If the political and the corporate system are not delivering, what about the permanent civil service? The biggest strength of the bureaucracy is that it comes through a transparent selection process and has amongst the best minds in the country. Bureaucrats have a secure working span of 30 to 35 years and can therefore think in the long term. All of them, when they appeared before the UPSC, professed a desire to serve the people. They claimed that their motivation to join the government was to take the benefits of development to the poorest. Some of them could have lied but certainly not all. The bureaucracy runs the government and has the executive powers to enforce the law. They are not just for programme implementation, regulation and compliance but are also mandated to protect the interests of the weakest—who are undeniably an equal owner of the country’s natural resources. They have to build and sustain public institutions, not mindlessly support outsourcing. They should be working on capacity building, improving the quality of products and services in the MSME sector, setting up technology incubation centres, skilling, re-skilling and strengthening the health, education, sanitation and training infrastructure to energise small industrial units. Instead we see that even the regulatory role of the bureaucracy is getting compromised.
What is undermining the bureaucracy? I am not getting into the subject of administrative and police reforms, etc. Here the question is why bureaucracy alone is targeted for corruption? True, we have seen how corruption undermines peoples’ trust in the bureaucracy and it has to be put down. The mechanisms to do so are available; we need the will to go forth. There are checks which work. All government decisions are subject to oversight by Parliament and statutory audit by an autonomous constitutionally mandated CAG; RTI queries, public disclosure and judicial review are other powerful deterrents. While petty corruption has continued as always, the last few decades have seen big corruption at higher levels. All these cases are linked to corporate entities, which have thrived under opaque decision making. They waste shareholder wealth on lavish lifestyles, questionable deals and hide behind an audit system which is on their own pay rolls. Their business decisions are vetted by an amorphous body of shareholders, financial institutions and promoters, who steam roll decisions in their personal interest. Notice how all cases of big corporate corruption were unearthed only when public servants and public financial institutions were probed. It was the oversight in the public sector which exposed the rot in the private sector, even leading to the recent fall of a government. The message is clear if we want to root out corruption, we must subject the private sector to the same kind of scrutiny as the public sector. All decisions, except on matters of national security, should, by law, be open to public scrutiny. Let us bite the bullet and see the dawn of a new India.
Talking of media, a lot has been written about their falling standards and there is no point dwelling further on the same. The crux of the matter is that information and questioning are the basis of democracy. The stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. Only intelligent people can ask questions, while the others can be led like sheep through fake news and propaganda. Educated people are a threat to totalitarian regimes. Bhagat Singh, before he went to the gallows in his mid-twenties, was reading the works of Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Upton Sinclair, Friedrich Engels, Louis Tennyson and Rabindranath Tagore while in Jail. Apart from his daring exploits, it will not be wrong to believe that his intellect was considered a greater threat by the colonialists, even when he was so young? Therein lies the role of media.
Propaganda and fake news have traditionally been considered to be tools of non-conventional warfare. You use it in adversary nations to exploit their fault lines, to sow dissension and create confusion with the objective of undermining unfriendly regimes. You never ever use it within your own country. The final prey of propaganda, if used within a country, is always the regime itself which starts believing its own fake claims and loses touch with reality. It is like setting up terror groups to wage war against unlawful organisations inside the country. The groups eventually turn on the creator. Let us also remember that if the media becomes too compliant and keeps projecting the regime’s version for too long, it eventually loses credibility and then there is no vehicle left to carry the truth. The way to correct wrong perceptions of the past is through informed debate and not through fake claims. Intelligent people on either side have to establish their claims through facts and reason—that has been our tradition of shastrarth. Pushing false narratives to a gullible and poorly educated public is not in the long-term interest of the nation. We need thinking people, not compliant masses.
News is now dictated by interests of the promoters and handouts by interested parties are published without even the minimum effort to check their veracity. Having said all this, it remains a fact that some of the brightest and most well-read men and women are connected to this field. Some may have ideological reasons, but most can easily discern what is happening around them. We have seen some senior columnists make a course correction in their analytical writings. Truth purifies the soul and gives the opportunity to start again. The idea is not to start ranting where you were fawning but to bring public discourse back to the reality. While professional bodies can exercise checks on their members, the longer-term solution is to have a mandatory disclosure of ownership and funding of all media enterprises.
The writer is an Indian civil servant and a former Chairman of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC). The views expressed are personal. This is the fourth of a five-part series that will appear over a period of time.