No, Minister: Subhash Chandra Garg's 2nd memoir mirrors tone of his first

The tenor of the second part of former finance secretary Subhash Chandra Garg's memoir is not dissimilar to that which pervaded his first one --and the title is a dead giveaway

No, Minister

By Subhash Chandra Garg

Published by Juggernaut

424 pages  ₹799 

There are no government-mandated uniforms for Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers, but they must follow an unwritten dress code. A price has to be paid by those who don’t. It may be a casual admonition or a serious charge. Former finance secretary Subhash Chandra Garg recounts in this book two such instances from his 36-year-long service as an IAS officer from the Rajasthan cadre. 

As a young officer, he once called on his senior wearing sneakers. Many years later, Mr Garg was gently admonished publicly by the same senior, who expressed mild surprise and indeed admiration at how the young officer had done well in his career from the days when he had visited him in his sneakers. Another act of apparent indiscretion was to receive the Rajasthan Governor in a short-sleeved shirt rather than a bandhgala suit. The real reason for this charge was something else, but Mr Garg’s bosses found that a good enough reason to pull him up. 

This book recounts many such instances where Mr Garg has had to endure confrontations with senior officials or rebuffs by political leaders. For instance, on chief minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia’s instructions, he was made to wait out in an adjacent room for over 45 minutes during a Rajasthan government Cabinet meeting, slated to discuss a proposal that he had framed. The reason: Prime Minister Narendra Modi had nominated Mr Garg as India’s executive director on the World Bank board, a decision that Ms Scindia did not like because she would lose her principal finance secretary. Later, in the Union finance ministry, he conducted a pre-Budget meeting in his own style, incurring the ire of his finance minister who was also present at that meeting. 

The tenor of this book is not dissimilar to the one that pervaded his first memoir — We Also Make Policy. That book was largely about his stint in the finance ministry and his controversial exit from North Block, almost coinciding with his voluntary retirement a year before his superannuation. No, Minister takes a closer look at his entire career as a civil servant, starting with his preparations for the civil services examination, studying in a rented room above a temple, to accepting voluntary retirement from service as power secretary. 

The title of the book is a dead giveaway. Clearly, Mr Garg was not a yes-minister official. His ministers and senior officials may have quarrels with him over the way he would assert his rights to record his views on any policy matter, but Mr Garg, it seems, would risk his career without a second thought.

 

As he recounts, those differences arose from a wide range of policy issues including fixing the fiscal deficit targets (inviting the charge that he was reaching out to the Prime Minister over the head of his seniors) or his strong views on how much surplus the central bank should transfer to the Union government and his insistence on writing a dissent note to the report of a committee to which the government had nominated him.

 

Mr Garg did not hesitate to become unpopular with his civil service colleagues either. He makes no bones about naming some of his IAS colleagues who would either pose hurdles in the famous Bhamashah income transfer scheme launched in Rajasthan or describing how his Cabinet secretary would not support his note at crucial stages of decision-making, even though it was prepared with his full knowledge.

 

What Mr Garg’s memoir convincingly establishes is the steady weakening of Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister towards the end of his second term. In one Cabinet committee meeting Singh chaired, the environment minister, who was accused of holding up project clearances, appeared 40 minutes late and left without committing to a timeline for clearing the projects. Mr Garg was saddened by Singh’s discomfiture. In contrast, the finance minister in the last year of Singh’s second term suffered from no such indecision, overcoming all objections to his plans for increasing the cadre strength of the Indian Revenue Service and getting his proposal cleared by the Cabinet. Mr Garg was not happy about that either.

 

Mr Garg also highlights a new trend in the budget-making process. For obvious reasons, prime ministers take a keen interest in the annual Union Budget. But that level of interest seems to have risen in recent years. According to Mr Garg, even the Budget speeches were cleared, paragraph by paragraph, in the Prime Minister’s Office.

 

Like his previous memoir, No, Minister is a tell-all account of what happened in the corridors of power and inside those committee rooms of New Delhi and Jaipur. But memoirs are often seen as half-truths, influenced by the author’s perspective. That caveat would hold in Mr Garg’s memoirs too.