Choice between neutrality and succumbing to pressure. Photo: LISA STOKES

It is not an easy task being a civil servant these days in the country, I guess. For that matter it never was, only it has become tougher. In the forty years of our existence we have seen many times tussles over turf, roles and responsibilities between civil servants and elected officials. It has always been challenging to work with a fine line of distinction between local politics and administration. Yet people went to work for the government in droves. It was not simply because the government was the biggest employer, but a government job also carried the stamp of authority, safety and security -- although not much money.
Most important of it all, however, was the dignity and respect for civil service that attracted most people to these jobs despite the subsistence level wages. These are also values that professional civil servants were expected to display in their conduct with the people they served. It now seems that we have reached a precipice where all these values are headed downhill.
The Pabna incident and the whirlwind of protest and counter-protest that followed is a grim reminder of the crisis that we face today. This is a crisis of confidence in people who are expected to uphold law and order. This is also a crisis of confidence in those who are expected to lead and protect the enforcers of law. The image that flashed through the media of an administrator and his colleagues breaking into tears spoke not of dignity but of helplessness.
Helplessness that arose from their inability to discipline a section of people with political connections who stormed into the collector's office and disrupted a recruitment examination in progress for hiring low level employees. The helplessness was stark because that unruly section of people was seemingly allied with the party in power, and the officers found themselves in a corner. Could this incident or the subsequent helpless image have been avoided?
Political interference in administration at local level is not unknown in our country. This has happened before, and probably will continue in the future so long as we have vague definitions of roles and responsibilities of legislators and administrators in local decision making.
Interferences came in many forms and in many dimensions in the past. Some were requests for award of procurement or construction contracts, some for jobs, and others as trivial as transfers from one job location to another. Some seasoned civil servants viewed such requests not so much as interference, but as necessary job hazards and handled them with tact.
In some cases, the requests would really turn out to be testy and the matter would escalate to higher authorities. Sometimes this would lead to the removal of the civil servant from the scene, but never would the civil servant and his cohorts be targets of abuse or harassment.
Have we ever wondered why there is political interference in such mundane matters as local recruitment for a government office? Is it because this is an avenue for finding jobs for unemployed political supporters? Or is it simply an attempt by a local party boss or legislator to reward party workers with government jobs?
In a spoils system where the government party in power can and does fill many government jobs with party loyalists this would not be a problem at all. But in a government that draws its employees through an impartial and competitive recruitment process a demand of this nature would pose a serious problem to administration.
Civil servants often face a stark choice of either disregarding pressures from political leaders at their own peril, or yielding to these pressures and losing their neutrality. Refusal to yield to political pressures by a civil servant is often viewed by a political boss as disloyalty to the party in power, and hence the government. It takes a statesman to separate government from the party, and to separate a government job from party work.
In the mid-seventies, when I was working for a cabinet minister, a party boss from the minister's district came to him one day with a demand that the deputy commissioner of the district be removed. His complaint -- the official did not care for the party as he never listened to the many requests that the party boss had made to him.
To this, the sage minister's response was that the official was assigned to the district to do government work, not party work. For party work the party boss should come to the minister, for government work he should go to the official. In simple words, the minister would draw the line between politics and duties of a government official. The deputy commissioner was never even informed that there was a complaint against him.
It has been a long journey for the civil servants and political leaders of our country since then. In the interregnum of the democratically elected governments of early seventy and nineties, when we had military dictatorships and autocratic rules, tussles between bureaucracy and political leaders were rare. The civil servants in the districts were much of the time left uninterrupted to do their jobs. But these are transitional times when we would expect to see a greater devolution of work and responsibilities to elected officials and a more well-defined role of elected officials in local administration.
However, until that happens the professional bureaucrats who would continue to provide the traditional services at local level would need protection and safeguards to perform their jobs for the greater good of the people they serve. They should not appear helpless nor their performance feckless because they are prevented by a mob from doing the job they are tasked to do.

Ziauddin Choudhury is a former civil servant who now works for an international organisation in USA.