An Open Letter to Educated Indians

Dear all,

The trigger for this letter is IAS Durga Nagpal’s controversial suspension from duty. The trigger is also everything that follows the UP government’s move – be it what I see in the mainstream media over heated debates and campaigns for justice, or discussions in our drawing rooms over glasses of whiskey and gin. 

And I write this letter from first-hand experience, since my husband is a bureaucrat himself. 

Through him, I have come to know and know of countless officers in the Indian bureaucracy. Some are what you read about in the black book. But many others, although not material for prime time news, are stuff that inspiration is made of. You probably do not know too many of those diligent ones. It’s understandable. One, because the “good” ones are perhaps too few and far between to garner attention or even a little column dedicated to the historic changes that they have wrought about. And two, it takes being a part of the government machinery to really know it and understand it from the inside, rather than how popular journalism portrays it. 

I know. Things are not just tardy in government offices they can be downright unfair and even illegal. I see it more often than you do. And do you know why? Not just because something is rotten in the state of our Indian bureaucratic “system”, but also because something is amiss within us as citizens seeking services.

I have come to realize that in India we exist in various levels of ‘Power-ty’. Everyone has power, over someone or the other, which they greatly enjoy. And they want more. The daroga over the havaldar, the permanent driver over the ad hoc one, the principal over the teachers, teachers over the students and senior students over the junior ones. RWA Presidents over the colony residents, Chairmen over board members of companies and parents over their own children, why not. It is like a food chain of power. And at each level, we do not sit satisfied. We are ambitious. We want to be more powerful than we already are, more successful than everyone else in the city, and better than the neighbour, certainly. And in order to have that comfortable upward mobility, we seek and patronize those apparently sitting cushy in the proverbial corridors of power. How? 

  

It is not power that corrupts, it is need for power that corrupts. And it corrupts not just the powerful but also the powerless. Ever since my husband assumed office, his phone has not stopped ringing. Calls asking for pulls and pushes to do with school admissions, request letters for special discounts from marriage pandal organizers, calls-upon-calls for settling property disputes and even demands for arranging boxes of liquor for someone’s parties. The list is endless, and often borders on the bizarre. And no, it is not just so-and-so’s helpless neighbour or Mr. X’s poor sister-in-law calling for lazy files to move in the right direction. It is even those friends and family members who sit lambasting the government and it’s functioning as a fashionable topic over parties or on Twitter's hallowed pages in better weather, but waste no time in picking up that phone when it comes to a little favour, even if of the extra-legal kind.

When a young officer assumes charge, two things can happen. One, he will go with the flow, become a spoke in the wheel, especially if that is why he wanted to leave all other lucrative career options behind and get a powerful post to enjoy in his sarkari naukri. Or two, he will reject becoming a part of what he does not agree with and try to bring to the system his mind, heart, sweat, career and ideas, all towards contributing to his/her sense of duty, responsibility towards a post and position and with a hope for a better tomorrow. The latter are so scarce, we can barely see them, as I mentioned above. 

But then I ask you - do we want to see them? 

What if one of the shareef ones cancels the license of our cement mill? Or Mr. Clean refuses your packet and asks you to pay your duty in its entirety for your imported car? Today, we shout slogans to reverse Durga’s suspension. Tomorrow, we will be visiting the service tax officer with a box of laddoos, and more, so that the interior designer under his jurisdiction waives off a few lakhs for designing our new condo, or finds you a house maid from a reputed agency. And the day after, we will again be spewing venom against the same system that we have helped prop up on our favour-seeking attitudes – not just in helpless situations, please note, but otherwise too. 

Ask yourself, honestly. What scares you more? A corrupt babu you know you will be able to work your way around for whatever you want, or a clean civil servant who will not sign on the dotted line and not pick up that phone to get your daughter admitted to her engineering college? 

When you have answered that, ask yourself now. Are you angry over the unfair suspension of dear Durga and what she stood for, or are you protesting because you have got another reason to protest for the sake of protesting against the favourite goat – the government? Did you bother to find out and be thankful to the many Durgas who are working in your cities right this minute to keep your roads free from lawlessness, or your trains running smoothly, your hospitals ticking or your terrorism-infested districts safe? As a people demanding services and your rights, what do you do to incentivize those who you know as honest, hard-working and fair, so that they continue as exactly that and not fall to the many temptations around? But then, I guess we do not even prefer to have that breed around any more. Because we too are part of a certain nexus, which has no room or use for those goodly kinds. 

I do not condone or deny the rot. God knows we get to see it every day. But as the wife of a bureaucrat husband, I do realize how much easier it is to generalize, to opine, to blame, to other, and then even to protest. And how very difficult to realize the parts that we, the so-called educated people, play in the perpetuation of wrong. The system will not change, because we do not want it to change. We are all very hungry. The corridors of power are present in every home, and we want to keep them gleaming with comfort and we want to keep ourselves, our rashly driving sons, our daughters caught in rave parties and our factories evading duty as safe as bribery can buy. 

We, as a people, are bureaucratic existing at various levels of ‘power-ty’. We create mai baaps because we ourselves dream of being a bigger one. And while we do that, the real aam junta which cannot read this post sits and suffers, hoping for change.

And ‘Change’? Just a 6-letter-word we paint on our posters but are simply not interested in working towards in our daily life. I wish some sign campaign would work towards changing that attitude too. Perhaps that day, my husband's phone will stop ringing so much!  

Regards,

Sakshi Nanda.

[First on CNN-IBN ]