As detailed in The Indian Express, the Ministry of Human Resource Development's attempt to scrutinise the accounts of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA), set up as an autonomous institution, has met with sullen resistance from the officials and an angry outcry from the cultural chatterati.

Artistic freedom is threatened, say the officials. The BJP is trying to push through its cultural agenda, say the liberal standard-bearers. But they do their own cause harm when they equate a liberal philosophy with a family.

The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has dominated the institutions that control the country's cultural purse-strings. Look atthe IGNCA, the executive committee of which rewarded six members with life-long shelters. Three of them are unquestionably loyal Congresswallahs former prime minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, former finance minister Manmohan Singh, and current party president Sonia Gandhi. Or take the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

Who should be its chairman but N. D. Tiwari, a politician who has presided over the abject decline of the Congress in a state that was once its stronghold? It is the Congress that has shown the way to the other political parties. Consider this: When S. R. Bommai was Human Resource Development Minister, he ensured the chairman of the Indian Council for Historical Research and the chairman of the Indian Council for Social Science Research were from Karnataka. It could be a coincidence, but it could also be that the government of the day trying to do what it is expected to -- reward its faithful and invest in their continuing fealty.

That the BJP is straining at the leash is understandable. Ithas waited a half-century to redo the history of post-independent India. Its ideologues and academics have been championing this cause for several years. Victory time even a fractured mandate, like the BJP has got this time -- is payback time. That is partly the failure of our administrative system.

Unlike the legitimate spoils system of the US, where every president is expected to appoint his own powerful White House staff, the Indian executive has only so many jobs for the boys. And there is the entrenched Indian Administrative Service, which is always on the lookout for positions for its cadre. Autonomous institutions, especially those that involve travel grants and fellowships, provide rich pickings in these lean times. The point is not just to decry one political party when it indulges itself, but to agitate against the absence of cultural professionals.

The few we have are willy-nilly affiliated to the Congress and its first family. They are fortunate to have gained the kind of training, whetherthrough festivals of India or decades of seminar-hopping, that RSS supporters would sacrifice their shakha mornings for.