The Insider's View
Javid Chowdhury
Memoirs by
civil servants post retirement usually tend to be pretentious, grandiose and lacklustre.
Fortunately, Javid Chowdhury tries to give an evolved and earnest depiction of
his 40 years as a public servant. What stands out is an objective, candid and
analytical reflection of Chowdhury’s years as a Gujarat cadre IAS: the years in
training, when he imbibed the services values and ethos; his initiation into
the rural universe as the District Development Officer and the District
Magistrate; and further on, to his handling of Jain Hawala and the infamous
Bank Securities scams as Director of Enforcement and Union Revenue
Secretary. Incisive and perceptive, sated with telling anecdotes and
entertaining portraits of icons, fellow bureaucrats and ministers, The Insiders
View is a persuasive sketch of the author, a self-confessed welfare socialist,
besides being an x-ray of the insides of the bureaucracy.
Javid Chowdhury
explains the changing social contour and viewpoints of entrants to the elite civil
services: The role of the civil servant in the mid sixties when Chowdhury
joined the service is very dissimilar from today. Till the eighties civil
servants had significant say in drawing up public programs and shaping public policies.
The author argues that since the nineties following liberalisation and globalisation
the structure has changed. Much of policy formulation today is outsourced to
extra constitutional bodies like think tanks, foreign advocacy groups, NGOs etc.
“Economic reforms” has become a buzzword
and anything considered so is automatically categorised a meaningful
initiative. Certain informal wings of the government such as prime minister’s
Economic Advisory Council have appropriated extra legal jurisdiction. An
advisory body like planning commission has over the time become a decision
making body. Accused of a lack of urgency in decision making, the civil servant
is now ever more circumvented. The credentials of the civil servant has also
changed from generalist humanities graduate to skilled professionals such as business
management graduates ,engineers and doctors. Even as the latter are better able
to solve problems, which are clearly demarcated, the old school public servant notch
up in handling issues involving varied social pressures where there are no unambiguous
answers but the requisite for a harmonising touch to settle the differing
demands of society the author argues.
A useful
section on how civil servants stack up gives us an informed scrutiny of levels
of corruption among them. Though Chowdhury can get stodgy at times but that’s
assuaged by his sincere concern and the seriousness with which he conducted
himself in his vocation. Moreover, there is a good rationale why Chowdhury was embedded
with such high integrity when one reads about the rather comically strict M.G.
Pimputkar, the former director of the LBSNAA at Mussoorie. Here was the man when
learnt of the fact that rations were falsely drawn on his name had got his own
ration card suspended. In an era where multi-crore corruption scams barely
raise an eyebrow, this must seem inconsequential. Chowdhury writes that the
question of integrity was an obsession for the civil servants of his time. The
civil service is endemic with rivalry and pettiness and Chowdhury when he was posted
at the Centre was not impervious to these. He recalls a whisper campaign by the
then Union Cabinet secretary who spread a falsehood that Chowdhury was mortally
ill so that he would get transferred. He regrets that the doyen of civil
services, the Cabinet secretary, would make such a diabolic statement about his
immediate subordinate.
The
author regrets the gender bias and writes of distressing phenomenon that no
woman officer has ever headed the service as cabinet secretary. No prime
minister seemed to favour a woman for the top post and it has not been for want
of nominees. The author alludes the names of three worthy women candidates, who
were circumvented, Sudha Pillai, Roma Mazumdar and Reva Nayar. Giving repeated
extensions to the incumbent was the usual manner of blocking such appointments.
He adds that even under-privileged communities cannot become cabinet
secretaries and the civil service can go any lengths to prevent this. Chowdhury
gives the example of the rightful claim of Mata Prasad, an outstanding officer,
who should have become the first scheduled caste cabinet secretary. But he was
blocked from the top post by giving a second extension of three months to the
incumbent cabinet secretary. In adjunct
is the caste factor. The author says that caste based power play is gaining an
unimaginable hold in India, this weakness for one’s own caste is now
increasingly found in top Ministers and civil servants. With a light pen, he
says that in his stint as Revenue secretary he found it impossible to place
even a single officer of the level of Deputy Secretary or above in the
department on the basis of an objective assessment of their merit.
In Javid Chowdhury’s
autobiographical account of his life, what stands out is his angst and mild
bitterness about the manner in which economic liberalisation took place after
the 1990-91 predicaments. Undoubtedly, Mr Chowdhury’s mindset is diverse from
that of those who ran economic policy while he was in the finance ministry heading
a directorate responsible for the enforcement of foreign exchange laws and
later as Revenue Secretary. In his memoirs Chowdhury makes it clear that he was
exceedingly uncomfortable with the reforms process, although he does not single
out anything specific or substantive as knotty. He calls Vijay Kelkar, with
whom he worked as additional secretary as an uncritical liberalizer. During
1995-96, Privatization fever was raging in the government and was getting a spur
under Vijay Kelkar. There is a sense of hurt and disappointment Mr Chowdhury
fails to cloak in reciting how the reform process dismantled the earlier policy
system. A recurrent theme is that of him being a befuddled bureaucrat who was always
told that the government was reforming, but no one had inkling about the reason
or the macro plan.
Javid Chowdhury makes no bones
about his loathing of the “tsars” of economy policy in establishment. The
author does not name them explicitly, but one can easily guess who these people
may be from the many episodes he describes. Montek Singh Ahluwalia will easily
top that roll. N K Singh and Vijay L Kelkar also figure in that list of the
tsars with whom Chowdhury could not see eye-to-eye on policies relating to
economic issues. Javid Chowdhury is no ‘fence sitter’. Though one may not
always concur with his appraisal of Ahluwalia, Singh or Kelkar, but his honest
views on policies and people exhibit a value that is increasingly becoming rare
among bureaucrats. In the role of someone who headed the enforcement
directorate, his main grievance was that the tsars of the economy wanted the
foreign exchange regulations to be made ineffectual. The author begrudges the
campaign that the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act had to be rescinded and supplanted
with the Foreign Exchange Management Act, as the prior law was only an apparatus
for persecution. Chowdhury declares that the impression given that high-profile
corporate was routinely and falsely targeted is sheer fiction. However this
lacks confidence as elsewhere in the book, he recounts how the directorate was
prone to misuse by ministers and politicians to meet political goals.
An eye opening
disclosure concerns the attempts of the author as an Enforcement Director to
put an end to the USSR-Indo rupee rouble swindle. USSR had accumulated a large
credit balance on exports due to the fact that rouble was highly valued. The
inherent incongruity in the trade agreement was taken advantage of by the
racketeers. In order to end the scam, the directorate wrote to the Revenue
Department to amend the conditions of export and proposed to do it through
Central Board of Customs and Excise. However Revenue Department was outraged at
the suggestion. Chowdhury notes that in this case it was clear that the
directorate was attempting to tread on the toes of some very powerful vested
interests.
Again in the
Jain Hawala case, he recalls how a high ranking CBI officer went out of his way
to divert the focus of the enquiry. The Hawala dealer SK Jain who was the main
accused gave a statement totally out of perspective claiming that he was very affable
with then PM PV Narasimha Rao and had taken a briefcase full of money to his home.
The officer, instead of reporting the matter to his senior, the CBI director,
placed the cross examination record before the Supreme Court, aware fully well
that it would be disclosed to the media and change the spotlight.
On
an entertaining note are his accounts of going together with the CBI director
to Switzerland for the Bofors documents, and his experiences as Director of
Enforcement. As a Health Secretary he comprehended that the social sectors are
bereft of concrete thinking and that the bureaucratic and political executive together
have managed to guarantee this. Another interesting anecdote is over a battle
over banning the sale of non-iodised salt and author’s face off with the formidable
PM AB Vajpayee who sought the removal of the ban.
Chowdhury
gives an insight into Vajpayee’s encounter with Narendra Modi after the Gujarat
unrest. The query regarding the camps for Muslims being folded up was foremost
and Vajpayee was obviously in variance with the Gujarat CM. Conspicuously, the author
writes, LK Advani as home minister who was in attendance, didn’t voice a word. At
long last the PM had his way by commanding Mr. Modi to fill in the media on the
state of affairs. The author is highly disapproving of the part or lack of it
played by civil servants during the Gujarat carnage.
The author portrays
his account as an insider’s view. But his disillusionment with the way the FERA
was diluted and how DTAA’s became the channel for tax skirting demonstrates
that he was in a large extent an outsider in the system, this at a time when at a time when economic
policies of our country was changed to a large extent. The Insider’s view is indication
to that detachment. Undoubtedly, in spite of the author’s qualms the IAS still
manages to rule the country.
Suhas S. IAS
