La Affaire Rathore: Brutalisation of Governance
Skeletons are tumbling down in quick succession DGPs and Home Secretaries of Haryana; Home Ministers and Chief Ministers of the State; high-ups of CBI; High Court Judge; elite Sacred Heart Convent
Original at www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20091230/edit.htm
There is more to come. Senior officials who conspired in the torture and humiliation of Ruchika and her family, district officials who executed it and those who failed to prevent this blatant injustice. And the Union Home Ministry, the cadre controlling authority of IPS, who are now busy applying some cosmetics! The list could go on and on because this episode is the standing testimony of the brutalisation of governance at every level, from top to bottom.
Some years ego I wrote in these columns thus about the 'decadence of governance': "The country is slowly moving away from democracy towards 'kleptocracy' with politicians, for whom democracy is nothing but a tool to capture power and the license to loot, at the centre of the orbit. Around them in the orbit are the civil servants, the police and even judges each feathering their own nest". Put in plain words 'kleptocracy' meant 'government of the thieves, by the thieves, for the thieves', bereft of the basic element of governance called justice. Nobody read the writing on the wall. Instead some of my erstwhile colleagues felt these remarks were rather harsh and 'governance' was not that bad after all. I was hoping so and had been looking for encouraging signals to believe that 'governance was not bad after all'. Now it looks as if 'governance' is not merely bad, it has become brutal. Total absence of justice for 19 long years is brutalisation of governance, which is the central message coming out of the sordid 'Rathore' episode. It is as if 'institutions of governance and the instruments of public administration' lay buried fathoms-deep.
Media, particularly electronic, is ruthlessly targeting the 'politicians at the top', more specifically the Chief Ministers of Haryana for not taking adequate action on the 'molestation' complaint against a senior police officer. Former DGPs and Home Secretaries are being questioned and old records dug out. Nothing wrong in holding the political bosses and their principal advisors accountable and answerable. But this time around the oft-used decoy of 'political interference' should not be available for the real perpetrators of the crimes that are tumbling out.
It is because for long 'political interference' is the crude brush with which serious lapses of basic governance is being painted white. Politicians come and go, but it is the higher echelons of Civil Service, Police and Judiciary who are creatures of the Constitution charged with the responsibility of providing fearless, honest and just governance at the basic levels where people live. For this purpose Constitution gives these services special privileges and protection. Such protection is not available to the politicians. Neither did the Founding Fathers repose much faith in the political system to give fair governance. Yet today's civil servants and policemen abandon all their responsibilities and cringe before politicians and do their bidding without demur. This is a standing shame on India's once 'Iron Frame'!
Civil servants and the police have near totally succumbed to political thuggery, with some even facilitating it. Higher Judiciary is busy acquitting corrupt and criminal bigwigs by stretching law to absurd limits. Corrupt and the venal are striding this land like colossus, dominating its political, administrative, police, judicial and business spectrum. In the event, over the years while the good and the honest have shrunk and faded away, the corrupt and the venal loom larger than life mocking at the institutions and systems of democratic governance.
Despite the noble cliché of 'We the People', Constitution of India concentrated political and economic powers with the central government, devolving some to the states to maintain a federal facade. None was given to the grass-root entities of district and villages. The 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution in 1992 for establishing and empowering institutions for 'people to govern themselves' still remain only on paper. The system of governance continues to be top-down and sickeningly arrogant and colonial. Administrators and policemen are nothing but satraps! Nevertheless, for want of any alternative, the critical task of delivering de-centralised administration and just governance continues to be on the shoulders of India's civil services led by the members of the IAS and IPS. Through a new talisman, Gandhiji summed up the essence of such governance: "Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test: Recall the face of the ordinary human being whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away."
This was humane governance that was practiced by the civil services during the early decades of Independence. Though the colonial administrative structure, with IAS and IPS at the core continued unaltered, most of the civil service incumbents took their job seriously and involved themselves deeply in administrative work at the grassroots and district levels.For the IAS, increasingly becoming technical and managerial, this commitment soon faded because of absence of glamour in grass-root governance. Instead, the attractions of the new jobs in the burgeoning state industrial and commercial sectors seduced upwardly mobile IAS officials, especially as they were seen as stepping-stones to coveted jobs in the economic ministries in Delhi, with all its allurements and post-retirement bonanza! Ever since the dawn of the Liberalisation-Privatisation-Globalisation era in early nineties, IAS has been rapidly drifting away from the task of 'basic governance' to that of 'corporate facilitation' catering to the upper crust of society, leaving the aam aadmi in the lurch! And IPS has been cozying up with the new breed of 'rich and the famous'. Good Governance was the inevitable casualty and brutalisation followed.
Responding to public outrage, incumbent Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda has said that his government would 'revisit' the entire "Rathore' case. This is no favour. What he should really do is to revisit the 'brutalisation of governance' in the last two decades that has brought things to such a pass! Only then the soul of Ruchika will get 'Justice' and others of her ilk would feel safe and secure.
The writer is a former Army and IAS Officer of the Haryana cadre