New Delhi: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” said celebrated Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera.
The merit of a circular issued by the Narendra Modi government on October 17 to all the ministries, which has since been circulating widely on social media for its shock value, fits perfectly around Kundera’s words.
The circular has a categorical ask: Nominate officers of the rank of joint secretaries/director/deputy secretary till the gram panchayat level in all the 765 districts of the country to deploy them as “district rath prabharis (special officers)” between November 20, 2023 and January 25, 2024 to “showcase/celebrate the achievements of the last nine years” of the Modi government.
On October 21, former secretary in the Union government E.A.S. Sarma wrote to the Election Commission of India (ECI) to intervene at once and revoke the order. “To the best of my knowledge, the above instructions were issued when the model code of conduct had already come into force and, as such, they amount to its brazen infringement, as they place the NDA government at an advantage vis-à-vis the political parties in opposition, amounting to misuse of government machinery for activity that will influence elections,” he said.
Since all ministries, including the defence ministry, have issued orders to nominate officials to be ‘Rath Prabharis’ for the BJP to promote its government in the run-up to the polls, the senior bureaucrat also said, “It is a matter of serious concern that officers of the Defence Forces should be mis-deployed for showcasing the NDS government’s achievements. It may not be appropriate in the long run.”
By mid-day, former IAS officer M.G. Devasahayam also wrote to the Election Commission endorsing Sarma’s letter. The Election Commission is yet to react to these letters.
Former cabinet secretary B.K. Chaturvedi told The Wire, “This is unprecedented. I have not seen any such thing in my entire civil service career. It will be seen as politicisation of civil and defence services. The government has publicity departments whose job it is to publicise its work. Using senior civil servants and defence personnel in special campaigns is improper in the context of impending elections in the states to be followed by the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.”
Former member of the Planning Commission N.C. Saxena also said, “[I’ve] never seen such a publicity programme involving civil servants. It is blurring the line between civil service and politics. On the one hand all data systems which assess performance, like NSSO and NFHS, are being undermined as seen in the recent resignation of the head of NFHS. On the other such programmes are being created to publicise government performance.”
Reacting to the October 17 circular, Congress spokespersons like Jairam Ramesh and Pawan Khera took to X (formerly Twitter) on October 21 to question the Modi government’s action. A day later, party president Mallikarjun Kharge wrote to the prime minister “on the blatant politicisation taking place of civil servants and soldiers who must at all times be kept independent and non-political”.
“It is a clear violation of the Central Civil Services (Conduct) Rules, 1964, which directs that no government servant shall take part in any political activity. While it is acceptable for government officers to disseminate information, to make them “celebrate” and “showcase” achievements blatantly turns them into political workers of the ruling party,” Kharge wrote in his letter.
He added that soldiers becoming “marketing agents for government schemes” would count as a “dangerous step towards [the] politicisation of the armed forces”.
For the Modi Govt, all agencies, institutions, arms, wings, and departments of the government are now officially ‘Pracharaks’ !
In view of protecting our democracy and our Constitution, it is imperative that the orders which would lead to the politicising of Bureaucracy and our… pic.twitter.com/t9hq0N4Ro4
— Mallikarjun Kharge (@kharge) October 22, 2023
It seems like the Congress party is remembering a history that the BJP is intent on forgetting.
The history
If independent India’s political history is of any value, Prime Minister Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), by dint of that circular, have only thrown at today’s India “the struggle of memory against forgetting”.
Let’s begin with the memory. On June 12, 1975, the Allahabad high court famously found the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, guilty of misusing official machinery in the Congress party’s election campaign, leading to her disqualification from contesting any election for six years in a row.
“The charge raised against her was that she had made use of the services of Yashpal Kapoor, the Congress gofer and her most important aide in the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, to ‘further her election prospects,, thus breaking an electoral rule that forbade the use of state employees for private gain,” wrote Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil in India’s First Dictatorship – The Emergency (1975-77). The authors went on to also highlight, “There was a second trespass: Mrs Gandhi had also used state employees, this time Uttar Pradesh officials, to build the rostrums for her (election) rallies.”
Indira Gandhi. Photo: Public.Resource.Org/Flickr CC BY 2.0
That judgment day also came as a double whammy for Indira Gandhi and her coterie because on that same June day, the Congress party took a drubbing in the crucial Gujarat elections. The Congress (I) lost 140 of the 182 seats in those polls to the Janata Morcha, and thereby lost power for the first time in that state. “Mrs Gandhi had run a strident campaign, staying in the state for eleven days and addressing 119 meetings. It was rare for a prime minister to take such keen interest in state politics, but the odd circumstances had demanded it: a massive wave of protest in Ahmedabad and other Gujarati cities had prompted the resignation of incumbents and the calling of fresh elections, offering the Congress the one chance it had to demonstrate its popular support and discredit the extra-parliamentary movement,” wrote Jaffrelot and Anil.
By his own admission, Modi, then a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) pracharak, “risked his life” to “work wholeheartedly for restoring democracy in the country”. His website says, “…in fact Gujarat became role model for many who were against Emergency. It was the Navanirman movement of Gujarat, which made Congress realize that at least in Gujarat, their lust for power won’t last.”
Also read: Narendra Modi’s Political Strategy Lies in the Constant Use of Self-Image in the Religious Context
The Modi government’s recent circular, however, is an indication that his regime is doing more forgetting than remembering of those times. Take into account also Modi’s week-long jaunt to campaign in a state election difficult for his party – the recent Karnataka polls. Akin to Indira of 1975, Modi addressed 19 rallies and six road shows, but his party was still routed, as Indira’s was.
A retired senior bureaucrat, who handled several elections and is now a member of the Constitutional Conduct Group but wants to remain anonymous, said, “It is shocking that the Centre had issued such a circular at a time when model code of conduct (MCC) is in place in four election-bound states where BJP is facing elections and the 2024 parliamentary elections are just a few months away. It is a blatant violation of the Constitutional norm.” He also underlined, “Looking at the scale of misuse of power that comes across from the Modi government’s circular, what Mrs Gandhi did in 1971 comes across as a minor offence and even then our judiciary rightly stood up against violation of the Constitution.”
“It was more a technical error, a ‘peccadillo’ as the papers put it, for Kapoor had begun working on Mrs Gandhi’s campaign on January 7 1971 but had left his government position only six days later, remaining a state employee in the official records until 25 January,” Jaffrelot and Anil had underlined in their book. The duo had also pointed out, “The stakes (of the judgment) were at once small and large: small because of the nature of offence, and large because of its implications.”
In the coming days, as the election fever only rises, political parties will likely rake this circular up against the Modi government and the BJP, with some or the other even going to the extent of filing a petition or two in court. Here, it is worth jogging one’s memory that the Allahabad high court order debarring Indira Gandhi from contesting elections had come after four years of hearings. Rumours were abound then that a lot of pressure and enticement were bestowed by her party emissaries on Justice Jag Mohan Lal Sinha to deliver a favourable judgment. The judge stood by the Constitution, but it nevertheless brought on India the Emergency.
Senior Supreme Court lawyer Sanjay Hedge, however, sees a fine line in the circular drawn between a party diktat on government officials and a government’s order to them to run an official programme. “Despite the politically fraught nomenclature, at the end of the day the yatra is a government programme and government servants are being nominated for coordination. Legally it cannot be invalid.”
Hedge also thinks the Indira Gandhi analogy is misplaced here. “Her election was set aside by the Allahabad high court because an individual government servant, Yashpal Kapoor, had for a few days been her election agent despite being in government service. The Allahabad judgment was set aside by the Supreme Court.”
Aside from the Kapoor instance, as Jaffrelot and Anil had pointed out, the high court had also taken into account the use of UP government employees in election work.
In this poll season, the ball is certainly first in the Election Commission’s court to rise up to the challenge of the “struggle of memory against forgetting”. In its case this is of utmost significance – considering it would not only mean upholding the constitutional norms of ‘the world’s largest democracy’, which is among its primary duties, but also affirming its independence from the government of the day, a constitutional propriety it must adhere to.
