I was miles away when my hotel room TV caught the fag end of a news-item saying Sen Gupta had resigned. I assumed it must refer to Planning Commission Member Arjun Sengupta and thought his resignation must have been caused by the outrage committed on the Ninth Plan by the Budget. I was even more outraged to learn later that the Sengupta in question was not Arjun but Bhabani, and that he had been hounded out by a pusillanimous Prime Minister abjectly surrendering to McCarthyism in the Lok Sabha.

Senator Joseph McCarthy caused untold damage to the democratic system in the United States by resorting, at the most hysterical phase of the Cold War, to precisely the kind of innuendo which Chandrashekhar and Vajpayee got up to in the Lok Sabha last week. McCarthy did it in the name of a shrill patriotism by targeting individuals through the instrumentality of the Committee on Un-American Activities. For Vajpayee, of course, shrill patriotism has been his and the BJP's life's bugle. As for Chandrashekhar, he charged Sen Gupta with having written a letter to an unnamed editor seeking international sanctions against India for testing a nuclear device at Pokharan. No such letter was ever written. Since I am not in Parliament, I do not have to use Parliamentary language: Chandrashekhar's charge is a lie. Either he should repeat it outside the House to enable Sen Gupta to sue him; or he should publicly apologise for resorting to such McCarthyism. And, in Parliament, I trust someone will have the integrity to take Chandrashekhar to the House Privileges Committee for having so grossly misled the Lok Sabha. Worse, Chandrashekhar now wants an Indian version of the McCarthy Committee to vet extra-civil service appointments.

The American example has no bearing on our system. There, the executive is separate from the legislature but has to act in conformity with the advice and consent of Congress; here, the executive is elected from within the legislature and is, in turn, responsible to the legislature: which means that if it loses the confidence of the House, it has to go. The Prime Minister can be hauled up for any decision he takes; he cannot be faulted for seeking advice from any quarter he deems fit. It is this wholesome principle that has been transgressed last week.

Sen Gupta's fault apparently is that he has committed the faux pas of not only holding but expressing his opinions. Regular civil servants, comprising, as they do (or at least used to), some of the brightest and best of our youth, also have opinions. It is only that by the time they join the civil service in their early twenties, few have had the opportunity of giving public expression to their opinions. And after becoming civil servants, they are, of course, prevented from doing so. But that does not mean they cease to hold opinions. A neutral civil service does not mean a neutred civil service. Opinions are held; they sometimes change; they are sometimes reinforced by experience. In a lively civil society, all opinions are subject to challenge and scrutiny. It is the very variety of opinion that promotes free and informed debate. This goes as much for society at large as for liveliness within the civil service. A civil service that does not think would be a grey bunch of apparatchiks.

The right to think does not tantamount to indiscipline or disloyalty. I know a former Foreign Secretary who is attempting to get into Parliament on a Communist party ticket. When he passed the civil service exam., he was stalled by our Intelligence services from joining the IFS because of his left-wing student politics. Clearly, the basic framework of his personal ideology has not changed in forty years. That did not stop him from being a loyal, patriotic, efficient and even outstanding civil servant. Ironically, he was one of Vajpayee's top diplomats when Vajpayee was Foreign Minister. And he was Foreign Secretary during Chandrashekhar's Premiership. Why, when they were in high office, were these two worthies not administering the loyalty tests they have imposed on Gujral and Sen Gupta?

I myself was the victim of the murmurings of British intelligence to their Indian counterparts when I appeared, in London, for the civil service exam. The Brits were listened to because we were then in the middle of the xenophobia induced by our disastrous setback at the hands of the Chinese. Although I had passed the exam (with some distinction, might I add), I received a telegram from South Block, several weeks after the announcement of the results, telling me I had been rejected from ``all services''. I went to see President Radhakrishnan about this injustice. He was not concerned at all with my political opinions. He only insisted that the question of a civil service candidate's personal political predilections had come up in the Rajya Sabha when, as Vice President, he was presiding over the House; and Nehru had clarified that Government was not concerned with the political sympathies of a civil servant; the only restriction was that a civil servant could not be in active party politics. The President reminded the Prime Minister of this. It took a few months but eventually Nehru himself OK'ed my appointment. My colleagues have often wondered whether I was a Marxist of the Karl or Groucho variety. And I must have been kept under surveillance for most, perhaps all, my years as a civil servant but, unlike my views, my loyalty was never questioned. Why can the same privilege not be extended to Bhabani Sen Gupta?

It is clear that the campaign against Bhabani Sen Gupta was mounted and orchestrated by my former colleagues in the Indian Foreign Service. I am appalled at their lack of confidence in themselves. If they disagreed with Bhabani -- and almost all of us would, on one point or the other -- why did they not trust themselves to have the intellectual ability and diplomatic expertise to counter him from within the civil service? When professional civil servants behave like grubby politicians, then it really is time to weep.

Of people like Vajpayee and Chandrashekhar, I expect nothing better. After all, neither did -- nor could -- have passed the IFS exam. They could not have known that Bhabani Sen Gupta's views on nuclear weapons coincide with Jawaharlal Nehru's. The eleventh Lok Sabha has disgraced itself. The sooner it gets itself dissolved the better.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.