Civil servants deserve an image boost in films

Civil servants are often referred as the “steel frame” of the nation. They discharge their public duties in order to enable the country to progress. However, in Hindi films, civil servants are often depicted as negative characters, corrupt and inefficient.

So, it was finally good to see the movie Newton where the protagonist is incorruptible, daring, efficient and most importantly a ‘public servant’. The reason why emphasis is given on the word ‘public servant’ is because there is a wide perception in society that once a person becomes a government official he becomes all powerful.

Yes, he is powerful, but that power is for serving the people of the country. There is a beautiful line in the movie Newton that says, “One shouldn’t have an ‘ego’ for being honest because being honest is the duty of a public servant and by doing that they are not doing any favour to the society”. This is not just a filmy line as many honest people do ‘gloat’ about the fact that how honest they are when most of their colleagues are corrupt.

The movie beautifully portrays the disagreements between public servants on how things should be done. On one side, there is an ‘idealistic’ public servant played by Rajkumar Rao who wants to get the votes cast on the day of election, no matter how grave the situation is on the ground, while on the other side is an Army officer, played by Pankaj Tripathi, who plays a ‘realistic’ public servant, who is struggling with the lack of necessary equipment required to discharge his duty in a Naxal-affected area. He cares for the life of his men more than anything else.

A similar dichotomy was showcased in Hrishikesh Mukerjee’s movie Satyakam, which released in 1969. The movie shows how an honest man, driven by an idealistic vision of a corruption-free society, fights with the system at every step. The protagonist played by ‘Dharmendra’ is an engineer who stands for what is right and, therefore, couldn’t move up the ladder of success since it would require pleasing his seniors.

The movie shows how making ‘compromises’ has become part and parcel of a public servant’s life. Another character played by Sanjeev Kumar in the same movie, who is also an engineer, gets huge success because he behaves the way the system wants to him to behave.

Both these movies dwell on the morality of public servants. They show that in life everything can’t be in absolute ‘black’ and ‘white’, there are a lot of ‘shades of grey’. Therefore, public servants shouldn’t be judged on simplistic terms as real-life situations can be extremely tricky and hazardous.

The author is a junior research fellow at JNU