I for one have very great respect and admiration for civil servants. …. much more than I have for even great political leaders with great vision . Tell me, what can vision alone deliver to the people of a nation if the several missions that must be undertaken to realise it though the blood, sweat, toil and tears of our civil servants all end in failure or futility?
But on the flip side , personally speaking, I also find much to criticise our civil servants about too .
Civil servants in India, as in every other country in the world, are not given their due credit in spite of being the unacknowledged rulers of the world … My (late) father who served in the Central Govt. in Delhi very briefly back in the late 1950s, but only for a few years, used to quip to me later when I was a graduate student in college toying with the idea of going into civil service : “The hand that carries the file wound in red tape —as much as, if not more than the hand that rocks the cradle — rules the world indeed…”
The reason why I think Civil servants in India don’t get their due credit in nation-building is because as a community at large they love to wallow in their own faceless-ness and self-effacement as though those two qualities of theirs were some great virtue to be worn and flaunted silently on their sleeves. Their holy book to which they swear eternal allegiance is The Official Secrets Act.
Years of toiling and serving in office as absolutely rule-bound, and at times even craven master-driven bureaucrats, I feel thoroughly conditions them into preferring to remain in the shadows, working like a beaver behind the scenes anonymously, using guile, craftiness and wile to carry out their tasks as efficiently as they possibly can — not necessarily as effectively though — to please and propitiate their political masters, all in the name of hallowed “policy implementation”. After spending some years in office and having “paid their dues”, so to say, all they then care about is to fiercely protect their own turf, territory, flock, end-of-service benefits and the prospects of plum post-retirement sinecures. .
As a fraternity they prefer as a whole not to be seen wielding any great degree of power while being in service for the public good, compelled as they are by service-rules to let the political master hog all the credit and limelight for good work done by them … They are instead quite content to be the unseen and unsung hands of power-brokering… They think that is their greater glory albeit a glory that is forgotten as quickly as they fade into post-retirement oblivion…
For all the above reasons, I have often wondered why in our country where two-penny politicians , cinema-stars and poets are commemorated by installing hundreds of statues of them in their honour at street corners in every village-square and city-centre , one rarely sees a statue unveiled anywhere to honour the memory of an honest civil servant who accomplished much during his service tenure that indeed went into making this country great.
Why indeed ?!
Sudarshan Madabushi