There is no doubt that the increasing politicisation of the bureaucracy has been corroding, for quite some time, the pillars on which fair and efficient administration rest. The pains taken by the founding fathers of our constitution to protect and insulate the civil service from political interference had ensured a large degree of neutrality, for several decades — except perhaps during the Emergency. What is more important is that it created a culture of looking down at any suspiciously close liaison between politicians and bureaucrats (for mutual personal gain) to be illicit and adulterous.
There is no doubt that the increasing politicisation of the bureaucracy has been corroding, for quite some time, the pillars on which fair and efficient administration rest. The pains taken by the founding fathers of our constitution to protect and insulate the civil service from political interference had ensured a large degree of neutrality, for several decades — except perhaps during the Emergency. What is more important is that it created a culture of looking down at any suspiciously close liaison between politicians and bureaucrats (for mutual personal gain) to be illicit and adulterous.
The recently passed Delhi Services Act runs counter to this ethos and legitimises the babu-neta nexus. While asserting the supremacy of politics and administration (euphemistically called the executive) over the judiciary, it ensures that the Union government’s political agenda is thrust on an elected chief minister. This law damages the very federal structure, to uphold which, the all India services were created. The chief minister’s control over the civil service, enshrined in List II of the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution, is undermined by legally empowering the chief secretary and the home secretary of Delhi to overrule him. The root of the success of political governance that lies in the subordinate position of the bureaucracy is, thus, uprooted – which, in effect, exposes officers to a field that is full of pits and mines. It is not that senior bureaucrats have never differed from chief ministers, but officials believe that when two persons ride a horse, one has to ride behind….
Kautilya’s observations on the causes of discontent in a polity
After the truth-shower 