A landmark judgment by the supreme court on October 31 (the 138th birthday of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the father of the all-India services) is the bitter medicine that politicians and babus should have co-created on their own.

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Why they didn’t, and how that fathered their cozy triad with corporate scamsters, is a matter of common observation.

But it took a bunch of 80-odd indignant bureaucrats and generals to push the apex court into the arena.

The result is the apex court order which, if tracked doggedly in the social media, can ensure that India’s battered steel frame stands up and be counted.

That said, it is important to remember that the SC hasn’t walked in to save bureaucrats the inconvenience of transfer.

The motive, driven by the aam aadmi, emanates out of Article 32 vice public good and enforceability of rights.
 
Between the lines, the SC has told us, the distraught citizenry, unsure as we are whether India’s babus are public servants or personal servants, that we have something to be optimistic about: the derided civil servant needn’t cower before the political master.
 
Specifics in the ruling

There are two catalysts in this order:

1. Security of tenure
2. A paper trail to mark all decisions
 
Security of tenure, as lead petitioner TSR Subramanian (former cabinet secretary) and others have successfully argued, can come via creating/strengthening ‘civil services boards’ (CSBs), headed by the cabinet secretary in the centre and chief secretaries respectively.
 
These boards, which the SC now wants up and running in three months, exist in New Delhi and some state capitals; but they will now have a more elaborate mandate to recommend to the head of government which officer among three all-India services, or state and central services, is the best one to hold a given position of public importance.
 
Of course, it will then be for the prime minister or the chief minister to accept or reject the concerned CSB’s proposals, but his or her reasons for overruling will be recorded on paper; thus ending whimsicality in recent cases like Durga Shakti Nagpal in UP and Sanjeev Chaturvedi and Ashok Khemka in Haryana.
 
The states and the union of India are also expected to specify requisite tenures for officers in field formations and the secretariat.

Surely, administrative flexibility can merit anyone’s transfer superceding the stated norm, but the sheer existence of a two-tier process and reasoning being recorded on paper will, no doubt, erode the overriding importance of a politician’s whim.

This simple structure, which the SC wants armed with adequate independence, is to ensure that at least officers in the rank of joint secretary and above in the government of India, heads of police and forest forces across the country, income tax and customs seniors, and other important custodians of public property like district magistrates and superintendents of police aren’t outright puppets dancing to a political remote.
 
Having said that, the order does not accept the petitioners’ suggestion that CSBs can have two retired civil servants too. Rather than allowing these boards to become another sinecure for superannuated babus, the SC has opened the doors wider. This, one hopes, will enable non-IAS practitioners to serve on the CSBs too.
 
The second part of Thursday’s order pertains to amending something called called ‘3 (3)’ in the Civil Services Conduct Rules, 1964.
 
With this, raging controversies like the one where former coal secretary PC Parakh acted on behalf of the PM but has now been humiliated and persecuted are being addressed.
 
So, each instruction, including oral ones, shall have to be recorded including the political and business interest being served therein!
 
Much of this exists in the rule book thanks to the committee on prevention of corruption headed by late K Santhanam on the Conduct Rules for Government servants and the all-India services rules.

It’s just that an SC direction, including that there should be a civil services act, gives this pious intent some legal teeth.
 
Alignment with RTI

Of great importance is the apex court’s observation that mere recording of every instruction will align with the Right to Information, 2005, giving them or a subsequent enquirer the genesis of everything that transpired in a decision.
 
“The judgment reconfirms how the Constitution of India is alive and kicking,” exclaims Subramanian. “It is a fundamental reform which government should have been doing on its own. (But) now that the court had to direct them, they are not going to like at all. I expect the filibuster to start!”

The danger only increases because the import of Thursday’s decision isn’t confined to the three all-India services, but all central services, state services, even public-sector units where government has a stake above a threshold.
 
That said, Subramanian expects the specificity of Thursday’s direction to add up in another extremely important matter of citizen interface with the police.

Here, Prakash Singh, a distinguished retired IPS officer, has procured SC’s direction on police reforms for over six years, but states have been pussy footing on implementing the directions.

On his part, Singh, who was a co-petitioner along with Subramanian and the others before he withdrew fearing conflict of interest, looked amused that IAS officers, who consider themselves a notch above the IPS and the rest of babudom, have had to turn to the apex court for protection from the netas!