This is a good place to pause and step back, to take a look at the service, as an identifiable group of people, the way they worked, and the way they ruled the state. Yes, ruled the state. I use the word deliberately, for that was what they did in those days. The system so carefully transplanted by Sardar Patel was a system of imperial pro-consuls in part, and it continued to be that. True, it was subject to stresses that were growing more and more intense; political groups were becoming increasingly truculent, confrontationist. But the system still held, odd though it might seem.
There were the elected chairmen of what were called Zila Parishads, or district councils; and under law and under the rules that the government had framed, they had powers to undertake
development work. But it was limited in those years; and the overall responsibility was still that of the district officer. You never saw long lines of people waiting to see the Chairman every day; but whenever the district officer was in headquarters, or when he was in some part of the district, there were always people waiting to see him, petitions in hand, wanting some kind of relief, some justice for a perceived wrong, some help.
The governments of the day, the political leaders, knew this and chose to leave things that way, at least then. One of the main reasons was that they knew that the district officers, the men in the IAS, were not political. It was only in later years that some officers saw the wisdom of aligning with the ruling party both for protection and advancement. The knowledge that they could trust the district officer to get things done meant that he did in fact, rule; this began to mean, as I discovered for myself, that apart from great amounts of energy, it needed craft, diplomacy, persuasion and only occasionally the sternness of the law. But it called for these qualities and for something greater than all these—what I can only call an earnest, transparent sincerity, born not out of years of encountering the intrigues and turbulence of events, but out of the ideals that one brought from one’s formative years. A good part of it came, I think, from the atmosphere in which one grew up in one’s family, and another from the conditioning that was an almost unconscious part of one’s time in school and
college; sadly, not much really came from the training one received in the Academy.
I found this true, as far as I was concerned, and my discussions with my colleagues confirmed this. All this did not last; perhaps we were witnesses to what was beginning to wither and die, but only in one sense. It mutated into something else, as I was to find out when I returned to the districts as
Commissioner. But that is for later; in that time, when I left my first and last assignment as Deputy Commissioner, District Magistrate and Collector, the traits I have mentioned were clearly there.
And what of the service? It was a recognizable entity, at least by those of us who belonged to it, though it had, it has to be admitted, two groups or identifiable sets of people within it. One consisted of those recruited by the Union Public Service Commission through the all-India examination, trained
in the National Academy of Administration and sent to different states—and roughly half of those sent were from states other than the one to which they were sent. These were what were called the
‘regular recruits’, officially as well as unofficially, which I always found rather odd; did it mean that the others were irregular recruits? The others were the officers promoted from the state civil
services, and were a ragtag lot of persons with little to bind them together except perhaps a simmering resentment of the regular recruits.
What was the real difference? Not education, certainly. Some promoted IAS officers were not only just as well educated but a number were erudite scholars, authorities in subjects like philosophy, literature or mathematics. I think it was that factor that I mentioned earlier—a sense of innocence, of transparency, of something that was a mix of these and a sharp sense of reality. It was certainly a rather juvenile lack of cynicism, but also the almost unquestioned confidence that one belonged to a special group, one was not isolated. Promoted officers, on the other hand, had no such moorings, no shared assumptions or attitudes. Also, they were much older; when I took over as Deputy
Commissioner of Cooch Behar I was twenty-nine years old.
But one can go on speculating. The fact was that this group, the ‘regular recruits’, were in great demand, not only as district officers but for different posts in the Secretariat. The public posturing of political leaders were one thing; what they actually did was something else.
One other factor identified this group; a kind of bond, a propensity to help one another. This was an invaluable help to me in my new assignment as Superintendent of Census Operations, a post that was re-designated Director of Census Operations soon after I joined, possibly because someone did not want to be mistaken for a clerical appendage to the system.
At first I considered the job a boring sinecure, a place where the government put someone who is considered inconvenient for whatever reason. But as I began to realize what it entailed, the sheer enormity of the task filled me with awe and apprehension, and a kind of excitement as well—a challenge to my ability to get it done. It involved counting people, finding out basics about each of them—sex, age, educational level, occupation, mother tongue and some other details. The point was one had to count over forty million people, the population of the entire state.
The way that we were going to do this was to ask the primary school teachers in every district to act as enumerators. They would be given a small honorarium for doing this work, and would be trained to fill in the forms—one for each person—and then, on one given day, 1 February 1971, starting at a specified time, they would spread out simultaneously and enumerate all the people in their given area, finishing their work that day irrespective of the lateness of the hour. This was necessary to ensure that people who were travelling were not counted twice; the area each
enumerator covered was not very big, so it was unlikely that they would do that if the work was done simultaneously.
But thousands and thousands of primary school teachers had to be identified, and then trained, and then given the forms which would then be collected, packed into separate packets and sent to Calcutta where they would be manually counted by an army of young men and women in two or three large counting halls. They would not just count, but fill in the details in different forms in different sheets that would then be collated and over a period of time, we would be able to generate the information
that would form the basis of all planning and development projects and schemes in the country.
And who would organize the work? The district officers, of course. Only they could move through their districts and order the primary school teachers to do this work. So my first task was to talk to the district officers. As I travelled through the length and breadth of the state from one dusty, shabby
district town to another, I began to realize the value of the network—the bond that the IAS constituted. Most of the district officers were either a year or two senior or junior to me; but in every district I was received with warmth and great goodwill, and a ready agreement to do whatever was required of them for this huge task. In the evenings I was invariably invited by the District Magistrate or Deputy Commissioner to dinner at his house, where we spent some cheerful hours exchanging notes over simple fare, occasionally preceded by a few generous and convivial drinks.
Those were rather dangerous times; the movement which came to be called Naxalism had spread, not in all districts but in a number, and travelling by road at night, which was what I had to do to save time, was not always safe. But the district officers always ensured I had some protection with me; in one case, in the district of Birbhum where the Naxalites were particularly strong and had killed a number of local officers, the DM insisted that a police officer sit with me and the driver in the jeep I was using, with me sandwiched between the two, and with the police officer holding a drawn
revolver. He said I was not to argue, as that might just save my life. Nothing of course happened, but that was the kind of concern that they showed. The network again.
Let me say quite frankly that had it not been for these young IAS district magistrates and deputy commissioners the census of the state could not have been carried out, and I dare say this is just as true of all the other states in the country. It was their unquestioned authority that made it possible, and the sort of unspoken bond that they shared with me, one of the same breed. I have no doubt that bright young people who went out to do a similar gigantic task who were, let’s say, academics or
statisticians, would have never have been able to do it, and would then have prepared excellent reports on what went wrong.
The network included the subdivisional officers, not all of them IAS officers, but nonetheless very much a part of the system of authority of which the DM or DC was the centre. They helped organize the teachers, to hold the training camps (which meant they had to be trained first, which was what my two deputies and I did over some very exacting months) and then get their block development officers to collect and distribute the forms well in time, and then to get them all back, and package them in good order.
It was not, of course, all a bed of roses; we had some strong associations of primary school teachers, chiefly led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the CPI(M), and they were aggressive and demanding. The government of the day was of the second United Front of Leftist parties, a little—but only a little—more orderly than the first. The Chief Minister was Jyoti Basu, the CPI(M) leader, who was to all appearances dour and uncompromising, but was very astute and
sensitive to people’s reactions and responses. The menace of Naxalism was something he had to tackle, and it proved to be difficult, as the Naxals brought violence to the city, to Calcutta; first a traffic constable was killed in broad daylight, then another. Calcutta began to experience a kind of apprehension that bordered on terror.
It got to a point when passengers coming to Calcutta airport in the evenings would not leave in their taxis or cars till all of them were ready to go, and then a convoy would head fearfully towards the city along the completely deserted Eastern Metropolitan bypass, a new road then. It was understood that if one car stopped, all the others would stop as well. Only when the convoy got to Park Circus did cars go their different ways.
This being the kind of tension in Calcutta, one can well imagine what it was in the district towns and in the smaller townships and villages. And our work was in those regions, and of course in Calcutta as well. It was a formidable task, but one that the DMs and DCs and their officers got down to with determination and, where necessary, with some firmness, and the work was done.
Some district officers did tell me, ruefully, that in one or two areas they couldn’t vouch for the veracity of the count, as conditions were really very disturbed in those pockets; Naxals were on the prowl, and terrified school teachers may have, in those areas, returned earlier than they should have. But fortunately these were few, and the numbers involved not very many. We agreed we’d do a furtive recount in these places just to check the figures; not very correct in terms of data collection, I’m sure, but it was the best we could do.
The work of collating the enormous amount of information collected proceeded as the year went on in my office, far removed from the momentous events that were taking place in the state and in the country. In the state, then under President’s Rule again, the menace of Naxalism was tackled by the Governor, A.L. Dias, and by the Union Minister for Education, who was also Minister for West
Bengal Affairs, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, a brilliant barrister who had once been a minister in Dr B.C. Roy’s government, then dramatically resigned from it and from the Congress Party. He later rejoined the party when Indira Gandhi was building it up; they were personal friends, which helped.
They were assisted by the emergence of the Chatra Parishad, the youth wing of the Congress Party, which countered the political offensive of the Naxalites. From what one read in the papers there were skirmishes between the two and a number of Naxalites were killed. Slowly the Chatra Parishad, headed by two young men, Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi and Subrata Mukherjee, grew in strength, and the fear generated by the Naxal groups faded.
The year 1971 also saw, in its last month, the creation of a new country in the subcontinent,
planned and executed with surgical precision by Indira Gandhi. Units of the Indian Army swept into what was then East Pakistan, outthinking the huge army that Pakistan had stationed there and, after defeating it in a number of intensely fought encounters, forced it to surrender, and thus effectively dismembered Pakistan. Fighting alongside them was the Mukti Bahini, the freedom fighters of what became Bangladesh, and it was a heady moment when, in the capital of the new country, Dhaka, their national flag was raised and their new national anthem rang out—like our own, it too was a song whose words and music came from the peerless Rabindranath Tagore. He must surely be the only poet who has given two countries their national anthems.
The next year brought Indira Gandhi back to power with a strength that she never had till then; her power was supreme—she had created a new country and done it in spite of the warlike noises made by the United States, and at home there were huge crowds that saw her as the embodiment of Durga, their protector and deliverer. It was a sentiment that she craftily exploited to the full. On the strength
of her immense popularity and power a Congress government was voted into office in West Bengal, headed by Siddhartha Shankar Ray as Chief Minister.
I was getting a bit bored with the routine of the census work then, consisting as it did of overseeing the compilation of large amounts of demographic statistics. So when I was asked by Siddhartha Roy to join his personal secretariat I accepted the offer with alacrity. Within a year of my joining I had become Secretary to the Chief Minister, with a compact secretariat to oversee, handling all the papers and letters that came to the Chief Minister.
Files from different ministers I studied myself, and placed them before the Chief Minister with brief explanatory notes if the issue was complicated or not easily seen in the myriad notes and letters in the file.
This is when I began to see how a state worked, right from the nerve centre, so to speak. I was also Joint Secretary to the cabinet, and sat in on all the cabinet meetings, helping the Chief Secretary
record the decisions taken and then getting them approved by the Chief Minister. I found that the Chief Minister began to trust me with virtually every paper that came to him; he made it a point, however, to ensure that I was never involved in or privy to the political work he did.
That was one of the firm principles that Siddhartha Ray laid down concerning the manner in which his secretariat was to function. Another was that we were not to send him files from other ministers with ‘shadow files’ of our own, in which we would give our opinion on whatever proposal was being placed before him. Explanatory notes, meant to make reading a file simpler—something like a clear summary of the issue—were different, and often those were what we worked on. And while one of us would be present at all formal meetings in his room, no one was permitted in when he met
ministers individually, or the Chief Secretary.
This meant in specific terms that no one in the secretariat was at liberty to comment on a proposal or policy sent up for the Chief Minister’s approval. All one could do—and did—was to summarize the contents of the proposal or policy to save the Chief Minister time. In other words, the Chief
Minister’s secretariat did not become a sort of super-secretariat, the repository of power that it could have been. I found this a huge relief, because, while I was not the éminence grise that some others holding similar positions in other states had or were to become, I was able to see how government functioned, how policy was formulated, and above all, how the civil service and the political executive related to, and worked with, each other.
This was, now that I look back on those times, significant for more than just that reason. It was also the first time that I was able to see how a different set of IAS officers—all considerably senior to me —functioned. Between them and me there was no camaraderie as there was with the district officers; there was goodwill, to be sure, but also a little distance. I took that for granted, and so did they; the IAS was nothing if not strictly hierarchical.
And yet I did discover that there was a bond between all of them—a much looser, more nebulous bond perhaps, but one that was evident in their day-to-day dealings with one another. A Secretary would drop in to the Finance Secretary’s room and sort out some tangle with him that would