Media In Babu-Land

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19 highlights

  • Before being jailed for his alleged involvement in Bihar flood relief scam, a young Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer and district magistrate of Patna Gautam Goswami had been chosen by Time magazine as one of the ‘Asian heroes of 2004’ along with Shah Rukh Khan and Anoushka Shankar.

  • Interestingly, the man writing Goswami’s citation for Time was none other than its South Asia correspondent Arvind Adiga

  • In his journalism, Adiga seems to have gullibly bought the inflated narratives about civil servants, which abound in the Indian media.

  • More often than not, in their zeal to reinforce the social fascination with seats of bureaucratic power, they tend to amplify civil servants performing even the routine work. That’s a kind of work which comes as part of a job in civil service, and for which they are paid as well as provided with elite privileges.

  • As if the political class wasn’t providing enough tokenism to keep the media engaged, there are always the symbolic gestures of bureaucracy to bank on

  • And then, you can’t miss that element that works whenever you seek to edify a public figure in India — frugality.

  • Sometimes lionising civil servants with cinematic nicknames like ‘Dabang’ backfires as the officers tend to get deluded by the media buzz surrounding them.

  • There could be numerous explanations for the media falling for such administrative showmanship. First is, obviously, the nature of their readership or viewership.

  • Second, the media sometimes tends to strike common cause with the sections of bureaucracy that are seen as lamenting against political interference or are keen on adventurism of whistleblowing. Both the activities are fodder for journalists whose default operational mode is rooted in the romantic appeal of anti-establishment.

  • In the name of curtailing interference, the uncritical acceptance of bureaucratic authority also exposes the naivete of these pet theories of politician-bashing

  • The order, avowedly, sought to minimise political interference in bureaucracy. Little did media commentary realise that all forms of political monitoring of bureaucracy may not be interference, and a large measure of it is integral to the power of the elected in running a democratic government1

  • in small towns and villages of India, colonial administrative baggage has ensured that civil servants remain the face of government and the site of governmental processes — ‘mammaries of welfare state’ to use Upamanyu Chatterjee’s evocative phrase and title of one of his novels.

  • Any assessment that puts civil services exam success and individual excellence in the same sentence has a blatantly flawed assumption to begin with. The reason being quite simple — the prime motivations for aspirants joining the civil services is quite the opposite: a lifelong ticket to escape all possibilities of excellence because the assurance of a secure job shields you from all challenges.

  • When Seema Chishti profiled the topper and her family, she fell for the contrived narrative of “social change” and “individual excellence.”

  • Local dailies and the Patna edition of national newspapers cover this steady supply of bureaucrats with a pride that hasn’t benefited the state in any concrete sense.

  • Bihar continues to be at the bottom of all significant indices of human development — it continues to reel under dehumanising conditions of poverty, disease and underdevelopment. Contrast that with states like Gujarat where young people have been far less keen on joining bureaucracy. Driven by enterprise, innovation and private initiative, the state has done far better on developmental fronts, including better human development indices.

  • Almost two years ago, in his column for Business Standard, Sharma built a case for doing away with the anachronistic baggage of the under-informed, unimaginative, obstructionist and overrated governance device, namely, the IAS.

  • Cutting down the tentacles, and flab too, of bureaucratic machinery has to be part of any ambitious reform agenda in India.

  • Instead of questioning the rusty, oversized and self-important cogs in governmental machinery, the media has been playing the cheerleaders for custodians of red-tape in numerous government offices.

Footnotes

  1. The politician-bureaucrat dynamic procedurally tilts in favour of the former. This alone is sufficient cause to presume that the cases of unwarranted and frequent interference in the working of the bureaucracy cannot be integral to the running of a democratic government ↩

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