NEW DELHI, 25 July 2004 — You do not need to send out a circular for Delhi to become sycophancy-compliant. It comes with the union territory.
The sycophancy of New Delhi’s ruling class is non-partisan and non-communal. It is offered to anyone in power, irrespective of whether the deities themselves want the offering or not. This does not mean that the divinities are not pleased by the homage. It is a rare person who is immune to flattery. The more intelligent forms of divine life expect subtler forms of homage, and subtlety itself becomes an indicator of the supplicant’s abilities, which in turn must be appropriately rewarded. For this is a give-and-take game. There is nothing called a one-way street in the corridors of power although the occasional unfortunate has been known to get trapped in a cul de sac.
Sensible bureaucrats know that there is never any harm in leaving a pat of butter beside the politician’s daily bread. The gesture does not have to be ostentatious. Only the vulgar demand excess, and this is a good moment to note that vulgarity is not the exclusive of any particular race or class. Indeed, the rich have far more means to exhibit their vulgarity.
The Case of the Misspelt Name is a classic Delhi tale. The text is poignant. The sub-texts are hilarious, or, at the very least, tragiccomic. For the uninitiated, here are the details.
Kewal Krishna Chugh is a program officer at the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, a worthy government organization sated with good intentions. It is headed by a public figure of varying degrees of luster, but run by professional bureaucrats of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS). Its purpose is to showcase Indian culture to the world, and mirror the world’s culture (as defined by the world’s governments) to India. In practice, this means that the ICCR can send Indian artistes to various famous and vague parts of the world. Classical dancers are its favorite export, but it has been known to send qawwali troupes to Central Asia as well.
A parallel function is to host foreign cultural ensembles in India. So when the Chinese want to send acrobats, or the Koreans musicians, ICCR welcomes them and provides them with an audience. The ICCR also organizes estimable functions like the one for the presentation of the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding on July 9. For such purposes it has acquired a permanent bureaucracy that spreads its domestic wing across the country, and soars abroad to perch in specific, culturally important cities. If you chance upon a center for Indian culture in Cairo, for instance, then thank the ICCR.
Krishna Chugh, obviously a north Indian (I mention this, because it is an important element of one sub-text), is a program officer at the ICCR. He has worked for 32 years and has another five to go before he retires. What eventually turned into the most dramatic assignment of his career began lift as a routine matter. He was put in charge of sending out the 1,800 invitations to Very Important Persons for the Nehru Award function. Among them was Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, daughter of Sonia Gandhi and wife of Robert Vadra.
There was a minor problem in the invitation. Her surname was spelt “Vadhera” rather than Vadra. Someone from Mrs. Vadra’s office took the trouble of pointing out this error.
So far, so normal.
Before we proceed, and since her name has been now mentioned, it would be fair to point out that Mrs Priyanka Vadra cannot be held responsible for anything that happened to Chugh. I doubt if she read the invitation too carefully. These things appear by the basketful at VIP residences in Delhi, and end up, without making history, as part of some wastepaper-basketful. The person in her office was also doing nothing more than correcting a minor mistake for future reference, a perfectly legitimate act on the part of any secretary. As Priyanka pointed out when the details tumbled out, she gets some 500 cards a day. I would be surprised if she knew anything about the matter. Even if she does not, yet, have a country to run, she has other things to do.
But the wheels of sycophancy began to grind the moment the “protest” about the misspelling reached ICCR. When such wheels grind, they have to make mincemeat of somebody. Some scapegoat has to be slaughtered.
And so one morning when he reached office, Krishna Chugh says he got an office memo saying that the director-general of ICCR, Rakesh Kumar, an IFS officer, was very angry, and demanded an explanation. Chugh apologized to the DG, added that he had made every effort to avoid the mistake, and then apologized to 10 Janpath as well. But he was relieved of his post, and then, through the relevant departmental promotions committee, transferred to Trivandrum, along with a colleague, T.J Varghese. Chugh protested, and when he was ignored went to the Delhi High Court. His complaint was injustice; Kerala was a punishment posting, not a promotion.
Why?
We must now shift, in our search for justice, to what Hercule Poirot often called the psychology of the individual. Our first individual is Chugh. He has put in 32 years of work and has only another five left. He is settled in Delhi, and looks forward to a pleasant sunset at ICCR.
What greater punishment can there be for an aging Punjabi than solitary confinement in the furthest tip of India, as distant from family and friends as could be, ignorant of local language or customs. As the crow flies, Tehran is much closer to Punjab than Trivandrum. The cultural distance is equal. His colleague Varghese (possibly a Syrian Christian from Kottayam), was being given the kind of last post that long years of service merit. Chugh was getting shafted.
And now to the psychology of the second individual: The boss. One of the characteristics of the sycophant is that subservience to his master is matched by the virulence of his anger against the slave. It is, possibly, some sadistic method of expiation of guilt. It is, of course, equally possible that I am entering psychological territory about which I know damn-all. However, no mercy is ever shown to a scapegoat.
Chugh decided that he was not going to be a goat. He did not expect redress from higher authority. He knew that in this case higher authority was punishing him to appease some even higher authority, perhaps the minister, in the hope of some juicy reward. (Opportunities thin out the higher you travel toward the bureaucratic stratosphere.) Chugh must also have known that the IFS supports its own, and would have sniffed away a mere program officer. And so he challenged the power of The System through the power of the judge. His case came before Justice Manmohan Sarin.
One element of his plea was particularly interesting, and became a mitigating factor in the stay on transfer. Chugh told the court that he had done all he could to ensure that the spelling was correct.
He checked with MTNL (proving how the phone directory must be in a mess), websites (you have been warned) and the people at 10 Janpath, where Sonia Gandhi lives. No one corrected him. So what do we infer? That Chugh was not immune to the change of power equations in Delhi. It is safe to assume that even if he had any doubts about the 1,799 other invitees, he did not double or triple check.
Second, Chugh sensed that “Vadhera” did not seem right. For one thing, there is a Sindhi air about it. “Vadhera” means landlord in Sindh and while a prized title, does not exist outside that province. So neither Chugh’s diligence, nor his sense of reality, could be faulted. But the judge laid his hand unerringly on the key point: “The adage — what is there in a name — does not carry any conviction with the authorities. An error for which a reasonable explanation was tendered by the petitioner should not have invited a punitive transfer simply because it concerns those who are in the higher echelons of power.”
Moral of the story? Court the courts. Everyone is doing it, whether on reservation of jobs for Muslims or Punjab’s abrogation of water treaties, so why not you?
It is often alleged that law and order have collapsed in India. That is wrong. Order may have collapsed. That is because politicians are in charge of order. The law remains upright, because judges are in charge of law.
