THE recent change of government in Punjab has triggered another round of musical chairs, with the provincial bureaucracy once again being upturned based on the whims of its new political overlords. Merely hours after the new regime led by Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi took over, heads had started to roll in the province’s police force, where ‘undesirable’ police officers were either placed as OSD or had their services returned to the federal government. The changes were not unanticipated: the PTI had made it clear after the July 17 by-polls in Punjab that it would make short work of all police officers involved in forcefully subduing its long march on the capital in May.

The police force purge is just the start. More transfers and reshuffles in other branches of the provincial administration are bound to follow as the new government puts down roots and seeks out willing officers to ‘facilitate’ its political plans. To be fair, the new regime is merely following suit: the recently ousted Punjab government led by PML-N’s Hamza Shehbaz was just as complicit, as was the government before it, and all other governments before that. The unfortunate reality is that the executive has lost much of its independence to other branches of the state. Senior bureaucrats’ willingness to ‘align’ their interests with that of political parties (or the establishment) has certainly not helped, resulting in the steady erosion of the independence and standing of the civil services. The result, as we see in Punjab, is stasis: no officer is willing to take critical decisions while they remain unsure about their fate. Unfortunately, with the rewards of loyalty and subservience quite high and the potential cost of abandoning professionalism for politics low, it appears that this ‘problem’ is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. Civil servants themselves need to introspect and consider whether they actually want the legacy of the civil service as an independent, historically prestigious institution tainted by its indecent subservience to external control. The establishment and the political leadership, too, must realise that it is rapidly hollowing out the state with its constant interference in the executive’s functioning and control. The system must change to provide greater security of tenure to professional officers who simply want to focus on discharging their responsibilities, and to create greater disincentives and penalties to weed out civil servants who prioritise their own interests over their responsibility to the state.

Published in Dawn, August 1st, 2022