Media In Babu-Land

Almost a decade ago, reacting to Outlook’s cover story on the changes in the social profile of new entrants to Indian bureaucracy, a reader AVS Reddy wrote: “ Agreed that your story got the facts right, but publishing them wasn’t in the right spirit – of the civil services or journalism. For, a civil servant is ideally expected to function efficiently but keep low key – any publicity may only spoil…’’

The reader’s brief letter had succinctly identified some of the fault-lines in the Indian media’s approach to covering civil servants. There were reasons why the reader thought so — he might have recalled something that happened three years back in 2004.

Before being jailed for his alleged involvement in Bihar flood relief scam, a young Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer and district magistrate of Patna Gautam Goswami had been chosen by Time magazine as one of the ‘Asian heroes of 2004’ along with Shah Rukh Khan and Anoushka Shankar. It was ironic that Goswami’s flood relief work, which eventually accounted for his fall from grace, was cited by Time as a reason for him figuring in the exclusive list.

Interestingly, the man writing Goswami’s citation for Time was none other than its South Asia correspondent Arvind Adiga, who four years later went on to win the 2008 Booker Prize for his debut novel The White Tiger. In his journalism, Adiga seems to have gullibly bought the inflated narratives about civil servants, which abound in the Indian media.

Such profiles, bordering on hagiographical accounts, are not only occasioned by events like the recently observed 11th Civil Services Day, but they keep surfacing quite regularly. More often than not, in their zeal to reinforce the social fascination with seats of bureaucratic power, they tend to amplify civil servants performing even the routine work. That’s a kind of work which comes as part of a job in civil service, and for which they are paid as well as provided with elite privileges.

This contributes to the larger-than-life accounts of civil servants, which one comes across in newspapers and channels as well as in new media. So you have a routine inspection of public construction work done by a District Magistrate, and her act of holding a contractor accountable turned into a spectacle playing repeatedly on Zee News.

As if the political class wasn’t providing enough tokenism to keep the media engaged, there are always the symbolic gestures of bureaucracy to bank on. Often the face takes over the issue, policy or the state of governance attached. You might not be aware of the issue but, along with other dailies, The Times of India will inform you about the symbolic gesture of an IAS officer eating a mid-day meal in a school to dispel superstitions about the widow cook.

And then, you can’t miss that element that works whenever you seek to edify a public figure in India — frugality. Not to go far back in Gandhian times, there are always bureaucratic equivalents of what some politicians in early 1990s made fashionable in the wake of the Gulf war-triggered oil crisis — walking or cycling to office. So in regional as well as national media you are fed with such austere figures as Kaimur’s District Magistrate, who according to The Telegraph, walked to his office ostensibly to save fuel.

Sometimes lionising civil servants with cinematic nicknames like ‘Dabang’ backfires as the officers tend to get deluded by the media buzz surrounding them. According to a report in ABP News, the then Bulandshahr District Magistrate Chandrakala used abusive language against Suman Lal, a journalist with Dainik Jagran, and filed a case against him for what she called ‘insulting’ her office. Lal had questioned her about her high-handedness in getting police to arrest and send a young boy to jail for insisting on a selfie with her at a public function. What might have emboldened the DM was the fact that journalists, as the NDTV report shows, had initially applauded her ‘tough act’ against the selfie-enthusiast.

There could be numerous explanations for the media falling for such administrative showmanship. First is, obviously, the nature of their readership or viewership.

Media stories try to cater to the ingrained middle-class bias, which glorifies salaried civil servants and demonises the political class. Media professionals, mostly constituted by the middle class, seek narratives of a few islands of ‘performing’ government professionals amid cynicism about the political masters. Unsurprisingly, they use the plot of pitting them against each other in a moralistic play.

For that to happen, some subtexts are invented. For instance, one may still recall how the media gave a definite slant to a video showing a spat between a Haryana minister and a woman Indian Police Service (IPS) officer. Without a preconceived view, it’s difficult to find anything in the video which proved that the minister was wrong. The facts, with the video being the only source, were not conclusive at all. Taking a break from politician-bashing for a while, it could be seen that the minister was raising a genuine public concern and the officer was obdurately misbehaving, which is unbecoming when interacting with a minister.

Second, the media sometimes tends to strike common cause with the sections of bureaucracy that are seen as lamenting against political interference or are keen on adventurism of whistleblowing. Both the activities are fodder for journalists whose default operational mode is rooted in the romantic appeal of anti-establishment.

So, the media finds Ashok Khemkas of the world useful for such narratives and it’s equally pleased to give a thumbs up to November 2013 order of the Supreme Court asking the central and state governments “to set up a special board that will look after transfers, promotions and disciplinary matters involving civil servants.” The order, avowedly, sought to minimise political interference in bureaucracy. Little did media commentary realise that all forms of political monitoring of bureaucracy may not be interference, and a large measure of it is integral to the power of the elected in running a democratic government. In the name of curtailing interference, the uncritical acceptance of bureaucratic authority also exposes the naivete of these pet theories of politician-bashing.

The disproportionate space and time given to covering bureaucracy in regional press can also be seen in the light of the fact that in small towns and villages of India, colonial administrative baggage has ensured that civil servants remain the face of government and the site of governmental processes — ‘mammaries of welfare state’ to use Upamanyu Chatterjee’s evocative phrase and title of one of his novels. With nothing quite ‘happening’- administration itself becomes a spectacle and the bureaucrats the default movers and shakers.

However, a key factor driving the inflated media coverage of civil servants is how it’s central to static career aspirations of a sizeable section of its readership and viewership. It can be seen in the way some dailies report on the success stories of civil services examination every year.

Sample how the Indian Express covered the latest final results (declared in May 2016). The paper clearly showed the vice of over-analysis in the ways it tried to sociologically decode the results. When Seema Chishti profiled the topper and her family, she fell for the contrived narrative of “social change” and “individual excellence.”

Any assessment that puts civil services exam success and individual excellence in the same sentence has a blatantly flawed assumption to begin with. The reason being quite simple — the prime motivations for aspirants joining the civil services is quite the opposite: a lifelong ticket to escape all possibilities of excellence because the assurance of a secure job shields you from all challenges.

One can say that Chishti won’t have said so if she had seen the hubs of civil services coaching in Delhi. Assembly lines of people mugging up the same assorted cut-and-paste study material would dispel her illusions about anything ‘individual’ or anything resembling ‘excellence’ in the examination process.

Chisti’s second assumption can’t pass a basic test – Bihar test. The state presents a case for refuting perceptions about civil servants being agents of social change or development for their region or for the social segment they come from. Bihar has contributed a large number of young men and women to civil services. Local dailies and the Patna edition of national newspapers cover this steady supply of bureaucrats with a pride that hasn’t benefited the state in any concrete sense.

Bihar continues to be at the bottom of all significant indices of human development — it continues to reel under dehumanising conditions of poverty, disease and underdevelopment. Contrast that with states like Gujarat where young people have been far less keen on joining bureaucracy. Driven by enterprise, innovation and private initiative, the state has done far better on developmental fronts, including better human development indices.

In midst of all these, what the media has been failing to ask is something more basic — do we need to continue with the administrative instruments of colonial times to address the challenges of modern-day governance?

Within the media space, Mihir S Sharma has offered a well-argued critique of the relevance of IAS in our times. Almost two years ago, in his column for Business Standard, Sharma built a case for doing away with the anachronistic baggage of the under-informed, unimaginative, obstructionist and overrated governance device, namely, the IAS.

Sharma’s critique is remarkable for one more reason – he dissects the nature of civil services for what it is, and doesn’t pander to what the unchanging middle class perceives it to be.

Media commentary has also failed to critically scrutinise successive governments for failing to usher in the real governance reforms that have to start with less government. Cutting down the tentacles, and flab too, of bureaucratic machinery has to be part of any ambitious reform agenda in India. No government has been bold enough for that, and the media hasn’t prodded governments for that.

One doesn’t know what exactly the Prime Minister meant when he recently asked civil servants to avoid seeking publicity on social media. What, however, is known is that mainstream media has its own traps of attention and deluding phases of fleeting stardom ready for them.  Instead of questioning the rusty, oversized and self-important cogs in governmental machinery, the media has been playing the cheerleaders for custodians of red-tape in numerous government offices. In the bargain, news media gets what they always want – a face to weave a story around.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @anandvardhan26