Memories of an ordinary bureaucrat :: 41 :: Back to Delhi

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This was my third assignment in Delhi. From the 1970s to 1990s, almost in every decade I came to Delhi on a posting and every time I had problems in having a house of my entitlement allotted to me. There was so much of corruption. A batch-mate of mine told me he had been asked to pay up Rs. 70000 as bribe to get a government house of his entitlement. He said even the minister was in it. Seeing all this I gave up pursuing the matter and eventually I was allotted a flat on first floor on Vinay Marg in Chanakyapuri meant for deputy secretaries whereas I was of the rank of a joint secretary having hit the top of the scale three years earlier.

Transfers were, therefore, a sackful of troubles. And this was my 12th transfer in the career span of 29 years. I hardly ever resisted a transfer though it was always troublesome, mostly in respect of residential accommodation. My wife, who had to face the establishment problems, was always very accommodative and never threw up any tantrums because of the difficulties she came up against. The house that we got this time was a two-bedroom affair and by every means was too small for an officer of thirty years’ service. But then there was nothing that I could do about it.

On this transfer we faced another problem. Our truck loaded with household goods and the Maruti 800 car took inordinately long time to come from Shillong. Inquiries revealed that LK Advani’s Rath Yatra was the culprit. The chief minister of Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav, had sealed the state in a bid to prevent Advani from passing through to Ayodhya. As a result our truck was held up on the eastern border of Bihar for as many as 15 days. Though many trucks were victims of vandalism ours somehow escaped unharmed. A fortnight of anxiety thus ended but during this time we stayed cooped up in one room in the departmental guest house. After the beautiful well ventilated house that we had at Shillong it was quite a climbdown.

 In the house that we were to occupy, however, we were surprised to see peacocks having free run of it. Behind the Vinay Marg colony there was a drain which had thick vegetation on its two banks that hosted the peacock community. Within two years, however, they disappeared as the place was built over for police personnel. Nonetheless, the Nehru Park was easily accessible as was the Yeshwant Place and Chanakya Takies.

I have already mentioned my first brush with the Secretary who was from our Service and was five years senior to me. Over time, however, our relations improved appreciably. He was happy with my efforts to work in accordance with the manual of office procedure as also the promptness that I submitted the cases. My immediate boss, however, was the Member of the Postal Board in-charge of Personnel. But the Secretary was more active. With the two immediate bosses I had to put in extra hours and was generally in the office even on Sundays also.

The paper work was so heavy that I wouldn’t have time in the office to look at the dak that used to be in a thick folder. I had to bring the whole thing home and work on them after a cup of tea with my wife. Personnel Branch had to deal with a large number of writ petitions filed from all over the country and they used to come to us when a petitioner or respondent would file an appeal in the Supreme Court. Not only did we have to prepare replies and get them vetted by the nominated Additional Solicitor General we had to be present in the Supreme Court on the day of hearing. This took away a lot of time and would build up pressure. No wonder my blood pressure would always remain elevated.

In the midst of such a busy schedule I had taken upon myself to revise the rules for promotion into the cadre of inspectors and from there to the Group B cadres of the department. The idea was to quicken the promotions and to get bright youngsters who would be able to serve longer durations in higher cadres with chances of promotion into Group A. I had discussed the matter with the Department of Personnel where the Joint Secretary was a long lost friend. As he vetted it I submitted it to Secretary who put it before the Board. It had taken almost three years to cocretise the proposals and when I left the Postal Board it was still pending with the Department of Personnel.  

There was one good thing about the Secretary and that was he wouldn’t mind if one told him that his orders would not be carried out for not being in accordance with the government’s instructions. In one case in which he wanted to appoint an officer on ad hoc basis as Member of the Board I had to tell him that I would not sign such an order as approval of the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet was essential. When the file went to him he asked me whether there was anybody who would sign the order. On my telling him that there was none, he signed the order himself. A month later a stinker came from the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet warning the Department never to act in breach of established procedures.

The Secretary had fallen foul of the Minister who in those days was Late Rajesh Pilot. I do not know what went wrong between the two but the latter had him removed to the Cabinet Secretariat in a post that was sinecure for a few months that were left before his superannuation. So, piles of files submitted to the Secretary over a period of a few months came back from the minister. Apparently, the files were submitted for the minister’s orders in which no suggestion were recorded for the course of action to be taken.

 Resultantly, I had a new secretary – in fact, two new secretaries one after the other. Both were former members who used to be my bosses. I had, therefore, no problem with the change of regime. 

During the tenure as Deputy Director General I was selected in 1992 for a consultancy in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania by Universal Postal Union, the specialized agency of the UN for postal matters. It was a consultancy for six weeks and I was to spend two weeks in each country. Soon after completion of the consultancy I was transferred again – this time as Chief Postmaster General of West Bengal, Sikkim & the UT of Andaman & Nicobar Islands even though I could sniff a promotion for me in the near future. But then that is how the governments function. I don’t know till today whether it was a contrived transfer to accommodate somebody in my place. So after pushing papers up and down for three years my wife and I proceeded to Calcutta to work in the state to which my parents belonged and the language of which we had been speaking at home since birth.  

*Photo from internet

Destinations :: Delhi

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Sun setting over Ramakrishna Puram

Having been recruited for the Central Civil Services my official career took me several times to Delhi at various levels of the government. Resultantly, I spent more than thirteen years of my service career at Delhi, more than four and a half years of which were spent on deputation with the Union Public Service Commission. That does not mean I did not go out in the field.

Post Beating the Retreat illumination

I worked for almost a tenure in undivided Madhya Pradesh, a tenure each in Maharashtra and North East and for truncated tenures in

Gujarat, Jammu and Kashmir. Andhra Pradesh, and West Bengal.

I

My wife out on the big verandah with governebt flats in the background

had developed an abiding interest in photography but, unfortunately, I did not have a camera when I was posted in most photogenic place like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir. Even during tenure with the UPSC I did not have a camera mostly because I couldn’t afford one. Only in 1975 when my sister came for her

Viewing South Block with a filter on

sabbatical I acquired her Minolta SRT 102 on payment of only the customs duty loveable on it. I still have it but it has since been overtaken by obsolescence with the emergence of new breed of smart digital cameras which too, in turn, have been put in the shade by the cell-phone cameras.

Together after a long time at Delhi in my official house

Delhi was the first place where I learnt to wield what was then a new sophisticated camera. Only a very few of the results of my effort are mounted here

DESTINATIONS: DELHI (1955)

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Old Delhi in 1955

In 1955 I was in my late teens and it looked like as if I had been somehow put on travel­­­­­ mode. I had just been to Bombay where I had spent most of my two- month long summer vacation. And now it was October and there was a chance of visiting Delhi. An uncle of mine was a touring officer of the C & E Morton, the confectioners, and he was going to be in Delhi for a week. He wanted my sister and me to visit him.

Getting into Punjab Mail that used to run between Bombay and Amritsar we were off for Delhi. In those early days the more important trains wouldn't go to New Delhi station for the simple reason that it was still in the process of coming up. Delhi Junction or the Old Delhi station used to be the scene of most of the railway action. Gwalior to Delhi was a distance of only 200 miles and the train used to take  a little more than 5 hours. As the train slowed down at Old Delhi a few coolies jumped into the compartment. Tall, well-built and fair, some with even thick beards with red turbans, were intimidating characters. The Bombay coolies were no patch on them. However, soon I spotted uncle. He got one of the coolies to pick up the luggage and promptly asked him to show his token number. It was only eight years after the partition which induced a two-way traffic of millions between the two newly-independent countries. Many of those who migrated this side of the newly created borders had chosen Delhi for making a fresh start in life and a large number had settled down as coolies to convey passengers’ luggage to and from the station. It was laborious work as we didn’t know till then of the concept of travelling light. Instances of disappearance of coolies with luggage of an unwary passenger had seemingly assumed alarming proportions and hence the need to check the token number.

Once outside we came across a veritable jam created by tongas (a horse-drawn carriage).  Looking for fare all had almost converged in front of the station exit. My uncle was staying in a hotel in the Old Delhi area. Those were early days  and most of the towns had only one or two really good ones, the star system had not been introduced till then. Delhi was no different and had The Imperial and the Maidens, the two reputed high-end ones and the rest being ordinary. My uncle had a biggish room in one of the ordinary ones in which three of us could accommodate ourselves pretty comfortably though it was nothing much to write home about. Surely there were better “ordinary” hotels in the same area.

Our first tripin the town was inevitably to Connaught Place. As soon as our uncle left my sister and I climbed into a Tonga and went there. Autos had not arrived on the scene yet and the tongas could go all over the town. Their movements were later restricted and they are now an endangered species, confined only in the Old Delhi area. Connaught Place was an immense largely vacant circular colonnaded market with very few cars running around. The

A Tonga

shops, however, were impressive - big and holding most of all the goodies that one could conceive of. We were happy to see the Scindia House, coming as we did from Gwalior – the erstwhile Scindia capital. On another of our excursions we went to Chandni Chowk which we found very dusty and crowded. Tongas in fair numbers were plying on the main road kicking up a lot of dust – not like the Delhi of our imagination. A few trams that looked ramshackle after the ones of Bombay were plying on the crowded street.

We had not been in Delhi for even a couple of days when we got a call from one of our Gwalior acquaintances who used to be the manager of Gwalior Potteries in Delhi. Promising to come and fetch us, he arrived one afternoon and much against the wishes of my uncle he had us piled into his car to be taken to his bungalow in the Potteries complex. It was far away in South Delhi and we had to go past the Red Fort, on to Darya Gunj, past Raj Ghat and India Gate through the leafy avenues of New Delhi and then had to wait at a level crossing. Curiously, the traffic of cars tongas and cycles was stopped here to allow an aircraft to land. The Safdurjung Airport was then the airport for Delhi and the one at Palam was still a few years away in the future. After going past the INA market we got into a dusty road that went past a government colony called Vinay Nagar (which is now Kidwai Nagar) running for about a kilometer and a half to get to the Potteries complex. It was a big complex with a pottery producing ceramic tea sets and other table-ware. At that time Gwalior Potteries was a well-known brand, particularly in North India. Now, of course, it is not to be seen or heard of. There used to be two bungalows one of which was lying unused. The whole property – quite a large one of tens of acres – belonged to the Maharaja of Gwalior, as did the Pottery. All of it was surrounded by what looked like a rural setting with a few scattered villages.

It is interesting to reflect back on this South Delhi area of 1955. The dust-laden road that we took has now virtually disappeared. There were no colonies on either side of it till it met its end at the Gwalior Potteries. There was no Sarojini Nagar or All India Institute of Medical Sciences or Safdurjung Hospital and there was no Ring Road. The road to Mehrauli continued as a narrow strip of asphalt and tongas used to ply on it right up to Kutub Minar and Mehrauli. Green Park colony was coming up a few kilometers down the road to Kutub.

The nephew of the manager, Vimal Majumdar, who passed away recently, and I used to move around in buses that we had to catch at the INA Market. Our favourite haunt was Darya Gunj which was always full of traffic of all kinds. Both of us also once took a tonga to go to the Kutub, supposedly a lonely place then and not quite safe. It was generally devoid of foreign tourists, who now flock to the place in large numbers. Bus and tonga fares used to be in annas and paises – the rupee had not been changed over to the metric system till then.

The October 1955 trip was rather uneventful apart from the fact that it was the first time I happened to be in Delhi. Soon, thereafter, in late December a friend, Ramesh Tiwari (now retired from University of Manitoba and living in Winnipeg) persuaded my highly-reluctant mother to agree to my my accompanying him to Delhi for the first Industrial Exhibition to be held at the then newly-built Pragati Maidan. While two of Tiwari’s cousins also came along, we were to put up at the house of another of his cousins who was working in the field of civil aviation and was living alone. One of Tiwari’s cousins, Suresh Dube, excellent at cooking, took over the kitchen and fed us all. Because of his innate talent he later made a career in catering after obtaining a degree from Anand in Gujarat. As everyone good in his calling looks for greener pastures, he too went away to America to work with multinationals and eventually ended with the Food & Agriculture Organisation of the UN. An excellent company; he used to make fantastic scrambled eggs.

 I had never before seen anything like the Pragati Maidan and the Industrial Exhibition held in it. It was a massive complex and there were numerous tall halls of fancy architectural designs housing the exhibits of several countries participating at the Exhibition. I remember stalls of two countries – of China and the US. The Chinese was perhaps the largest, exhibiting China’s rudimentary industrialisation. But there was practically a full display of their amazing crafts. I happen to remember their amazing kind of ceramic ware. They were just out of this world. We had never seen such beautiful bone china tea sets manufactured in India. At home, however, we used to have a few fine bone china cups with saucers made in Japan which were perhaps bought before the imports were banned during the World War. What was perhaps more remarkable at the Chinese pavilion was that the Chinese girls were not only friendly, they could also converse fluently in Hindi

 The other pavilion that was interesting was the one of the US where we saw a TV set for the first time. People would wave at themselves as they saw themselves on the screen. The camera would be kept pointed at the crowd and boys would try to muscle in into  view. Another interesting item was the Cinerama tent which showed on 11 television screens in a circular tent the films taken by a like number of cameras mounted on top of a vehicle as it moved through a street. One got a 360⁰ view of the street – of the two sides, and of the front and the rear sides – giving the impression as if you were moving down the street in a vehicle.

Those were the heydays of India when many world leaders used to come to visit the country. Pandit Nehru, the Prime Minister, had acquired a cult status as a champion of peace and the country still had a reputation of being an ethical force in the world where while

Bulganin & Khruschev arrive in Delhi in 1955

the ‘hot’ war had ended a “cold war” had  set in. With his socialistic inclinations he had naturally built up a good rapport with the leaders of the now-defunct Soviet Union. Two of its leaders, Nikita Khruschev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Soviet Union and Nikolai Bulganin, the Premier of Soviet Union, came on a visit to Delhi during our stay. A huge crowd had gathered on the then King’s Way (now Raj Path) lawns to welcome them. All of us also joined the crowd. It was a sight to see. Numerous trucks laden with people had collected on the lawns and, as happens, inevitably hawkers had flocked in large numbers selling roasted groundnuts by weight or Coca Cola (available then) at 4 annas (just a quarter of a rupee) a bottle.

Soon it was time for us to leave for home. As I remember it, Delhi was still somewhat primitive, not like Bombay I had seen a few months earlier – more glittering and glitzier. It looked more like a sub-urban town, with ramshackle buses loosely run and bus-stands generally non-existent. After dusk the streets would be dark with very little illumination from the street lights because of either low voltage or low wattage of the incandescent bulbs. The streets were not yet fully paved or asphalted – much like our own Gwalior, barring areas where roads had already been concretised. Nonetheless, we had a good time and came back home – but not before we spent a night unrolling our bed-rolls on the platform of the Old Delhi station having missed the late night-train – richer in knowledge and experience. At that time it never occurred to me that in the future not only would I be visiting Delhi several times, I would also live and work there for as many as 14 of my 34 working years. 

____________

Photos: From Internet

The rape that stunned the nation

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It was different; it was a different kind of gang-rape that shook not only the nation but also the Diaspora, besides evoking strong and sensitive reactions from abroad. It even prompted the Secretary General of the United Nations to write to the Indian Prime Minister for ensuring greater security for women. It was a different kind of rape in that it was not like the ones that are reported almost every day in the newspapers. It was different because it was an uncommonly and excessively brutal and beastly assault, which tore up the insides of the 23-year old bright and ambitious paramedic, eventually taking her life despite the best efforts of medicine men in the country’s capital and abroad. 

So much has been written about this unfortunate incident that it is now needless to repeat the details. What, however, matters is that this rape has become a sort of a watershed in the Indian social consciousness. Reports of rapes in the newspapers and the electronic media have been frequent, if not regular, and common people have been taking them in their stride, pursuing their day-to-day activities leaving the rape-victims to fend for themselves in the tortuously protracted (and sometimes gender-biased) investigations followed by adjournments-and-appeals infested legal proceedings. But the mindless brutality exhibited in this particular case of sexual violence seems to have acted as the tipping point that released unprecedented social energy in the shape of protests and strident demands for the lives of the brute rapists who displayed traits worse than those of predatory animals. 

The barbaric rape provoked an acute sense of horror, distress and shock stirring up the nation, setting off spontaneous reactions right across the country. Massive peaceful assemblies were held, to start with, in Delhi at a scale much larger than what one had seen in 2011 during Anna Hazare’s Lokpal campaign. Later, it spread all across the country from north to south and east to west. Largely non-violent, barring a few stray incidents of violence engineered by miscreants in Delhi, the demonstrations, though leaderless, exhibited exemplary discipline and restraint. There was no breast-beating, only loud and vociferous demands for, inter alia, change of the laws, meting out prompt justice ending in severe punishment to the perpetrators of the horrific crime. The civil society has never reacted in this manner in the past bewildering, as it did, the political and governmental establishments.

The protestors, with their legitimate demands for harsher punishment for rape and sexual assault, built up such a pressure on the government that it promptly appointed a committee headed by a former chief justice of the apex court to review the existing softer provisions dealing the offences. They had to, as the protestors gave vent to their anger against the MPs who, they said, unanimously enact legislations within three days raising their salaries but amendments to the laws for sexual violence proposed by the Law Commission have been left unattended for more than a decade. Likewise, Delhi Government promptly set up five “fast track” courts to deal with rape cases on the basis of 2003 recommendations of the same Commission. Typically, commissions are created for specific purposes but their recommendations are seldom acted upon with promptitude for the benefit of the society. The pressure this time was so overwhelming that the government couldn’t tarry any further.

 Fearful of the pervasive anger, the political class demanded special session of the parliament to enact the amendments in a hurry when most of them remained dormant earlier, never bothering to raise this vital issue even as rapes and assaults on women were frequently being reported. Clearly, it was not the lapse of the government alone; every political outfit was at fault. When the Home Minister put his proverbial foot in the mouth by saying that the government could not meet protestors all the time, he obviously forgot that three senior ministers had met and spent about three hours meeting the Yoga Guru Ramdev with a view to buying him off during 2011 agitations for enactment of a Lokpal bill. The unforthcoming Prime Minister made a bland statement with a gaffe of a “theek hai?” (all right?) at its tail end and later made amends by remaining present at the Airport with the seemingly insensitive UPA Chairperson when the body of the rape victim arrived from Singapore at the unearthly hour of 3.00 AM. 

The Delhi Police never had it so bad, despite the Union Home Secretary’s gratuitous pat on its back for prompt investigations followed by arrests. The Home Secretary’s fatuous praise overlooked the fact that the unfortunate assault would not have taken place had the Delhi Police functioned in accordance with the law. Before the horrific attack there was a series of failures of Delhi Police which are now common knowledge.

Recent reports, however, indicate the bus was booked on several occasions for violation of various traffic rules in the past but each time it was somehow let off lightly. Investigations have revealed that the bus-owner was paying “hafta” (weekly bribe) to the Police; an entry to that effect was found in a police diary. Such entries are reportedly communicated to all traffic police officers to enable the buses in question to illegally operate without let or hindrance. The young life of the aspiring paramedic was lost largely because of the utter lack of governance as exemplified by the ineffective and corrupt ways of Delhi Police. 

Its strong-arm methods in dealing with the protestors too came in for severe criticism. Its use of batons on unarmed protestors, including elderly women, firing of numerous tear-gas shells and directing high-pressure water cannons in severely cold conditions were condemned by all. Evidently, Delhi Police’s assault on sleeping devotees of Yoga Guru Ramdev Delhi’s Ram Leela Grounds in 2011 was not a one-off action. It has a history of such atrocious conduct. It also came in for heavy criticism for its steps to prevent peaceful assembly of protests at India Gate and Jantar Mantar by blocking all roads and imposition of prohibitory orders, respectively. The Delhi High Court pulled it up asking it to maintain law and desist from curbing basic rights. Later, it has had recently to apologise before the High Court for suppression of the names of delinquent policemen.

Although the print and electronic media called her “Nirbhaya” (fearless) and “Damini” (lightning), respectively, the rape victim has remained faceless and nameless even after her death. The media, however, has been doing outstanding work ferreting out relevant facts connected with the incident. Even the companion of the victim was interviewed who emphasised that instead of lighting candles people should help others who happen to be in distress. Had people promptly responded to appeals made by him while lying on the roadside, he asserted, the victim might have survived. A news channel has, therefore, launched a campaign for change in attitudes of such pervasive callousness prompted by fear of harassment by the Police. A distinct hands-off attitude has been perceptible all over the country in such cases largely because of protracted, virtually interminable police investigations in which witnesses and others who attempt to help the victim are browbeaten and threatened by the corrupt police investigators. The channel’s initiative is indeed praise-worthy but the policemen all over the country also will have to mend their ways.

Even as the nation was virtually on an unofficial mourning for the death of an innocent victim because of a brutal assault some conservative legislators and organisations placed all the blame for her misfortune on the girl. While some felt that she should not have been out on the streets with her boy friend so late in the evening, others blamed only her for the incident. According to them, mostly it is the women who invite trouble either by way of their conduct or by wearing Western dresses that expose far too much. They blamed Westernisation of social mores for whatever was happening to women in the country. The chief of an extreme right wing organisation, while showing utter disconnect with reality in speciously calling rapes an urban phenomenon, asserted that Hindu marriages were a contract under which women were ordained to serve the needs of their husbands. Another self-styled god-man blamed the victim for not seeking mercy from those who attacked her. The media has been proactive in hitting out at and tearing apart those who made regressive statements or sexist, gender-biased comments. The newly elected Congress MP, the son of the President, had to face inquisitional questioning from several channels for his idiotic comment against the protestors whom he contemptuously called “highly dented and painted” socialites.

Rapes were being reported every day from various corners of the country even while the protest against the Delhi rape were continuing. It seemed the rapists were immune to whatever was happening around them and the sub-culture of rape seems to be flourishing unabated. The spate of reports in the dailies made one wonder whether it was the media’s way of trying to project before the country the enormity of the problem. The silver lining, however, was that Police, having shaken away its lethargy, promptly nabbed most of the rapists.

In many ways the gang rape has turned out to be a defining episode. Never before people were brought so close together in sorrow, anguish and anger against the non-functionality of the established system. Shaking the people and the political class alike, it has left a deep impact on the nation’s consciousness. As far as the Establishment is concerned, the cruel and pitiless episode has driven another nail in the coffin of the UPA government.

Note: All photographs are taken from the Internet