19 highlights
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Charles Cornwallis had sown the seeds of the Indian Civil Service in 1793
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Macaulay Committee institutionalised it as a modern merit-based system in 1854, and even allowed Indians to appear
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In Lloyd George’s speech, the metaphor of “steel frame” was first used to describe the pivotal role of the ICS in how the government and administration functioned in India.
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the expectation of political neutrality has been key to the role of civil servants as the stable and permanent executive
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In a way, the political neutrality of the civil services hinges on the idea of its intellectual integrity.
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Confined to a mostly Left worldview, The Hindu is far from providing its readers a diverse information basket, various shades of opinions, and multiple perspectives.
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In a way, its edit and opinion pages act as echo chamber for the Left
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Such a one-dimensional opinion page isn’t what public reasoning entails — for a curious section of readership in general, and for civil services aspirants in particular.
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While English historian George Grote’s use of the phrase “constitutional morality” can’t be held hostage, in the absence of other perspectives or to only one school of thought’s invocation of it, the results of a “constitutional test” can’t be declared with any degree of certitude without taking into account the views of different examiners of constitutional validity.
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The one-dimensional assumptions about who constitute “people”, as legal luminary Sir Ivor Jennings rightly observed, leads to the question: who decides who “people” are?
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The partisan view can’t be masked with semantic subversion of words like “conversation”
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Contrary to what an opinion piece in the paper and similar arguments made on other media platforms have suggested, what we are witnessing isn’t a conversation but two separate sets of monologues about the Constitution and the idea of citizenship in the modern nation state.
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Even in news reporting, The Hindu is plagued by something that, in a rare confessional moment occasioned by need to divest then editor Siddharth Varadarajan of his editorial role, was described by N Ram as “editorialising in the guise of news coverage”.
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“The charges against Varadarajan were that he was influencing the news to reflect his own preferences and prejudices, particularly with reference to the way the paper has covered the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi.”
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In fact, in the same piece, Ninan points out two aspects to show how The Hindu, under the editorship of N Ram, was even more unrepresentative of various views in its edit page and did even less investigative reporting.
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The doctrinaire perch from which Frontline addresses its readers would make reference material like A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, compiled by TB Bottomore et al, quite useful in understanding its content.
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If Nehruvian, neo-liberal, realist and even Marxist schools could be broadly identified as analytical frameworks for approaching international affairs and foreign policy in India, The Hindu’s opinion page has been quite unrepresentative of the realist as well as neo-liberal voices in global affairs commentary.
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The repercussions of the paper’s ideological positions on domestic issues are reinforced on its assessment of issues concerning India’s foreign policy.
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The Hindu’s cult readership among civil services aspirants has made it the preferred window to the country and the world outside the study desk of the aspirants. The problem is that its Mount Road window gives a view that is partial, limited and ideology-confined.