In the Service of Free India: Memoir of a Civil Servant

301 Pages·2021·3.707 MB·English

by  B D Pande

B.D. Pande (Bhairab Datt Pande) was the first person from Kumaon
and Garhwal division to pass the Indian Civil Service (ICS)
examination from London in 1938. In his thirty-nine years as a civil
servant, Pande held many important offices in the state and central
governments. He served as finance secretary, development
commissioner and food commissioner in Bihar; chairman of LIC at
then Bombay; and finally cabinet secretary to the Government of
India from 1972 to 1977. Pande was also the first person from
Uttarakhand to be appointed the governor of West Bengal and later
Punjab. In 2000, then President K.R. Narayanan conferred on him
the Padma Vibhushan for his meritorious service to the nation. He
was also honoured with a DLitt (honoris causa) by the Kumaon
University in 2006. He passed away peacefully on 2 April 2009.

In memory of Vimla Pande
CONTENTS
Introduction
Preface
1. My Family, Childhood and Education
2. Cambridge and the Civil Service Examination
3. The Bihar Years: District Postings
4. The Bihar Years: Patna
5. Delhi and Bombay: 1960–66
6. Patna, 1967 and Delhi, 1967–72
7. Delhi: Cabinet Secretary (1972–77)
8. Post-Retirement Years: 1977–81
9. Governor, West Bengal: 1981–83
10. Punjab: The Sikhs and the Hindus
11. Punjab: The Anandpur Sahib Resolution
12. Governor, Punjab: 1983–84
13. Punjab: 1984
14. Punjab: 1984 and After
Annexure I: Epilogue—20 April 1994, Ram Navami Day
Annexure II: Uttarakhand Paryavaran Shiksha Kendra
Annexure III: Epilogue: September 1999
Timeline
Introduction
T
his book will come as a surprise to those who knew my father.
After leaving Punjab in the wake of Operation Bluestar in
1984, my father came away to Almora deeply burdened. He
started writing, penning down what he had understood and
experienced in Punjab. He recalled the days of his childhood and
schooling, his career as an Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer that
began under the British and through the early years of
Independence, his years spent in Bihar and later Delhi, ending with
governorships in West Bengal and then Punjab. He was awarded the
Padma Vibhushan in 2000. Having been cabinet secretary during the
Emergency, there was never a shortage of journalists wanting his
opinions then and later. However, he chose never to talk about these
events in his lifetime, not even in private.
These memoirs were handwritten and filled two blank diaries,
with a third short addendum. As he says very clearly in his opening
paragraphs, they were written out of memory and were not based on
any written notes or records. The bulk of it was completed in 1986, a
short epilogue was added in 1994 along with photocopies of some
old documents he had come across in the library and found to be of
interest; and a second briefer one in 1999. His instructions, pasted
on each diary, were that the diaries were not to be opened ‘until five
years after my death or 1 January 2001, whichever is later’. He
passed away in 2009 at the age of ninety-two. It is now more than
ten years since his death and more than thirty years since the events
of 1984.
The sections on Punjab are contained in later chapters of this
book. They were written in April and May 1986, a couple of years
after Operation Bluestar. The whole manuscript is written in a sort of
stream of consciousness style. To make it easier for the reader, I
have taken the liberty of placing what was written in roughly
chronological order and divided it into chapters. I have only slightly
edited the manuscript, the language has not been tampered with,
and nothing has been added into the manuscript. The style remains
conversational and there are some digressions, given his writing
style. A few explanatory footnotes have been provided. The
handwriting is mostly clear and legible, although a few words took
some effort to decipher. I have not tried to verify anything written
here, except to check some places and names where possible, and
to give the correct reference to one of C.P. Snow’s books that he
mentions.
Born into a fairly conservative Kumaoni community, education—
as it so often has in India—lifted my father into the world of the civil
service. He was the first Kumaoni to join the ICS, and the first to
become a governor. He always retained a strong attachment to the
community and kept in touch with close relatives. Family, in many
ways, remained an anchor. He grew up under the care of a devoted
father who was ambitious about his son’s career. My father set off to
England in 1936, at the age of nineteen, with the intention of
appearing for the ICS exam, which required two years of study at an
English University. He qualified on his first attempt in 1938. He would
have been among the last few recruits into the service, what with the
disruption of the Second World War. In today’s world, international
travel is commonplace. In 1936, being an Indian in England would
have been a very different experience from what it is today, and we
get a glimpse of what it might have been like. Moreover, the war
clouds were already gathering. He qualified for the ICS just as the
Second World War broke out and he returned to India as an ICS
officer in 1939, on a ship under complete black out due to the war.
Thus began his long career of thirty-nine years as a civil servant
wherein he witnessed and partook in the building of a nation.
The ICS has been described (as my father quotes in these
notes) as ‘neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service’. It is equally known
for values of integrity, impartiality and merit. The Indian ICS officers,
by covenant, owed loyalty to the British Government. With
Independence, the same officers became an integral part of the
project of building a nation. After Independence, the ICS was
replaced by the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). My father
describes his own career as a movement along ‘the bureaucratic
escalator’, that is, progression based on seniority and merit. His
memories of the years spent in Bihar, and later Delhi, provide vivid
descriptions of the civil service life.
Altogether, he held a very large number of positions which are
briefly summarized in the timeline at the end of this book. The first
twenty years of his career were spent in Bihar—a time of hardwork,
optimism, friendships and a young family. The next nineteen years in
Delhi were far more stressful. He was appointed cabinet secretary in
1972 and retired from this post in 1977, making his tenure one of the
longest of any cabinet secretary in sovereign India. He was therefore
in this position when the Emergency was declared by then Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi. In 1981, he went as governor to West
Bengal, and in 1983 as governor to Punjab. He remained in Punjab
during Operation Bluestar—a military operation carried out in June
1984 at the order of the Prime Minister to establish control over the
Harmandir Sahib Complex in Amritsar and to capture armed
followers of the religious leader Bhindranwale. Immediately after, he
resigned and left for Almora. The events leading up to the
Emergency and Operation Bluestar are presented herein from a very
unique perspective.
Although my father had studied in Almora as a child, his links
with the place grew more tenuous. He had not made any particular
plans for his retirement (such as building a house in Delhi) and so
when he resigned from the post of governor, Punjab, he took the one
option that was immediately available—of returning to live in Almora
in the old family house, which had been vacant for several decades
then. As he points out, this was neither planned nor anticipated.
Perhaps he initially thought of it as a temporary residence. But
various factors contributed to keep my parents there for the rest of
their lives. They made of this old house a warm and welcoming
home which became a necessary stop for many visitors and was
much enjoyed by their grandchildren. Once again, without any
conscious effort on his part, he became chairperson of an NGO and
got involved with an environmental education programme, and with
the life of the hills in a very new and different way. Although only
briefly discussed in the annexures, this work has left an important
legacy.
The annexures also include some details relating to his family
history in Almora, based on old documents, including the schism that
developed in the community around various social matters.
In publishing these memoirs, I hope they would be of interest as
they bring out some of the challenges that faced civil servants, and
the commitment with which these were resolved, in the years
following Independence. The experience of the Community
Development programme still has important lessons for today’s
Panchayati Raj institutions. The Emergency and Operation Bluestar
remain important for our understanding of Indian history, and
perhaps some details might be of value to historians of modern
India.
An old Sufi saying that is used at several points in the
manuscript is ‘This too shall pass’, emphasizes the ephemeral
nature of all situations in human life. Towards the end of his life, my
father asked me more than once to suggest a good book on the
social history of India to him. Having lived a long life, he had
experienced some major and dramatic changes at a professional
level—through the political life of the nation, the economic
development of the country, social norms and values; and at a
personal level—with sons and daughter whose lives and choices
meandered into unexpected trajectories. In a small way, these
writings contribute to understanding the values with which an earlier
generation of bureaucrats had contributed to nation building, and at
a more personal level, the mixture of modernity and tradition that
(still) characterizes Indian lives, as well as the necessity of having
the ability to cope with change.
In conclusion, it needs to be said that no attempt has been
made to ensure political correctness or to change the tenor of what
was written, recognizing that we all speak the language of our own
times, and also to remain faithful to what was written down. Some
words used here have a rather different meaning now. For example,
‘terrorism’ today has very specific international connotations. It is
used in a more general sense here. While all opinions expressed