Jawhar Sircar, recently elevated to the Rajya Sabha by Trinamul, on Sunday compared the three Prime Ministers that he worked with as a civil servant and launched a scathing attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government on issues ranging from corruption and the rise of “omnipotent oligarchies” to the subservience of the bureaucracy “as courtesans”.
“Whenever I compare the three Prime Ministers (he has worked with), Mr (Atal Bihari Vajpayee) Eloquent, Dr. Manmohan Singh, whom I served rather closely, not eloquent, and the third person (Modi) — I won’t describe and leave it to you — only one has claimed that he would purge dishonesty from India and all that. But he is the one who has taken the maximum pains (not to),” Sircar said in a virtual address organised by Manthan, an international think tank based in Hyderabad.
The 69-year-old was speaking in a session titled “The State of Civil Services in India”.
Sircar, who retired as the Union culture secretary and was the Prasar Bharati CEO till 2016, alleged that important directorial positions in major private companies, “aided and assisted” by financial institutions, were determined on the basis of whether the person is useful to the Prime Minister or not.
Sircar accused Modi of running a one-man show, where civil servants are appointed or discarded at the will of one person or people close to him..
He added while political persons would pull strings to appoint civil servants close to them in posts they preferred earlier as well, the matter has become more “acute” now.
“During Dr Manmohan Singh’s period, any minister could have his swagger and say that this is my man and I want him... here, I want him there. Finished. But right now it's a one-man show,” said Sircar.
He alleged that Modi amended the TRAI Act only to remove legal hurdles in the way of appointing Nripendra Misra as the principal secretary to the Prime Minister. Misra is a former TRAI chairman and the Act, before its amendment, prohibited him from taking up a government job.
In his 42-year stint as a bureaucrat, Sircar worked in the Bengal government before taking central deputation to Delhi, during which he served under Vajpayee, Singh and Modi.
Sircar resigned as the CEO of the Prasar Bharati in November 2016, owing to his differences with the Modi government. In one of his Facebook posts — one he wrote after being nominated to the Upper House of Parliament — Sircar said that he decided to resign since he couldn’t “carry on with PM Modi’s Hindutva, his autocratic style of functioning and the economic mess he is creating”.
Sircar is a prominent member of a section of India’s civil society firmly standing its ground against the saffron regime and its alleged machinations against the core elements of India’s ethos, such as plurality and democracy.
This was one of the primary reasons why Trinamul chief and Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee nominated him to the Rajya Sabha.
In the address on Sunday, Sircar said that India has moved from “liberalisation to oligarchisation”. Taking a dig at the BJP government at the Centre, he said that India is ruled by “omnipotent oligarchies” these days and that the government of India has become “much more impersonal” in the past few years.
Elaborating on this, Sircar said the Union government’s recent decision to monetise public assets is actually the Modi regime’s initiative to “repay” the people who gave the BJP money during the polls.
“From liberalisation, we went to the loot and scoot regime, where people like Mehul Choksi and Nirav Modi would loot the nation and scoot.... Now there is a schematic handover of key assets and key infrastructure to a handful of people whose wealth has multiplied under the Modi regime,” Sircar said.
Invoking the conscience of Indian civil servants, Sircar said: “We joined willingly as courtiers. But we must not continue as courtesans.”
He referred to two incidents to explain what happens when civil servants fail to perform their duties or go overboard.
First, he referred to the district magistrate of Hathras in Uttar Pradesh as a “criminal”, who colluded with a “terrible” administration. Sircar highlighted how the district administration was busy stopping journalists and arresting Muslim scribes instead of taking necessary action.
Second, he spoke of the recent incident of Karnal in Haryana where, in a video, the SDM was purportedly found directing policemen to “break heads” of anyone who wanted to cross barriers in the wake of the farmer protests.
In both cases and others like these, the court must take umbrage, Sircar said. He believes none of the governments in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, or the Centre will take action against these civil servants and hence the judiciary must be “hyperactive”.
