Whose interests do the IAS officers serve?

The Union government has decided to make already subservient IAS officers even more subservient to New Delhi. It was decided last month that 178 newly minted IAS officers would be posted in Union government ministries for a while before they are sent to their respective states of service. They’d begin their career from Delhi. After being posted in important positions in states, they’d come back to Delhi to reap benefits based on how they served the party in power in the Union government with their service in the states. For an officer cadre, which was originally raised by the British to protect the interests of London, which basically meant looting British South Asian territories packaged as “India” and being an agent of London strategically placed among the people, this isn’t entirely surprising. Can state governments trust such folks as  Indian Union is entering a phase where Delhi is bent on completely destroying states’ rights?

To understand this, let’s look at the colonial origins of certain institutions. The institutional daddy of the Indian Army is the British Indian Army. That injects meaning to what ‘our’ men do in Kashmir. The institutional father of the Indian Union’s police system is the Imperial Police, a force designed to terrorise the population when they dissent and to protect interest of occupiers, collaborators and the powerful. Only then we can make sense of fake encounters and routine torture. The IAS’s daddy was the Imperial Civil Service. When a few thousand largely Anglo-Hindi graduates with top-ratings in the dowry bazaar ‘administer’ a billion-plus people, with most of their sons and daughters ending up in the Delhi-New York-London power circuit — spanning think-tanks, academia, business, politics, arts and ethnic marts, the ‘I’ in the Imperial shows it to be alive and kicking in these ‘I’=’Indian’ times.

ICS was created by Britishers to deliver goods to the Imperial Centre, to make sure that natives never administer themselves. Every state is ruled, de facto, by these Delhi-deputed folks. The recent order of initial Delhi posting makes it clear to the budding officers and also to the rest of us, who they are, why they are  in the Capital and who they actually serve. While there is no dearth of accomplished people in state civil services, it is by design that the primary administrators in all the states are deputed from Delhi — an outsider, alienated from the people’s language, culture and aspiration, who aligns with Delhi power against the people. How different were white ICS sahibs — a chosen nomenklatura, brainwashed by ideology and lured by “career prospects” and “respectability”, preferably with no organic connection to the people they served?

Why do states with dignity, ability and talent, need Delhi-deputed generalists to administer affairs on our behalf even for issues that are completely a state government’s business. Indian Union is a federal union. In a true federal union, states manage internal affairs. There’s no reason why there should be any IAS officer in any function belonging to the state list or concurrent list. Non-Delhi deputed administrators speaking Marathi, Bangla, Tamil, Kannada can manage their affairs in their respective regions as they’ve done for centuries and often millennia before the Union existed. All structures that uphold colonial intent are criminal structures. That’s abhorrent to anyone born free. Taming and governing natives by sending in socio-cultural outsiders, be they soldiers or administrators, has always been a criminal project. Colonisation is a process, not an event. So is decolonisation.

The author writes on politics and culture @gargac