the same party controlled the central and the state governments, which gave the prime minister and the central Congress leadership a certain leverage over the state governments. This
leverage was, however, not used sufficiently by Nehru, especially to push through land reforms, and was used often, but not wisely by Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. On the other hand, as over the years the states increasingly came to be ruled by parties other than Congress, central influence over state governments has declined. The dismantling of the licence-quota system and the lesser role of central planning have also had a similar effect.

Over the years, the need for a strong central government with greater authority to influence state administrations has been felt in certain crucial areas. In a multi-religious, multilingual and multi-ethnic country like India, the Centre has the critical role of protecting minorities of all kinds as also the disadvantaged groups such as the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, women and the landless. A strong Centre is also required to mitigate or at least prevent the growth of acute regional disparities by use of different means. A strong Centre has also been found necessary to deal with divisive caste, communal and regional forces and inter-regional conflicts.

At the same time, it would be wrong to say that the federal character of the Indian political system has suffered erosion over time. The states have continued to enjoy the autonomy provided by the Constitution, as is evident from the functioning of the states ruled by parties other than the one ruling at the Centre. The state governments have continued to enjoy full autonomy in the fields of culture, education, land reforms, agricultural development, irrigation, health care and water supply and other areas of public welfare, local government and industrial development, except in case of big industries and foreign investment for which central licences were needed till recently. Moreover, nearly all the central government plans and schemes of economic and social development and welfare have been implemented—well or badly—through the states’ administrative machinery.

Unfortunately, certain states are or have been misruled and are lagging behind in economic development and welfare activities, including maintenance of a peaceful environment for their citizens. But this is so not because of central intervention or lack of state autonomy but because of maladministration by the state governments concerned. For example, land reforms were stymied or did not benefit the landless in some of the states because of the obduracy of their state administrations and despite pressure from the central government. On the other hand, the Kerala and West Bengal governments did not have much difficulty in introducing pro-peasant land reforms despite their ruling parties having little say in the central government.

The only real encroachment by the Centre on the states’ constitutionally-guaranteed autonomy has been the frequent use of the Constitutional provision under Article 356 to impose central rule in the form of the President’s Rule in a state. This power was designed to be exercised rarely and in extraordinary circumstances such as the breakdown of administration or constitutional government in a state. It was, however, frequently used
during the seventies to dismiss inconvenient opposition-ruled state governments or to discipline the state units of the ruling party. Fortunately, this misuse was largely checked later. It would, however, be wrong to say that the misuse of Article 356 had reduced the autonomy of the states ‘to a farce’.