The Insider’s View: Memoirs of a Public Servant

186 Pages·2012·0.91 MB·English

by  Javid Chowdhury

JAVID CHOWDHURY
The Insider’s View
Memoirs of a Public Servant
Contents
Dedication
Preface
1. Return to My Roots
2. The Learning Years
3. The Terrain of Field Administration
4. Flashback from the Field: 1974 to 1978
5. The Changing Face of Public Administration
6. Caring for the Civil Services Family: 1996 to 1997
7. Orphaned Economic Laws
8. The Securities Scam
9. The Rogues’ Gallery
10. The Russian Connection
11. Unending Bofors: Some Aspects
12. Treasures from Sleuthing
13. In the World of Finance
14. The New Theology
15. National Economic Security
16. Time in the Health Sector: 1999 to 2002
17. Gujarat: Societal Dynamics
18. Discharge of Rajdharma: 2002
19. Communalism? What is That?
20. Grassroots Political Workers
21. A Civil Servant’s Icons
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
For Shama, who had a passion for crafting the right word
to capture the human experience—it is sad that she left too
early to see this.

And for Rishad and Shaheen, who may dip into this and
discover some not-so familiar ideas from a universe
different from the one they engage with now.
Preface
Launching upon this odyssey of my professional life, I’ve wondered about people who pen their
memoirs. Those whose decisions set off a chain of momentous events often seek to write hard-core
autobiographies to record their contribution to posterity. These charmed men and women are few.
What about the experiences of many others that reflect the slow, imperceptible percolation of new
ideas of change in the consciousness of society? Are their journeys less worth recording than the
milestones of history? My perception is that the socioeconomic trickle that percolates through the
cracks of human understanding constitutes the principal catalyst for the evolution in societal
consciousness. More often than not, the socioeconomic dynamics set up the compelling circumstances
and the State responds to those impulses by taking concrete governmental initiatives. These memoirs
are an affirmation of this understanding of the processes of social and economic change. In this, I
recall my years as a public servant in the backdrop of the transforming society and economy in India.
The course of the socio-economic processes that are changing our society, as seen through my
personal prism during my professional career, is what I propose to recall in my memoirs.
I realize that, while I have had an interesting professional life, there are any number of people who
have had reasonably interesting lives. I may not have been at the centre of many historic events.
However, I would venture to claim that as a senior civil servant, I have often occupied reasonably
key positions in the apparatus of governance, for close to four decades. By virtue of that, I have held a
vantage point to observe the national scene in these eventful decades. While the events unfolded,
quite often I was the government functionary, standing on the edge of the frame and converting them
into government decisions. It is to record how society pushed and pulled over that eventful period,
starting in the mid-sixties, that I place my thoughts on paper.
Over my four decades’ career the impact of such far-reaching socio-economic changes is starkly
evident in the process of empowerment of the Dalits and intermediate castes in the last five decades.
As we started our post-Independence journey from a semi-feudal society, there were large areas that
required social re-engineering. In the course of time, the intermediate castes began to recognize the
power of the vote and started consolidating this power. The resulting flux was conducive for the
intermediate castes to assert themselves in democratic politics. The situation was ripe for a social
upheaval; politics led to the inevitable empowerment of the intermediate castes.
Inter-community relations have also been marked by violent confrontation in the post-Independence
period. Unfortunately, the bitter circumstances of Partition still cast a shadow on the Hindu and
Muslim communities in the new India. The roots of these tensions are embedded deep in the psyche of
the two communities, and often elude rational scrutiny. Tragically, the emotional space of our
citizenry has been wastefully occupied by such inter-community stresses and strains.
It is these impressions of the macro-level social processes—a mosaic of fact, memory and
judgment—that I will set out in the memoirs. I believe, that my recollections of the eventful past five
decades could reveal something that is of value to those interested in the country’s contemporary
history. The approach to the recording of these memoirs is in part anecdotal, and in part an analysis of
key contemporary social and economic issues. Since significant social change is always against the
existing grain, the examination of issues will necessarily throw up some contrarian views. Each
anecdote recalled in the memoir attempts to illuminate a facet of this evolving socio-economic
reality.
1
Return to My Roots
I come from what can be described as a mixed background. My father was a Bengali from what is
now Bangladesh; my mother was from the undivided Bombay state. I was born in a small town—
Khambat—in what is now Gujarat state. In that sense I am a Gujarati, though I have not taken
permission of the Chief Minister to claim so! I grew up in Dehra Dun in the erstwhile Uttar Pradesh;
went to college in Delhi; and served much of my career in the Gujarat state cadre of the Indian
Administrative Service (IAS). It would clearly be very difficult for me to confine myself to one
parochial identity.
A REPLANTED SAPLING
Despite being an original son of the soil, my first extended stay in Gujarat was after I joined service.
Many aspects of the scene in Gujarat came to me as a great discovery. In some ways I suffered the
root-shock of a replanted sapling in leaving my home in Dehra Dun. Nadiad Prant, where I was first
posted, was an endless expanse of level farmlands, dull brown in the fallow season. This was a
different world from the lush foliage I had all around me in Dehra Dun. My father was a scientist in
the Forest Research Institute, located in an idyllic estate outside the town. The Englishmen, who had
built the township, quite plainly had a deep respect for their pristine surroundings. Each building—
whether for the research institute or for residential purposes—was carefully located, ensconced
between the native trees and shrubs. The house and the surrounding vegetation was all of one piece;
nature could not complain that it had been violated. The house had vast expanses of lawn surrounded
by thick clusters of trees. One side overlooked a nullah, which was pure and largely untouched.
Beyond it was the shallow spread of the Tons, a seasonal river. And beyond that were the Himalayan
foothills on which sat Rajpur, and still higher up, Mussoorie. An all-pervading serenity was ever-
present. Nature in its untouched form was so much our normal surroundings that, perhaps, we took it
for granted. Later, when I arrived in Nadiad Prant on my first posting, after the rabi crop had been
harvested, the endless and featureless vista of dull brown fields deeply disoriented my mindscape.
In my later years, with the growing work stress, at one stage I came to feel the need to—if I may
use that expression—‘still’ my mind. What could be better than the yogic exercise of meditation? The
simple practice of stilling the mind upon a steady image, without any judgment or possessiveness,
came to my assistance. Unfortunately, I have never been blessed with any spiritual faith of any variety
whatsoever. My values, to the extent that they exist, are entirely of the contingent type. In fact, I have
always envied those within my circle who have been touched by some spiritual experience. In any
case, if I took to some simple form of meditation, what would I set my mind on? Unbelievably, when I
began to practise meditation, the picture that spontaneously loomed up in the calm of my mind was a
scene from my Dehra Dun days that has haunted me over the years. Past the nullah that I have
described, there was a narrow kuccha path winding through a thick plantation around the spur of the
hill, which finally arrived at a broad flood plain that gently drained into the Tons river. We often took
this route when we went to fish for fingerlings in the river. And as I meditated, my mind spread over
the widening flood plain, with its scattered ber shrubs, with a few rounded stones littered around, and
with the Tons twisting its way in the distance, a gentle hum in the background. It was that quiet scene
that set me at peace with myself and one which continues to serve me whenever I feel the need to
disengage from self-created pressures. That moment of peace seemed to capture all that I longed for.
When I relive the past, my mind invariably settles on that flood plain, gently merging into the slow-
flowing Tons.
MY PRIVATE LIBRARY
Exposure to Gujarat was, in many other ways also, novel for me. I was struck by the ever-restless
Gujarati, busy with this or that practical activity. In those days, if Gujarati youngsters went for higher
education, the preference was for chartered accountancy and the engineering disciplines, particularly
textile engineering. The preferred education was entirely employment-oriented. Youngsters also took
the conventional BA and BSc courses, but only with the intention of moving into some practical
vocation later on. I do not mean this patronizingly because I consider myself particularly cerebral; in
fact, I am quite the opposite. But, I did spend most of my free time reading—I read anything available,
from newspapers to thrillers, to serious fiction and non-fiction. Nadiad was then a small town with
cheek-by-jowl dwellings. It had almost nothing by way of entertainment. There were a few crumbling
cinema halls, but the musty atmosphere and the odd films shown were not very welcoming. There was
no general bookshop in the town-only little holes-in-the-wall shops selling textbooks and guide
books. The only spot where I could pick up something to read was the tiny A.H. Wheeler’s stall at the
railway station. Most of the stall’s collection consisted of self-improvement books—How to Improve
your English; Five Steps to an Improved Personality; The Secret to Success; English Fluency in
One Month, etc. Other than these, there were the occasional mysteries, a few paperback classics and
some lurid novels in the Gujarati language. Whenever I felt bored, I went and picked up a few books
and magazines from the stall. The booksellers had some faded memory of the all-weather classics
from their university days, which they offered for sale in the pocket book format. That is when I came
to improve my education by reading the time-tested masters—Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, Thomas
Hardy and other such durable authors. In the course of time, the number of books in my collection
rose to about a hundred.
One day my landlord, Ranchod Kaka, who lived on the ground floor, dropped by. He was a kindly
soul who had never previously set eyes on an animal from north India. By way of conversation, he
frequently expressed wide-eyed wonder at some of my doings—that I read late into the night and got
up late the next morning; that I was somewhat casual in spending (one of his favourite stories was
how I had used a hundred rupee note [not an insignificant amount in those days] as a bookmark, and
later lent the book to a friend!); that I was not married; that I did not feel lonely living away from my
parents and siblings; and so on. One day, we were sitting next to the bookshelf containing my
intellectual assets of about one hundred books. Then, in praise he said: ‘You read so much. You read
throughout the night.’ And then pointing to the shelf: ‘Ane juo e tamare ketli saras, motee library che.
Aa badha vanchwa ma tamne ketlu samay lagyun hashe?’ (And look, what a large library you have
got. How long would it have taken you to read all these?). For a moment I thought he was mocking me
—that miserable row of paperbacks being called a library. But he smiled benignly, shaking his head
as he said this, and it was obvious he meant well—it was beyond his understanding that books are no
burden. As a long-lost son who had returned to Gujarat, it came as a revelation to me that in Gujarat,
books must be worshipped, but they need be read only if there is a proximate practical value.
JAMVANU!
Having a Gujarati lineage, I had been exposed to their culinary style from my young days. The use of
sugar and jaggery in the subzi or dal in the conventional north Indian household would be considered
lunacy, but in our house it was acceptable as a variety in recipe. During my vacations, when I went to
my mother’s ancestral home, the eating habits there were quite Gujarati. Even in non-vegetarian,
Muslim households, the meal started with the sweet dish. The traditional community meal on a
special occasion, say a wedding, was an eye-opener. Seven or eight persons sat around a huge metal
thaal. The food was placed in the centre—pulao in a heap, along with bowls of curries—and each
person drew away the portion he wanted, close to him. The first time this presented horrifying
possibilities of someone’s gravy flowing into someone else’s heap of pulao! The thought of eating
from a thaal was much more difficult than the actual experience. Many of the persons sitting around a
thaal are well-practised in it and could eat fairly neatly, obviating the possibility of someone eating
someone else’s portion. Now with people accustomed to eating in separate dishes, this old practice
of community eating seems odd. But the custom actually has its roots in community solidarity and
once you get used to the idea, it is charming to think of eating along with your brothers and sisters
from a common heap of food.
The traditional vegetarian Gujarati cooking is extremely elaborate. Some may complain that you
have to cultivate a taste for it. The festive thali has an enormous number of items, sometimes as many
as fifteen. Often the sweet dish is the main dish. Gujarati cuisine is based on a liberal use of cooking
oil. The star items on the traditional thali are deep-fried savouries. The entire process of preparing a
festive meal is a very time-consuming one. In today’s world we can only hope to be treated to a full-
range thali at a very well-organized household on an occasion like a wedding; most of us, if we feel
like having a traditional Gujarati meal, turn to Vishala restaurant when in Ahmedabad.
Gujarati savouries, it can be rightly claimed, constitute the pride of its cuisine. If a state dish were
to be notified, like say a state animal, the race would be between fafda and ganthia, two deep-fried
savouries made of gram flour. Fans of these items can have them at any time of the day or night and in
any quantity. They are considered the most exotic form of breakfast food, along with jalebis. In my
time, I have been offered fafdaganthia at hours ranging from three in the afternoon to ten the next
morning: ‘Saheb thodun breakfast, thodun kaink fafdaganthia ho jaye’ (Saheb a little snack, let us
have a little fafdaganthia). It is, no doubt, an extremely tasty snack, but people unfamiliar with it need
to be forewarned that even small quantities can make one’s tummy go ballistic! Gujarat is a truly
unique state—at one stage during the national Emergency, fafda-ganthias were placed under price