Dissent is a virtue too

By Harsh Mander
Often resistance, not obedience, is the only way civil servants can ensure that the law is implemented.
The right to dissent is central to the idea of a democracy. This is true not just for ordinary citizens, but equally for civil servants in the employ of government. I believe that a democracy guarantees to civil servants not only the right, but even enjoins on them the duty, to dissent in response to the call of their conscience.

In my two decades in the civil service, obedience was repeatedly upheld as the paramount virtue of a civil servant in a democracy. It was commonly advocated that the duty of a civil servant was to obey orders of political masters without questioning these dictates. Officers who dissented were not just inconvenient, but were seen to be stepping outside the boundaries laid down for the permanent unelected executive in a parliamentary democracy.

Common practice

But I believe that the duty of obedience is at most only to lawful official publicly espoused objectives of the government, not to unlawful directives of elected political or administrative superiors. Let me illustrate. The official position of governments is that legislated land reform laws should be faithfully implemented. But the unstated orders of political superiors are almost invariably that powerful landowners should not be dispossessed of their land holdings. Whenever we tried to distribute ceiling surplus agricultural land to the landless, or restore land illegally expropriated from tribal land holders, Ministers and local elected representatives would instruct us to stop implementing progressive land reform laws. These orders were patently illegal.
The same chasm between the stated legal policies and the actual will of the executive can be found everywhere. The stated policies are for fair and non-partisan action in communal, caste and gender violence, but the unstated political or administrative directives often advocate biased action against vulnerable and oppressed castes, religious and ethnic minorities and women. The law enjoins respect for human fundamental rights, but there is often open and unapologetic political endorsement even at the highest levels of the executive for torture and encounter killings. The law makes corruption a criminal offence, but in practice this is endorsed as the grease that makes the giant sluggish state machinery function.



Reality is different

In fact, if officers are faithful to the stated policies and laws of government, then the officer will then be bound to implement land reforms and other progressive legislation, to protect oppressed and dispossessed minorities, castes and women, fight corruption and respect human rights. But the reality is that in obeying and implementing in letter and spirit these stated lawful policies, the officer will frequently be disobeying the unlawful goals of members of the superior executive. Civil servants who choose to obey these unlawful directives cannot claim ethical defence in the duty of obedience. Far from it being their duty to obey, their obligation is to resist and actually disobey these orders. Only in so doing will they safeguard democracy and the Constitution.

In the early, relatively idealistic decades after Independence, the civil service organised relief camps for millions of refugees uprooted by the country’s bloody Partition, and organised their rehabilitation. It also succeeded in restraining divisive and communal organisations and politics, as a result of which the troubled and wounded country was remarkably free of communal riots after Gandhi’s assassination in the hands of extremist Hindutva radicals.

Bureaucratic betrayal

As the years passed, greater and greater sections of the civil services have capitulated and obeyed illegal instructions to deny people their constitutional rights, including to life, liberty and democratic dissent, and to fail to extend equal protection of the law to people because of their religious or ethnic identities or economic powerlessness. The unsung and mostly unknown heroes from within the bureaucracy who swam bravely against the current, refusing to obey unjust and illegal orders, could never gather sufficient critical mass for the permanent bureaucracy to act as a decisive bulwark against divisive and communal politics, corruption and injustice.

The civil service must carry therefore historical blame for failures of the state to extend equal protection of the law to religious and ethnic minorities and to impoverished people in general. Unless it reclaims its fundamental duty of conscience, it must relinquish its claim to the helm of governance in the country.

The Hindu