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September 1, 2002
REVIEWS: Mandarins in the balance
The history of bureaucracy is as old as recorded history of any other human activity. Historians and sages agree that management of collective activity gave birth to bureaucracy long before mankind started haggling about a system of government best suited to its genius. In that sense, bureaucracy predates democracy, which is considered the best of all the imperfect systems of governance afflicting mankind. The Chinese, with a near-monopoly on antiquity, claim that their system of career mandarins, recruited on merit through open competition, is at least 5,000 years old.
In our conventional wisdom, however, bureaucracy as we know it so well, began only with the subjugation of South Asia by the British colonialists. This may well be true, as far as our much- puffed up ‘superior’ civil service is concerned. ICS, that veritable brain-child of Lord Macaulay who sought to clone a ‘desi and brown’ version of the white, starch-collared and stiff upper-lipped pucca saheb and succeeded in doing that, was the lure of every educated youth in British India. And even in an independent Pakistan, the CSPwalas (anointed successors to the ICS) were venerated as God’s avatar amongst lesser mortals, and worshipped as such.
The colonial masters had the ‘brown’ sahebs’ work cut out for them. They were there to serve the Crown and watch over the natives like hawks. Service it indeed was, but only to the masters who recruited them for their mission. The masters devised, in their wisdom, a near-perfect and water-tight system of recruitment for these servants of the crown. They set up what was, euphemistically, called the Public Service Commission to handpick the most suitable youth to serve their imperial interests and administer the unruly wogs on behalf of the king and the crown.
Merit was but only one of the many criteria used by the colonial overlords to rope in talented young Indians into their service. A greater emphasis was laid on unquestioning loyalty to the crown. Therefore, preference in recruitment was given to the sons and scions of those — rajas, nawabs, landed aristocracy, et al — who had established credentials of fealty to the crown. Merit was often sacrificed for the sake of enrolling people of proven loyalty.
This tradition of non-merit weightage was passed on to the crown’s successor states in 1947. Pakistan inherited a lesser parcel of land than India but a twice more arrogant landed aristocracy. The spirit as well as the format of civil service remained mired in the colonial concept of loyalty to the masters, first and foremost. So, there was no break with the colonial tradition.
So formidable was this tether with the past that civil servants in Pakistan continued to pride themselves on their perceived role of the ruling elite’s watchdogs, and denigrated the people in whose name they were recruited and whom they were expected to serve. Successive regimes in Pakistan, found a valuable tool of exploitation in the bureaucrats. They became an essential perk of political power.
Bangladesh was spawned out of Pakistan’s womb as a result of an internal haemorrhage but still carried almost all the genes of the mother-state, in both form and spirit. A.M.M. Shawkat Ali, a civil servant (CSP) of the 1966 vintage, who was recruited by Pakistan but whose services were largely employed for Bangladesh after 1971, has painstakingly compiled a history of the evolution of Bangladesh Public Service Commissions to record the growth of civilian bureaucracy in that country.
Shawkat Ali’s well-researched and well-documented thesis is a labour of love. He has gone to extraordinary lengths to back up his narrative with all the relevant archives, tables and graphs, bibliographies, annexes and indices, to trace the course followed by Bangladesh to accord that centrality to the role of bureaucracy in state-craft which had taken firm roots in Pakistan before the birth of Bangladesh, and not necessarily for the good of the country.
The author remonstrates that although the state of Bangladesh opted, constitutionally, for two public service commissions, instead of one, yet the commissions’ advice was more often than not ignored and spurned by the country’s leadership. One could not agree more with him that the collective wisdom-the lore-of the commissions was not properly utilised , or benefited from, by the country’s political masters who invariably thought of themselves as the fount of all wisdom.
He cites the example of the veterans of the Bangladesh freedom movement who were given extra weightage in recruitment to government service. The veterans were inducted on the basis of interviews only, while the regulars also had to take a written test. That led to decline in both the morale and quality of service. The “homogeneous character” of civil service, the author rues, was lost very early in the national life of Bangladesh because of this discriminatory system of induction.
Curiously, the system of weightage for the veterans continues to flourish, against the advice of the commissions, in the second generation, too. Discrimination, as such, is becoming institutionalized in that country. Even the progeny of the ‘veterans’ is being accorded preferential induction into government services, just like their fathers, against better judgment.
So, unsurprisingly but sadly, independent Bangladesh carried all the wrong and infectious inheritance from Pakistan. These ills have been compounded in their intensity with the passage of years. Shawkat Ali does not single out anyone — individuals, parties or institutions — for aggravating the problem for the new-born country but the message is clearly embedded between the lines.
The political and military leadership of that country too failed the expectations of its people and have corrupted those very institutions essential to anchor a civilized society in the modern sense.
Extraordinary weightage is just one such instances, at par with the damning institution of quota in services in Pakistan which has been, entirely, at the expense of quality of service.
In a nutshell, the lure of power and pelf has proved to be a far more enduring factor in the evolution — or lack of it — of civil service and its bedrock institutions in both Pakistan and Bangladesh. The twain may have separated in form but in spirit their sociological moorings remain the same. The book should, more aptly, have been called ‘the lure of the mandarins’ and not their lore.
Writer’s email: k_k_ghori@hotmail.com
The lore of the mandarins: towards a non-partisan public service in Bangladesh
By A.M.M. Shawkat Ali
The University Press Limited, Red Crescent Building, 114 Motijheel C/A P.O.Box 2611, Dhaka 1000, Bangladesh. Email:
upl@bangla.net
Website: www.uplbooks.com
ISBN 984 05 1632 9
310pp. Tk495
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