A dangerous precedent

Deploying government machinery for PR is disturbing

The government’s decisions to deploy senior bureaucrats as “rath prabharis” to publicise the achievements of the past nine years and to leverage the service of soldiers on leave to promote government schemes stretch the principles of governance in unprecedented and troubling ways. A controversial circular dated October 18 has mandated that bureaucrats of the rank of joint secretary, director, and deputy secretary be deployed in the country’s 765 districts to plan, prepare, and showcase “the achievements of the last nine years of government”. Before that, the Indian Army headquarters reportedly issued an order directing soldiers on annual leave to act as “soldier ambassadors”, promoting social/government schemes for which the army was preparing scripts and training manuals. Both orders are problematic in multiple ways. For one, as Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge has pointed out in a letter to the Prime Minister, the decision to deploy senior civil servants in this way is a clear violation of Central Civil Service Rules, which disallow government servants from participating in political activities. Beyond this specific matter, the order points to a disrespect to and misunderstanding of the bureaucracy’s role. As an executor of government schemes and policies, the bureaucracy is a key connector between the political dispensation and the people.

But this strictly apolitical role cannot be conflated with bureaucrats acting as public relations (PR) agents for the government, though there may be, admittedly, a fine line between the two on occasion. And given, as Mr Kharge has pointed out, that the designated role of rath prabharis is to publicise schemes that cover the last nine years of the Modi government, this initiative verges on employing government machinery for election campaigning, which could infringe on the Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct. Indeed, the dates for this Viksit Bharat Sankalp Yatra — between November 20 and January 25 — come ahead of the Assembly poll dates for two consequential states (Rajasthan and Telangana) among the five scheduled for election in November. Bharatiya Janata Party functionaries have countered Mr Kharge’s objections on grounds that senior bureaucrats should connect with the grassroots. This is a valid argument. Senior bureaucrats inhabiting the corridors of power could act as useful feedback mechanisms, as many have done in recent initiatives on toilet building or rural drinking-water projects. But the “rath prabharis” programme begs two questions. First, a grassroots-connection exercise could have started at any time these past nine years and should have been a continuous one. Why launch it when elections are due? Second, why does the government need to popularise or “celebrate” its programmes? This compulsion points either to a disconnect between political leaders and the people or a lurking suspicion that such schemes have been less than optimal.

The order reportedly appointing “soldier ambassadors” is even more problematic. It can explicitly draw India’s military into the political sphere, breaking the Chinese wall that the Indian state has been proud to maintain since independence, and sets a dangerous precedent in setting the stage for a military-political complex. India has witnessed at close hand the deleterious impact of overlapping interests between politics and the military in its neighbourhood. It must be avoided in India.