Bureaucracy doesn't distinguish between sovereign and absolute power

Even after scrapping the 'retrospective tax' the bigger problem of the bureaucratic interpretation of sovereign power remains unresolved. The time has come for Parliament to sort out the confusion

Forty or so years ago, an IAS officer called Upamanyu Chatterjee wrote a novel called ‘English, August’. The book was made into a film in 1994 directed by Dev Benegal. It was, on the whole, quite a forgettable film but there was one line in the dialogue that captured the essence of the Indian bureaucrat, especially the IAS man in the district.

“Hum yehan ke Raja hain,” says the main character in one place. That was a declaration of absolute power by an officer who had not been on service even for five years. It is exactly how the East India Company had meant it to be.

More recently, three finance ministers, in the context of the retrospective tax, have talked of the right to tax as an exercise of sovereign power.  A retrospective tax was imposed on some telecom companies.

The finance ministers are right about sovereign power. It is absolute. But whether it can be exercised retrospectively is a bureaucratic invention in the exercise of absolute power. It’s a case of the tail wagging the dog. It suited Pranab Mukherjee who made the tax retrospective. It is hard to believe, however, that he thought it was fair. More likely, it was just a case of “I will show you who the boss is”.

Mr Mukherjee’s way

Mr Mukherjee had shown who the boss was once before also when he was the finance minister in 1983. He decided to show Dr Manmohan Singh, who was the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, who the boss was when the latter refused to grant a banking license to the Pakistani Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

In India that’s exactly how a bureaucrat’s brain is trained to work. The “tu jaanta nahin main kaun hoon” thing.  Not all bureaucrats think that way, but enough of them do, to make life hell for those who fall in their jurisdiction — and as the retrospective tax showed, even outside it.

Sovereignty means to be free and independent to take decisions. It doesn’t mean the executive is free to take arbitrary decisions. This is where the bureaucrats go wrong. They misinterpret sovereignty as granting governments the right to act arbitrarily. That’s why In India we see horrible inequities perpetrated by an unchecked bureaucracy, even at the lowest levels.

Shrilal Shukla captured this brilliantly in his novel Raag Darbari. At its most basic and fundamental level this boils down to handing over the power to abridge the rights of citizens and companies to the lowest rungs. Once someone in that rung takes a decision, it becomes a long struggle to have it reversed.

Teach your babus well

As we saw in Raag Darbari, it can even take a lifetime. Whimsy, prejudiced, corrupt intent and plain viciousness play a very role in this. So it’s no surprise that what happened to Langad in Raag Darbari is exactly what happened to the telecom companies. It took the proper exercise of sovereign power to set right an improper exercise of it via the mala fide exercise of absolute power.

The question remains why did it take so long for the Modi government to fix the problem. My suspicion is it was bureaucratic recalcitrance on the one hand and an element of crony capitalism on the other that led to the delay. Eventually the costs of both became too high and the Mukherjee folly had to be rectified. But that still leaves the problem of the bureaucratic interpretation of sovereign power unresolved. The time has come for the Parliament to sort out the confusion.