Editorial: Backdoor babus

NEW DELHI: The Union government’s move to fill key posts in various ministries with “specialists” from outside the Civil Services represents another turn of the screw in the Sangh Parivar’s grand scheme of capturing India’s institutions. Following up on its furtive decree last month allowing government employees to take part in RSS activities, this action will open the door wider for the regime’s favoured nominees to occupy key positions and help steer policy toward majoritarian goals.

The Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) last Saturday advertised 45 posts to be filled by lateral entry: 10 joint secretaries and 35 directors and deputy secretaries across crucial ministries such as Home, Finance, Agriculture, Civil Aviation, Steel and Information & Broadcasting. The legal room for this manoeuvre was created back in 2018, and 63 such appointments had already been made, with 57 still serving.

Lateral entry recruitment is sure to be seen as a challenge by the Civil Service, which likes to flatter itself with empire-era plumage and pose as the steel frame of the nation. The incoming of interlopers with fancy specialised experience in the public and private sectors, consultancies and international organisations is likelier to lead to conflict rather than competition with babus, who typically come to the service with an NCERT text-book world view. Further, bringing in professionals with close ties to the ruling party is sure to dilute the independence and neutrality of the bureaucracy, whatever is left of those two qualities.

The more troubling aspect of lateral recruitment is the goodbye it bids to reservation. Quotas for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) do not apply to this tranche of hiring as each of the 45 posts is deemed to be a separate recruitment. This of course is a legal dodge typical of the Sangh Parivar regime, whose hostility to affirmative action is as implacable as its fealty to the Constitution is false.

The opposition is justified in describing this as a betrayal of the Dalits especially, whose representation in the higher echelons of the bureaucracy is already abysmally low. Out of 81 secretary-level officers in the central government, only five, or 2.5%, are SC/STs. Overall, only 9% of the officers of the rank of joint secretary or higher belong to SC/ST communities. Representation for the OBCs is no better, with only 2.89% of higher bureaucratic positions filled by them.

The Union government is not alone in trying to use this route to inveigle its favourites into the steel frame. Many state governments in the past 15 years have cottoned on to this practice of planting their nominees in influential positions as consultants. The experience has not been happy. In Telangana, for instance, such appointments ended up becoming unofficial loci of power pursuing a rogue agenda in the state’s intelligence wing.

Lateral recruitment frequently is a cover to bring in consultants from the private sector or multilateral institutions to sell neoliberal policies to the country, at the people’s expense. In the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins describes how consultants embedded within bureaucracies are used to promote policies that benefit large corporations or persuade leaders to accept loans for projects that primarily serve corporate interests. As Perkins confessed, “We privileged the interests of corporations over those of the people or the planet.”