THE high turnover of bureaucrats holding important positions in Punjab is a manifestation of the PTI’s uneasy relationship with the bureaucracy, which the government appears to see as the main hurdle in the implementation of its vision for the country’s most populous and politically important province. That the government has just brought in its seventh inspector general of police and fifth chief secretary in three years of its rule in the province, over and above countless administrative shake-ups at the district and departmental level, shows that it is still struggling to find a working arrangement it can be comfortable with. This is not an illegitimate desire. Yet the pace at which it has been shuffling civil servants is counterproductive and has widened the trust deficit between the ruling politicians and bureaucracy. This is affecting public service delivery, the very reason for making these wholesale changes. The chief minister and his government are not the only ones to blame for the insecurity of tenure of the bureaucrats and police officials. These changes are mostly ordered by Islamabad, reflecting the federal government’s strong but impractical desire to remotely control the province. In recent months, scores of police officials and bureaucrats have been reassigned to please the PTI lawmakers.

The latest top-order police and administrative purge is believed to be a kind of compromise between the centre and province as pressures are building on the ruling party to deliver on its promises ahead of the 2023 elections. Nevertheless, few expect the new police boss and chief secretary to last very long in their jobs in the given circumstances. It therefore is hard to not feel empathy for the civil servants and police officials who have seen enormous political pressure from different sides in an environment of deep uncertainty surrounding their tenures under the present political dispensation. A couple of months ago, the Punjab Assembly approved a controversial bill that the provincial legislature could punish officers found guilty of breaching the privilege of assembly members. The state of constant friction between politicians facing public pressure to perform and civil servants with career concerns is not an unusual one. But blaming the police force and the bureaucracy for turning in less-than-optimal performances in Punjab as an excuse to reshuffle their ranks every few months will not help the ruling party. It is simple logic: no one is going to take their job seriously unless their tenures are secure.

Published in Dawn, September 9th, 2021