MAY 20, 2009, 3:25 A.M. ET.
By PAUL BECKETT of Wall Street Journal/ U.S.
NEW DELHI -- Since he retired as India's most senior civil servant in 1998, T.S.R. Subramanian likes to say that he can be spotted frequently on a golf course. Recently, using a stenographer (four decades climbing the bureaucratic ladder means you don't learn to type) he put his mind to a question that appears to nag him as he marches the fairways: What has gone wrong in official India?
Paul Beckett
It is a timely question, given that we are at the start of a new administration. And it is one Mr. Subramanian is eminently qualified to address, given his rise through the Indian Administrative Service to become Cabinet secretary under three prime ministers. It is also one he is eminently capable of fudging, given that same resume and the many vested interests he might feel obliged to protect.Fortunately, he takes the attitude that if you're going to go to the trouble of thinking and writing, why coat it in gloss? The result is a pithy tome, almost a Victorian-style treatise, called "GovernMint in India." It assesses whether the Indian government is up to par when measured against the mandate of the Indian constitution. His verdict, if I may paraphrase: If the Indian government were a golfer, it would score quadruple bogeys on every hole, cheat on the score card, then grab the stakes the other players had bet with.
The average Indian, Mr. Subramanian says in a chat over lunch, just wants the basics from his government. "I don't think Indians care about disparity but they want a minimum standard of living, food, a place to stay and clothing," he says. These are all things that the government has singularly failed to provide to the masses in the 62 years since independence.
Why is that so? We start with history. The British may have committed many atrocities here but Mr. Subramanian speaks admiringly about the efficiency with which they ran the civil service and the caliber of those who inhabited it. An important factor in their success, however, was the fact that their political masters were thousands of miles away and unable to interfere.
Then India minted its own constitution. The well-meaning framers, he says, failed to appreciate what would happen when the civil service and politicians operated in close quarters without significant checks -- legal, administrative or otherwise -- on how far the legislative class could influence the executive.
Thus the framework was set for a steady, and alarming, transformation in the balance of power and the purpose of government. Politicians, unleashed by the knowledge that they are very unlikely ever to be called to account for their actions, have come to dominate the civil service and twist it for their own gain.
T.S.R. Subramanian
The executive, staffed by bright men and women schooled in the limits of their authority, have proven no match. As he writes: "Sadly, many of the middle-level officers, with growing children to educate, elderly parents to look after, cannot bear the constant pressure, and buckle; they either switch off and become irrelevant to the system, or they join the politician, and all is well thereafter!"The judiciary comes in for equally scathing criticism for its failure to bring politicians to heel and to exempt bad behavior that ordinary citizens would be jailed for. I sense no love lost between Mr. Subramanian and his brethren on the bench. At one point, he offers a theory as to the root of these judicial shortcomings. Judges and bureaucrats traditionally stemmed from the same English-educated class of graduates, he says. And "most people who came to the judiciary were people who failed the civil service exams."
Where does all this leave us? "The political class," he writes, "is the only one which is not constrained by any checks or balances, follows no effective code of conduct and considers itself a king or an emperor, while extolling the virtues of democracy." In person, he puts it more starkly: In the last government, there were three Cabinet-level ministers making money. Yes, that kind of money. And nothing was done about it.
GovernMint is a narrow polemic that doesn't go much beyond Mr. Subramanian's purpose of a governance scorecard. He is the first to admit that it doesn't seek to provide big answers partly, I suspect, because that is really where the hard thinking begins.
He does offer a few practical suggestions: Suspend politicians facing criminal charges, as civil servants are suspended pending trial. Establish a fast-track court just for government officials so that cases are resolved expeditiously. Persuade judges to make an example of a few political wrongdoers as a public flogging for the rest.
Since no part of the Establishment has an interest in punishing corruption, trying for a more sweeping solution quickly leads into the realm of blind hope. Mr. Subramanian believes the best way to retake the government and re-bend it to the will of the people is through what he rather surprisingly terms "a messiah."
"Could one hope that there will be a new messiah, who will rise from the political class, to deliver the nation?" he asks in the final paragraph of the book. At a book launch party last week, some members of a panel filled with The Great And The Good (Retd.) of Delhi lambasted that notion, suggesting it was hopelessly naïve.
The criticism seems to have stuck. Over lunch a few days later, Mr. Subramanian suggests that no one else on the panel had any better answers. And he makes a point of explaining that he did not mean "a person falling from the sky" but someone from within the system with the will and the public backing to cleanse it.
Does that person exist today? Maybe, he says, we just don't know yet. Maybe it's Rahul Gandhi, maybe its Nitish Kumar. One thing, he says, the public is starting to send a message with the election's focus on development that if that person emerges, he or she will have mass backing. Of course, the flip side is also true: "This government, if it doesn't look into development, will bite the dust and anger against the political class will come."
—Paul Beckett is the WSJ's bureau chief in New Delhi
India's Greatest Failure
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