Government in default mode

The WTO bungle isn’t only about the IAS-IFS tussle, it’s a sign of a government that just does not think

After his knee-operation last year, you’d have noticed, few news stories/articles referred to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee as week-kneed — indeed, for a while, some reports even spoke glowingly of Vajpayee taking a tough stance, and thereby putting his foot down! Sadly, over the past few months, thanks to the PM’s vacillating ways, the week-knee metaphor has begun doing the rounds again.

The immediate provocation, of course, is the completely uncalled for bungling over the appointment of Hardeep Puri as India’s permanent representative to the WTO at Geneva. As is well known, Puri, who is currently the deputy high commissioner in the UK, is an Indian Foreign Service (IFS) official, and this got the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) lobby upset — since the Geneva posting has been seen as traditionally reserved for the breed of people called the IAS. So what the IAS lobby did, was to get Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran to write to Vajpayee, arguing that only a specialist — of the type that had served in the commerce ministry, was the sub-text — could do justice to the job, and clearly an IFS official would be unsuited for the job.

The ever-obliging prime minister, thanks partly due to the fact that he didn’t want to offend an ally like Maran, promptly cancelled Puri’s appointment, and appointed K.M. Chandrashekhar, currently the deputy chief of mission in Brussels — Chandrashekhar was, at one point in time, in the ministry of commerce’s trade policy division, and presumably fulfilled Maran’s criterion of having the right experience.

Now this appointment itself is bad in law — in the sense that the Kerala-cadre IAS officer Chandrashekhar was transferred to the Central government on deputation five years ago, and the rules clearly state that he has to serve in his parent-state before he is eligible for another Central government posting like the one in Geneva. But let’s not even talk about that, since it is precisely the obsession with such minutiae that is the gravamen of the IAS-IFS cadre wars — Chandrashekhar’s current job at Brussels, those seeped in such fine-print will tell you, is actually an IFS post, and it was unfair that an IAS official got it in the first place!

Naturally, the reversing of Puri’s appointment also shows the government in very poor light — after all, if the IAS-IFS tussle was so important, why wasn’t this sorted out earlier, before both the prime minister and the president gave their assent. It now makes them both look foolish? It doesn’t help that this is not the first time in recent months this has happened. The prime minister had initialled the proposal to transfer a senior bureaucrat to Gujarat, but once the pressure to rescind the appointment built up, the necessary department was instructed not to process the file personally signed by the prime minister — in case you think this is a sinister plot of usurping the PM’s power, the do-not-process instruction was also issued by the prime minister.

What is, of course, even more frightening than this constant power play, is the mindset it reveals — and I’m not even talking of a government which is so weak it can be bullied by all and sundry. What everyone missed in the tussle between the ministry of external affairs and the ministry of commerce is that in most developed countries, the two are not separate ministries, they’re one and the same. In the UK, trade and industry are a division of the external affairs setup, the counsellor of commercial affairs in Germany functions under its MEA, the same in the Netherlands, and so on. Confronted with this new reality, what does India do? Thanks to Tehelka, the government actually combined the ministry of external affairs with, hold your breath, the ministry of defence — in the sense that the same Jaswant Singh holds both charges. It’s true this is a temporary arrangement, and the two ministries remain separate, but the signal is the same — that even in the post-Cold War period, India’s powers-that-be see a natural alignment between defence and external affairs, but not between commerce and external affairs.

The fact of the matter is that in today’s world, diplomacy is almost all about commerce — the most obvious example of such realpolitik, of course, is former US ambassador to India, Frank Wisner, who spent a great deal of his time lobbying with the Indian government for US power and insurance firms, and then left to join the boards of Enron and American International Group.

Needless to say, the same mindset, the same lack of pro-active thinking, applies to other areas as well. No one in the government is thinking about why, for instance, once both Indian Airlines and Air India are sold, we need a ministry of civil aviation. Or why, once the Steel Authority of India is sold, we need a ministry of steel? Essentially, the government’s running in default mode, with the brighter elements of it spending their time in just responding to each crises as it comes along, instead of charting out visions of the future. This, not succumbing to the IAS lobby, is the real tragedy.

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