A Tide in the Affairs of Men: A Public Servant Remembers

By Prateep K. Lahiri

Prateep K. Lahiri has had a distinguished career in the civil service as an IAS officer spanning thirty-six years and has held the positions of secretary in the Government of India successively in two ministries: the Ministry of Mines and the Ministry of Finance. Early in his career, as district magistrate in several districts, he had first hand experience in dealing with communal conflicts and riots.

For about four years, he was India’s executive director on the Resident Board of Directors of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Manila, with the personal rank of Ambassador. After retiring from the civil service, Lahiri was also associated with the media in the capacity of secretary general of the Indian Newspaper Society (INS), an apex chamber of the newspaper industry in India. He was also the chairman of the General Council and Executive Board of the ISM University, Dhanbad, a leading institute for technical education in the country. Author of Decoding Intolerance, this is his second book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: May 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9788193626085

Book preview

A TIDE

IN THE

AFFAIRS

OF MEN

Prateep K. Lahiri has had a distinguished career in the civil service as an IAS officer spanning thirty-six years and has held the positions of secretary in the Government of India successively in two ministries: the Ministry of Mines and the Ministry of Finance. Early in his career, as district magistrate in several districts, he had first-hand experience in dealing with communal conflicts and riots.

For about four years, he was India’s executive director on the Resident Board of Directors of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Manila, with the personal rank of Ambassador. After retiring from the civil service, Lahiri was also associated with the media in the capacity of secretary general of the Indian Newspaper Society (INS), an apex chamber of the newspaper industry in India. He was also the chairman of the General Council and Executive Board of the ISM University, Dhanbad, a leading institute for technical education in the country. Author of Decoding Intolerance, this is his second book.

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This book is dedicated to the cherished memory of M.P. Sriwastava, M.S. Chaudhary, Sushital Banerji, S.B. Lal, R.P. Khosla, D.K. Saxena, A.N. Verma and Naresh Chandra – outstanding public servants who were my mentors and role models.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

FROM THE TRENCHES

1. Scarcity and Sikh Sensitivity

2. Students’ Agitation and Mob Violence

3. Dealing with Drought and Scarcity in East Nimar

4. Communal Conflicts and the Dynamics of Hindu–Muslim Riots

5. Night-landing of the Chief Minister’s Plane

IN THE CORRIDORS OF POWER

6. A Not So Healthy Health Department

7. Of the Tehri Dam and Earthquakes

8. Desperate Measures: Mortgaging of Gold Reserves

9. Corruption in High Places and Low

10. Manmohan Singh, the Man, Minister and Prime Minister

MISCELLANY OF EXPERIENCE

11. Bangladesh after Liberation

12. Encounter with Diamonds

13. The Story of Coal Mines’ Nationalization

14. Sojourn in Manila

15. Environmental Clearance for Development Projects and the Case of the Mumbai–Pune Expressway

16. Of the Print Media, Advertising Business and the Nizam’s Jewels

17. Interaction with Ministers & Thoughts on Achieving Effective Governance

Annexures

Index

Acknowledgements

After publishing my earlier book Decoding Intolerance: Riots and the Emergence of Terrorism in India, which was more of a research project on the subject of communal riots in India, I had been mulling the idea of sharing with the reading public certain experiences that happened in course of performance of duties and tasks assigned to me in different roles as a public servant. At the start of this venture I would like to mention the persons who have been there for me.

To begin with I must acknowledge the contribution of both my parents in shaping my destiny. They instilled in me values that have stood me in good stead throughout my life. My father B.N. Lahiri was the first Indian to head UP Police after independence. He remained the Police chief of UP from 1947 to 1953. He was my first ‘guru’ in administration.

In writing this book I have enjoyed the full support of my wife Ratna and our next generation of the family. It is because of their encouragement and interest that this book is seeing the light of day. My elder daughter Ruchira, in particular, read through the draft of the chapters and gave useful inputs.

Among friends and colleagues Satyanand Misra, an eminent former civil servant, went through several of the chapters and gave incisive inputs that were incorporated. Rajat Nag, an internationally known and respected professional in the field of development financing, vetted some of the chapters, especially the one on my sojourn in ADB, Manila and helped in refining the text. Professor Sumantra Bhattacharya of IIT (ISM), Dhanbad collaborated with me in writing the chapter on coal nationalization and extended his help in providing relevant data and updating it. I am grateful to them for the help and guidance I received in completing this project.

I have dedicated the book to a few outstanding public servants, who are no longer in our midst. I acknowledge that the guidance received and my interactions with them have benefited me immensely and their imprint would be there in all that has been written by me.

The book could not have happened without the acceptance for its publication by Pramod Kapoor of Roli Books, who generously and readily took up this and my earlier book for publication. I am greatly indebted for the suggestions and help extended by Neelam Narula of Roli Books, who has edited the book with meticulous care.

In the end I must thank Najeeb Jung, well-known administrator and academic for writing the Foreword, eminent poet and litterateur Ashok Vajpeyi and Rajat Nag, former Managing Director General of ADB, Manila for their endorsements.

– Prateep K. Lahiri

Foreword

‘There was a Door to which I found no Key:

There was Veil past which I could not see:

Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee

There seem’d and then no more of Thee and Me’

These lines of Omar Khayam are reminiscent of the career of Civil Servant in many ways. A Civil Servant often finds himself or herself in unsolvable, peculiar and unpredictable situations. He tackles them to the best of his or her ability, planning with care but often hitting in the dark. Sometimes, with luck, he gets away unscathed but sometimes luck runs out leaving him or her red faced and embarrassed, indeed in trouble. A Tide in the Affairs of Men is full of situations which a civil servant faces through his career.

P.K. Lahiri’s long journey has seen ups and downs which he recounts with great candour in the book we have at hand. I have known Lahiri for close to 38 years, when in 1979 he was my Supervisor in the Gwalior Division of Madhya Pradesh. He was the Commissioner of the Division and I was Collector and District Magistrate, Datia District. It was a period when Mrs Indira Gandhi had just won the national election, returning as prime minister after the Janata Government interlude. She had dismissed the governments run by the Janata Party and imposed President’s rule in various states. Madhya Pradesh was one of them. This was also a time when the Chambal valley had a resurgence of dacoity menace.

Fresh from the Academy, all of five years of service behind me, I was full of theoretical knowledge. I found a sound practical teacher in Mr. Lahiri. An example of probity, he was a person of exceptional integrity. He was always concerned on various aspects of ‘Governance’ and ‘Administration’. In those days since Madhya Pradesh was not an industrially developed state, there was great emphasis on Rural Development and Lahiri spent hours and hours devoting himself and pushing us on issues dealing with rural development. He was always clear that there are many aspects of civilian administration and those in authority must administer to the needs of the people and thereby ensure fair and good governance. As he himself says in the book, ‘this is a gold standard for each how the executive, comprising the political and the bureaucracy, performs’. Speaking with a deep understanding of the system, he stressed on the neutrality under which all of us civil servants must function and an anonymity that goes with being a permanent civil servant. He was committed to the idea of a faceless bureaucracy, against cutting ribbons, and inaugurations but insisted on our putting our head to the ground by providing a clean, efficient, no nonsense administration. Lahiri’s neutrality amounted to ideological neutrality, an aspect that is fast diminishing in today’s civil servants, who often hitch their wagon to influences in power.

This book therefore, is from a person who has served his period in civil service with a rare straight forwardness and extreme probity in personal life and in work; an integrity that was personal and intellectual, remaining always committed to the principles of equality and secularism as enshrined in the Constitution of our country.

As the reader goes through the book, he will find the difference between this account and other accounts written by civil servants. A standard joke about books written by civil servants is they often speak of their own success for ‘ …when I was Collector…’, ‘ …when I was Secretary…’ etc is the repeated refrain. The authors are obviously the heroes demolishing politicians and colleagues at will. Lahiri’s approach is the opposite. True to the character, he is self-effacing, going to the extent of reiterating incidents that are an embarrassment to himself. The incident when he rather inappropriately showed muscle to the Air Commodore in Gwalior when the latter did not allow the chief minister’s plane to land in insufficient light is a case in point. Till today he is embarrassed about it. Similarly, he exhibits rare courage and commitment to secular values when dealing with serious law and order situations in Madhya Pradesh. Clearly Lahiri has through his career worked within the confines of his oath of secrecy by not revealing or quoting from confidential records (with the one exception being the interesting experience in Bangladesh), yet lucidly writing of incidents and matters that are important for a lay person to know how governments and administrations function. An obvious admirer of Dr. Manmohan Singh he does not shy away from faulting the former prime minister when he tried to gently influence actions which were not entirely in order. He learns administration the hard way, being forced to apologise to the Sikh community for an act of his subordinate colleague. He quickly learnt the futility of standing on pride. He is in favour of the nationalisation of coal mines but it is clear this cannot be at the cost of forests or inadequate rehabilitation. The last chapter on ‘effective governance’ is a must read. His comments on maintaining relations with politicians, systemic reforms, the methodology of notings on government files and suggestions on how to improve them in the context of present times, modernisation of offices etc; makes this book compulsory reading for potential civil servants and gives us, retired ones, a journey in time, of the pleasures and the missed opportunities in our own careers.

This is the truthful glimpse of the events that encompass a civil servant’s career and makes for compulsory reading not just for potential, serving and retired civil servants but for everyone who is either sceptical or interested in knowing what it is like to work within bureaucracy.

– Najeeb Jung

Introduction

A

S A CIVIL SERVANT, I HAVE OFTEN THOUGHT ABOUT THE TERMS

‘governance’ and ‘administration’. Governance is a term that has come to be frequently used, even over used, in public discourse in recent times. A noun derived from the verb ‘govern’, the dictionary meaning of governance is to ‘control the laws and affairs of a state organization or community’. I have some reservations about the use of this expression with reference to running of the affairs of the state because implicit in it is that the executive exercises ‘control’ and citizens or the people are subjected to control or are controlled. This is evocative of the relations that once subsisted between the ruler and the ruled. In the present-day milieu, it is more apt to visualize the interaction between the executive and the citizens as of ‘administration’ since the expression denotes that those in authority are required to minister to the needs of the people and assist in fulfilling their aspirations.

Semantics aside, most of the discussion on the subject these days centres around the imperative of providing good governance. This is the gold standard for judging how the executive, comprising the political executive and the bureaucracy, performs. The discourse on the subject is usually in the abstract and even when it is not so, it is in macro terms, such as the failure to engender economic growth, provide stable law and order or generate employment opportunities. These are indeed weighty issues and need to be focused upon and debated in public fora. But for a lay person it is difficult to appreciate the nuances of the issues involved, unless he/she becomes aware of the choices that have to be made to ensure that the right course of action is adopted and correct decisions taken in real life situations. When a minister, administrator or a civil servant is confronted with a situation or faces a dilemma, how best should she/he deal with it? If a choice is to be made between courses of action that are open, what would be the best option to be chosen that would meet the criteria of good governance? The critical importance of making the right choice is underlined tellingly in the following lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which will perhaps remain topical till eternity.

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyages of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat;

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

Most of the incidents narrated in these memoirs have to do with choices I had to make when dealing with situations I was confronted with at different times.

An issue that people have written about, debated and discussed almost ad nauseam is that of the role of civil servants and the relationship between them and politicians. While I have no intention to add to the plethora of literature on this subject, a few words need to be said about it as a backdrop to the accounts of episodes and incidents culled from my experiences and narrated in this book.

Traditionally, the three tenets underpinning the functioning of the civil service are permanence, neutrality and anonymity. Permanence denotes the fact that with elections, governments change and while political functionaries demit offices each time this happens, the civil servants remain behind to serve whichever government comes to power. They provide continuity and are repositories of institutional memory. Neutrality is a concomitant of permanence because while civil servants have to execute policies of the political party in power, they must remain ideologically neutral. The third tenet—of anonymity—is important because it is the politicians who take decisions and must take the credit or blame, as the case may be, for the consequences. The civil servant is only an adviser and should remain in the background. The politician, not the civil servant, deserves the kudos or flak, depending on the outcome of a decision.

Such is the theory—but does it actually happen this way? The experiences recounted from memory in this book may, hopefully, provide some answers. This book is not written as memoirs in the conventional sense. Generally, most memoirs or autobiographies of civil servants that I have come across take us through their career progression narrating, usually chronologically, the happenings during their various postings. Quite often this turns out to be an exercise in self-glorification, taking credit for good outcomes and, sometimes, of self-exculpation for things that went wrong. I have consciously tried to avoid taking this route. Instead, I have recounted certain specific incidents that are etched in my memory. Since I did not have the foresight to maintain a diary or keep any record of official reports, notes or documents, the descriptions are based on recall—with one exception. I did retain copies of certain official papers pertaining to my deputation to Bangladesh, at the time of its liberation from Pakistan. In the chapter relating my experiences in Bangladesh, I have cited some of these papers and even reproduced them when considered relevant. I believe these are no longer classified since they refer to events that happened more than four decades ago.

At this point, I feel impelled to mention that in their memoirs, a few former civil servants have cited or quoted verbatim from official correspondence, documents or records extensively. They have evidently retained copies of such correspondence and documentation, including ones that are clearly confidential, which ought not to be put in the public domain till they are declassified. Doing so is in breach of the oath of secrecy such persons have sworn and contravene the relevant rules of conduct that apply to them, even after retirement. I was indeed surprised to see that in a recent book penned by a former civil servant, who held a high constitutional office, official correspondence between the author and various ministers, the prime minister’s office (PMO) and even the prime minister has been freely reproduced. Even minutes of official meetings, information from confidential documents and other communications have been quoted verbatim. While with the help of such documentation he has been able to take pot shots at the high and mighty, he has disregarded the fact that such behaviour is violative of the basic tenets of neutrality and anonymity that should inform the conduct of civil servants, serving or retired. Usually, such publications appear when those vilified have demitted office and the political dispensation in power welcomes the so-called ‘disclosures’.

While I may be considered guilty of making virtue of a necessity since I have no access to any