The world of an Indian civil servant
One of the more enduring legacies of British colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent has been the civil service structure it forged into shape, the better to ensure its hold on the psyche of the country. It has not mattered much that the withdrawal of the foreign power in 1947 through the partition of India left two countries created out of the original one, and that too through much communal bloodletting. Power may have passed into local hands and politics may have gone into a process of reshaping the land. And yet such new configurations of authority have hardly affected the administrative structure the British thought, and rightly too, would help bring about governmental discipline in the country. In independent India, the Indian Civil Service, the fabled ICS, was quickly replaced by the Indian Administrative Service, or IAS, with the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) not far behind. In the new state of Pakistan, the pre-1947 ICS was quickly supplanted by the Central Service of Pakistan or CSP. It is equally interesting that in both countries, the federating units developed their own civil service structure which of course was, in the ultimate analysis, subservient to the central administrative organ. For Bangladesh, the pre-1971 CSP administrative structure was succeeded by the Bangladesh Civil Service (BCS) soon after the country's military triumph over Pakistan in December 1971.
Bhaskar Ghose stepped into the IAS rather late in the day, which is again quite natural given that he was a child when partition left India divided, indeed traumatized at the way freedom had arrived. It was in the earliest stages of the 1960s that Ghose, part of that academic elite who have by and large traditionally occupied the higher echelons of Indian politics and its civil service, found himself part of the IAS. And thereafter it was fundamentally a question of acclimatizing himself to the process through which an IAS officer sought to exercise authority in a social situation where democracy still depended on a streamlined administrative system to carry its ideas through. There are all the anecdotes Ghose cites in this pretty gripping memoir of his days as a civil servant. One instance should serve as a pointer. It so transpired that when a young Ghose was undergoing training at the civil service academy, the new recruits were notified about some empty slots yet needing to be filled in the Indian Foreign Service recruitment structure. Ghose was unimpressed. Asked by a senior IAS officer why he did not wish to join the IFS, Ghose was matter of fact in his response: "I don't fancy spending my time going to cocktail parties and dinners." He wished, he said, to work for the country. Reminded that that was what the IFS did as well, Ghose was earnest in his reply: "Yes, but they have to give dinners and entertain. I don't like that kind of thing, sir. I hate it."
Needless to say, the senior officer was impressed. And impressed too, at an earlier stage, was another senior officer, S.M. Murshed of the 1956 IAS batch. Unlike many others, Murshed was as effusive in his welcome as he was definitive about how he needed to brief the young Ghose on the ways in which the latter ought to be setting about being an IAS officer. You could be forgiven for thinking that the memoirs of a superannuated civil servant cannot but be a usual defence of the system itself. And you would be right to think so. And yet there is somewhat of a difference with The Service of the State. Bhaskar Ghose, a proper Bengali, brings into the narrative not merely an account of the various positions he has held throughout his career but also gives readers an insight into some long forgotten personalities who once occupied significant spots in Indian administration and politics. Ivan Surita is one individual on whom Ghose dwells with sympathy. An Armenian who had taken part in the war and been grievously wounded while leading a British army team against the Germans in Italy, Surita chose to remain in India after 1947 even as other Armenians left along with the British. Surita joined the IAS. He never married and was not known to have had any affairs. He was forever irritated with the bureaucratic ways of his contemporaries, once teasing M.M. Basu, an ICS officer who at that point was state home secretary for West Bengal. He once embarrassed Basu thus: "If the government of India asked you to wipe your arse four times, would you do that?" Basu could not take it any more. Marching into the Chief Secretary's room, he complained loudly, "Ivan's constantly hectoring me."
This work is a comprehensive telling of a bureaucrat's story from one who gives you every hint of the bureaucrat he tried never to be. But he does leave you with the impression, and a pretty pointed one at that, that even though there may have been a qualitative change in the Indian administrative system over the years, and not always for the better, the fact remains that in a good number of ways, the Indian civil servant is still the powerful individual he once was when the foreign colonial power was around. The coming of democracy has not meant much change. Politicians, for all the populism they have brought into their relentless struggle for power, have continued to rely on civil servants for their instructions to be carried through. Ghose's run-ins with politicians, especially in West Bengal, are an account of the mutual suspicion which sometimes can lead to complications of a disturbing sort. Having worked for Chief Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray, he found his loyalty to the government, indeed his integrity, questioned once the Left Front came to office in the state. Save for the urbane Jyoti Basu, communist politicians distrusted him. But trust was not in short supply when A.N. Jha, secretary of the ministry of information and broadcasting (and this was in the mid-1960s), informed him that he was to serve Indira Gandhi, the minister for information and broadcasting, as special assistant.
Ghose's meeting with Mrs. Gandhi provides a glimpse into her all too human traits. Seating himself in the minister's office amid a crowd of other officers, he tried to make himself unobtrusive. Nevertheless, Mrs. Gandhi spotted him immediately. "When did you come?" she asked him. A day before, he answered, to which the minister responded: "Have they given you a place to stay?" A short while later, having been assured by other officers that everything was being take care of, Mrs. Gandhi told Ghose, "Let me know if you want anything."
Bhaskar Ghose's stay in the I&B minister's office was to be cut short, though, with the death of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. After Indira Gandhi took over as prime minister, the new information minister, Raj Bahadur, was not too keen on keeping Ghose on as special assistant. And no one invited him to join the PMO. Ghose drifted into being part of the bureaucracy in Delhi.
Ghose retired as secretary of the ministry of information, but not before his life and career went through a series of dramatic upheavals. The Service of the State is much more than a recounting of a tale. It is also a reminder of the straitjackets civil servants are liable to find themselves in, largely on account of fossilized bureaucratic conventions and sometimes irritating political behaviour.
. . . Of hubris and a fall
Rafi Raza speaks of no nightingale. As a political ally of the eventually executed politician, Raza was witness to the eventful ten years that were to mark Bhuto's rise and fall. Naturally, therefore, the book begins with 1967, when Bhutto linked up with Raza, Mubashir Hasan, J.A. Rahim, Mairaj Mohammad Khan, Abdul Hafeez Pirzada and others to give shape to the Pakistan People's Party. The month was November; and Bhutto had been out of public office for over a year since he had been forced to quit by a disappointed Ayub Khan. Between July 1966 and November 1967, therefore, it was an apprehensive, almost fearful Bhutto who pondered his future. For all his criticism of the field marshal over the Tashkent Declaration --- Bhutto had been harping on, without anything to show for it, a secret clause in the declaration he said proved Ayub's treachery to Pakistan --- he had not expected to be given the sack. But he was. After July 1966, he was a frightened man. Ayub yet wielded unchallenged authority and had over the years jailed political rivals relentlessly. He might do a similar thing in Bhutto's case.
President Ayub Khan eventually did send Bhutto to prison, but that was in November 1968, a full year after the PPP had been formed. And then, Bhutto was to be freed within three months as regime began to totter in the face of growing popular disaffection in both East and West Pakistan. In terms of history, though, 1967 remains a defining moment for Pakistan obviously because of the arrival of the Pakistan People's Party. For the first time in the history of the largely feudal region that was West Pakistan, a party had come forth with patently populist slogans. Bhutto promised a curious mixture of Islam, democracy and socialism to Pakistanis, not offering, of course, to explain how he would go about achieving. What mattered was how the people received his mantra. And they did receive it well. He was mobbed everywhere he went; huge crowds blocked railway stations and roads to see him pass and hear him speak. Never in the history of West Pakistan had a politician so swiftly transformed himself into a popular hero. And it was happening at the same time as the Bengalis of distant East Pakistan were finding their voice in one of their own, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
Obviously, Rafi Raza's work is of an adulatory nature. And yet there are the instances where cites his differences with Bhutto. For all that, though, it is a fact that Reza is one man who did not end up earning Bhutto's wrath (and Pakistan's first elected leader, by default of course, began to demonstrate the arrogance of power soon after taking over from a humiliated Yahya Khan in December) as many others did. Bhutto's goons would leave J.A. Rahim and Mairaj Mohammad Khan beaten black and blue for the audacity of questioning the wisdom of the leader. But that was in the days when Bhutto was first president and then prime minister. Prior to that, it was a team of idealistic men who saw as their mission a transformation of Pakistan's politics through the PPP vehicle. The dream would expand and would translate into electoral triumph for the party in West Pakistan in late 1970. There was a slight problem, however. Bhutto and his party soon realized that their moment of glory had been a brief moment in the sun, for the Awami League of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had beaten everyone else to emerge as the majority party on an all-Pakistan basis.
The rest of the story is now part of the history of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Rafi Raza, in manner typical of others in the PPP at the time, carefully glosses over his party's refusal to accept the results of the elections but does acknowledge the complications that arose over the subsequent weeks and months. Raza counts himself among the few moderates in the PPP when he states that at a meeting of party leaders on 23 March 1971 in Dhaka (and that was the day when Bengalis refused to celebrate as Pakistan Day and instead hoisted Bangladesh flags on rooftops all over the city), almost everyone present advocated military action against the Awami League by the Yahya Khan regime. J.A. Rahim, himself a Bengali, loudly denounced Mujib as a fascist who could only be countered by the army. And military action was not long in coming. When the army went into action late on 25 March, it was the state of Pakistan that lay grievously wounded.
Raza's ultimate focus is on the years of the Bhutto government from late 1971 to mid 1977. He duly notes the achievements of the government despite the various constraints it operated under. He records as well the deep flaws in the Bhutto character, those that would take him to his doom. In Raza's words, 'If (the people) had short memories, so did ZAB who, within a few years of assuming office, forgot the power of the people which the PPP had helped to galvanize --- his only real source of power.'
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