SHEKHAR GUPTA
At around the same juncture of history when Donald Trump has armed Elon Musk with a flamethrower to gut his bureaucracy from inside, the Modi government has notified the 8th Pay Commission.
The first is a dramatic, if chaotic, campaign to minimise government and cut costs. The second is a significant expansion of the government and wage bills, timed with the 2029 elections. Both won power more or less on the same promise. We’d prefer Modi’s words: minimum government, maximum governance.
By definition, this calls for no political or ideological loyalty. In fact, that is absolutely abhorred in this system. In the Trumpian view, this is an obscenity. It’s the unchallenged reign of the unelected, and he will take no more of it. So, he’ll burn it down.
For Modi, the career civil servant represents continuity, change and loyalty. There is no real problem with our administrative structure and personnel as long as they adapt with the politics of the day. The reason we’ve seen the greatest empowerment of the ‘selected’ (by UPSC) bureaucracies in the Modi era.
The constitution of the 8th Pay Commission is just a metaphor. Under Modi, the central government has expanded at a breathtaking pace. For evidence, go for a ‘before and after’ spin in the larger New Delhi region (not just the Lutyens Zone) and see how many new ‘Bhawans’ have come up.
In Trump’s America, his newly appointed FBI chief made his fame by promising to turn the FBI headquarters in Washington into a museum and either laying off most of its personnel or scattering them across the US, especially Alabama. It will be the Indian equivalent of sending the personnel of CBI, NIA and more to Kushinagar or Sonbhadra in UP or maybe Medak in Telangana or Kurnool in Andhra Pradesh. But see the contrast in India.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has a stunning new and massive bhawan of its own in the CGO complex by the side of the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. The Delhi Police has a swanky new ‘home’ in the heart of Lutyens while retaining its original one in the ITO area. The NCRB and BPR&D too got sprawling new headquarters in Mahipalpur, in 2017. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) had its own build. It’s way better than its original office, in Lok Nayak Bhawan, next to Khan Market. Lok Nayak Bhawan, to be fair, is a sarkari slum, no human beings deserve to work there. I am hoping it is earmarked for demolition in the rebuilding of Lutyens Delhi.
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) is among those occupying one of the towers in the new red sandstone mini-city behind the INA market and abutting the Barapullah flyover. The National Green Tribunal is now a massive New Delhi bureaucracy with a bhawan of its own on Copernicus Marg and zonal centres sprouting across the country. Nobody would bother a performance audit on such privileged new bureaucracies. The state of the environment, and the impact of the NGTs, if any, you can see, feel and smell for yourself.
Similarly, at the Centre and in the states, all relatively new institutions (not necessarily founded under Modi government) have seen a breathless expansion, and ‘bhawanisation’. Count Central Information Commission (the states have their own), Lok Pal and Lokayuktas in states, the many tribunals.
Turn your attention to the government being in business. Barring the sale of Air India, almost all CPSEs (Central Public Sector Enterprises) have not only remained intact under Modi government, they have seen massive new investments with taxpayer money. This year’s Budget has earmarked Rs 5 trillion of equity infusion into CPSEs. Attacked by Rahul Gandhi often for ‘selling out’ the PSUs, Modi has himself spoken multiple times underlining “how much better” they’ve done under him. The Centre just promised to invest another Rs 11,440 crore into Vizag Steel Plant, which had been on the privatisation list for almost two decades.
Just how well have the CPSEs done? While the broader indices, NIFTY and Sensex have fallen about 13 percent from their peak, the CPSE index has crashed, hold your breath and cry for your tax money, about 30 percent.
That amounts to a neat loss of about Rs 13 lakh crore (Rs 13 trillion) or about $148 billion (nearly double of India’s defence budget). Think about what India could do with that kind of money. Build a full north-south bullet train? Multiply several times the amounts paid in PM Kisan Samman? Or maybe buy two squadrons of those F-35s and also have Mr Trump smile. And you will still have about $120 billion left. You can read these details and more in this story by TCA Sharad Raghavan. Please do note that while the Congress has traditionally been statist, it’s the BJP leaders whose favourite line over the decades has been: jis desh ka raja vyapari, us ki praja bhikhari (in a nation whose king is a businessman, the subjects become beggars).
In India under Modi, the problem is never that there is too much government or that there can be too much government. It isn’t about the costs either. That the civil services are unelected is actually seen as a good thing. Ideological purity would be great, but where it isn’t available, there are always tools to make the civil servants fall in line, for reward or punishments. The best postings, empowerment, and if you are really valued, a life of almost no retirement.
After fitting specialists into key positions, for example RBI and SEBI, we are back to the trusted IAS. The direct recruitment at joint secretary level is an idea that disappeared so fast that we never saw its time come. There is some brave process going on under economist Sanjeev Sanyal (as this story by Moushumi Das Gupta shows) to at least abolish a whole bunch of new bodies set up as sarkari employment programmes. It’s a good initiative. Just note that in our system, nobody loses their jobs. They just get ‘reallocated’ elsewhere. And you know what they’ve said forever in Punjabi: Jehde lahore bhaide, oh Peshawar vi bhaide (one who’s useless in Lahore, in also a disaster in Peshawar). The joke is on the exchequer.
In the Modi Cabinet, too, the key positions now, from External Affairs to Petroleum, Railways, IT, I&B and more are with former civil servants. The Modi system’s comfort lies exactly where the Trumpian hate begins. We aren’t saying what’s better or worse, because who knows where Trump’s slash-and-burn will leave America. We are only making the point that the Trump and Modi approaches to building governance structures stand in exact contrast to each other.
For Modi/BJP supporters, Deep State is some amorphous entity including global foundations, Left-activist corporates and investors and also intelligence proliferations working in cahoots with them. The Trumpian conception of the Deep State, by contrast, is the house where unelected civil servants live, whose careers transcend multiple presidencies and who won’t bend to political will. He must burn it down. Ideally, he’d do this with his judges too.
Trump and Modi are two very different leaders, armed with contrasting political method and style. It’s fascinating how this reflects in their view of governance, and more importantly, to the entity called government. One is wrecking, while the other continues expanding it.
The article appeared in the theprint