The right to dissent is central to the idea of a democracy. This is true not just for ordinary citizens, but equally for civil servants in the employ of government. I believe that a democracy guarantees to civil servants not only the right, but even enjoins on them the duty, to dissent in response to the call of their conscience.
In my two decades in the civil service, obedience was repeatedly upheld as the paramount virtue of a civil servant in a democracy. It was commonly advocated that the duty of a civil servant was to obey orders of political masters without questioning these dictates. Officers who dissented were not just inconvenient, but were seen to be stepping outside the boundaries laid down for the permanent unelected executive in a parliamentary democracy.
Common practice
But I believe that the duty of obedience is at most only to lawful official publicly espoused objectives of the government, not to unlawful directives of elected political or administrative superiors. Let me illustrate. The official position of governments is that legislated land reform laws should be faithfully implemented. But the unstated orders of political superiors are almost invariably that powerful landowners should not be dispossessed of their land holdings. Whenever we tried to distribute ceiling surplus agricultural land to the landless, or restore land illegally expropriated from tribal land holders, Ministers and local elected representatives would instruct us to stop implementing progressive land reform laws. These orders were patently illegal.
The same chasm between the stated legal policies and the actual will of the executive can be found everywhere. The stated policies are for fair and non-partisan action in communal, caste and gender violence, but the unstated political or administrative directives often advocate biased action against vulnerable and oppressed castes, religious and ethnic minorities and women. The law enjoins respect for human fundamental rights, but there is often open and unapologetic political endorsement even at the highest levels of the executive for torture and encounter killings. The law makes corruption a criminal offence, but in practice this is endorsed as the grease that makes the giant sluggish state machinery function.
Reality is different
In fact, if officers are faithful to the stated policies and laws of government, then the officer will then be bound to implement land reforms and other progressive legislation, to protect oppressed and dispossessed minorities, castes and women, fight corruption and respect human rights. But the reality is that in obeying and implementing in letter and spirit these stated lawful policies, the officer will frequently be disobeying the unlawful goals of members of the superior executive. Civil servants who choose to obey these unlawful directives cannot claim ethical defence in the duty of obedience. Far from it being their duty to obey, their obligation is to resist and actually disobey these orders. Only in so doing will they safeguard democracy and the Constitution.
In the early, relatively idealistic decades after Independence, the civil service organised relief camps for millions of refugees uprooted by the country's bloody Partition, and organised their rehabilitation. It also succeeded in restraining divisive and communal organisations and politics, as a result of which the troubled and wounded country was remarkably free of communal riots after Gandhi's assassination in the hands of extremist Hindutva radicals.
This era of communal peace endured for more than a decade, until the Jabalpur riots in the early 1961. Fault lines had of course already begun to appear — such as when the District Magistrate Nair in Ayodhya opened the locks of the Babri Masjid for Hindu worship in 1949, laying the foundations for a communal dispute which was to tear apart the country three decades later — but these were relatively rare. The country could still rely on the higher civil service to act without communal partisanship in religious and ethnic disputes, despite other failures — including growing corruption.
Spectacular mass betrayal of the civil service occurred during the Emergency imposed on the country in 1975. A judicial commission led by Justice Shah which later investigated these traumatic and shameful 18 months of suspended freedoms, famously observed that when the civil service was asked to bend, it crawled.
In later decades of freedom, the same failure to resist illegal orders growingly marked official behaviour in later hours of major national challenges, such as: the 1984 massacre of more than 3,000 Sikhs in the wake of Mrs. Gandhi's assassination in the hands of her Sikh bodyguards; failures to hold criminally accountable the Union Carbide in the poisonous gas leak which killed thousands in Bhopal in 1984; the slaughter of unarmed Muslim youth at Hashimpura by paramilitary soldiers in 1987; the riots in Bhagalpur in 1989; the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and the slaughter that followed in its wake in Mumbai; and the state-sponsored massacre in Gujarat in 2002; the active complicity of the permanent executive in the denial of human rights, fake encounter killings and suppression by brute force of separatist and left-wing insurgencies; and burgeoning collaborative corruption with private industry and politicians.
Bureaucratic betrayal
As the years passed, greater and greater sections of the civil services have capitulated and obeyed illegal instructions to deny people their constitutional rights, including to life, liberty and democratic dissent, and to fail to extend equal protection of the law to people because of their religious or ethnic identities or economic powerlessness. The unsung and mostly unknown heroes from within the bureaucracy who swam bravely against the current, refusing to obey unjust and illegal orders, could never gather sufficient critical mass for the permanent bureaucracy to act as a decisive bulwark against divisive and communal politics, corruption and injustice.
The civil service must carry therefore historical blame for failures of the state to extend equal protection of the law to religious and ethnic minorities and to impoverished people in general. Unless it reclaims its fundamental duty of conscience, it must relinquish its claim to the helm of governance in the country.
