DE AGOSTO ESQUINA FRENTE AL PARQUE CENTRAL,

Back in Delhi, I went the next day to the strange environs of the headquarters of the country’s

television network, Doordarshan, and stepped like Alice into a different world. I have said enough of all that in my book Doordarshan Days and don’t intend to repeat it here.

But after I left Doordarshan—or, more correctly, was ordered to leave—I did spend a good deal of time thinking of what many have written about before and since then. Just how right is it to have an IAS officer head a professional television network?

Ruling a district is a complicated business, certainly, and the conditioning one gets in the National Academy is certainly not as helpful as it could be. Many IAS officers, both retired and serving, thought it was quite useless in fact, but I can’t agree. Leaving aside the classes on various subjects which were boring in the extreme, there was something one took away from there, something which helped in the districts.

Classes in most colleges are equally boring, but for some strange reason most people tend to go all gooey-eyed when their college, the canteen, or coffee house, or some such location, is mentioned later in their lives, and is covered over with treacly sentiment. And yes, it’s easy to say it’s because they associate it with their youth; the probationers in the National Academy were and are not much older. True, situations change very quickly in the districts, and all the stuff probationers are told in the cool and quiet rooms of the National Academy look antediluvian when one is facing some nasty situation in a subdivision or district. But I think there are some essentials that do remain—and these come from the add-ons rather than the core training given. Riding, rock climbing, physical fitness regimes,

trekking, the stint with the army, all go into the often unconscious responses to situations.

In any event, several aspects of the training in the Academy relate to or refer to running a district; very little of it refers to running a television network, or even to working in a ministry, for that matter. This makes one blunder around for a while, and often pick up ideas and potted knowledge from

colleagues senior and junior that are horribly wrong, even comic. In any event, why not leave the running of something like an airline or a hotel chain to those who are in the business?

I doubt if anyone in the government has really thought this through; there have been others who have researched the subject but their views are, as is usual, never considered by those who make the

decisions. But there is, somewhere in the grey fog that passes for collective bureaucratic thinking, a notion that somebody who’s faced difficult, even dangerous, situations can handle a complex

organization, eventually.

And it has worked on a number of occasions. S.R. Rao, an IAS officer, was put in charge of the Municipal Corporation of Surat, which is where the outbreak of bubonic plague started some years ago, and he succeeded in making Surat the second cleanest city in India, an assessment made by a

team sent out by INTACH in 1994 or 1995. Probir Sen, another IAS officer, was Chairman and

Managing Director of Indian Airlines and then of both that and Air India when they were two separate corporations, and did an outstanding job in bringing order and smoothness of functioning to these organizations. R.C. Bhargava took over and virtually built Maruti into the giant, prosperous carmaker it now is, and he was followed by someone who took it to even greater heights, Jagdish Khattar. Both were IAS officers, who had not spent their lives making cars but running districts and government offices.

There is also the establishment of Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, which was at one time a major centre for the visual and performing arts. This was the creation of another IAS officer, Ashok Vajpeyi, who wryly attributes its creation mainly to accident, and casual decisions taken by various other officers. But the fact is it was he who got a group of outstanding creative people together such as Charles Correa, J. Swaminathan, B.V. Karanth and others and set up an institution which was unique; as Vajpeyi says, he had to be careful not to make it into a replica of Rabindra Bhavan in Delhi which is one building housing three separate cultural institutions each separate from the other. Bharat Bhavan, he said, was going to be an integrated centre for all the arts, and that is, in fact, what it became.

It has to do, finally, with management, not in the sense in which it is understood by the bright-eyed lads and lasses in the IIMs but in the sense in which ordinary people understand it—handling

situations and people. If today the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India is an IAS officer it is not because of anything other than the fact that right at the top what one needs is just that— handling situations and people. These are not attributes that many of our distinguished archaeologists are blessed with.

One can argue with valid reasons for the conversion of the Survey into a trust, which has

distinguished scholars and archaeologists on it, and to whom the head would report. But as things are today, the massively monolithic Survey is, sadly, better ordered under an IAS officer who is sensitive to the issues involved. In recent years I believe they have actually found someone who is an

archaeologist and has administrative experience. If they have, that’s good news.

When I was removed from Doordarshan and joined the Department of Culture in the Ministry of Human Resource Development as Additional Secretary I was bitter, demoralized, angry and very, very hurt. I had put in a great deal of work when I was in Doordarshan: I had hardly taken a day off, unless I was ill—which was rare. I worked on Sundays, and I worked from 9 in the morning till after 9, sometimes 10, in the night. It was difficult to accept that, for all that work, what one got was a summary removal, within a day, to a post that was deliberately created for me, in a department where there was hardly enough work for a Secretary, leave alone an Additional Secretary.

I was told many years later by Gopi Arora, an IAS officer who had been very close to Rajiv Gandhi, that he, Gopi, had fought hard to get me a post that didn’t make my move look like a

punishment or a humiliation, but failed to get that done. ‘They actually wanted you to be sent to a post with no work worth the name,’ he told me sadly.

I could not, however, have had a kinder or more enlightened Secretary in the Department of Culture. J. Veeraraghavan was from the Audit and Accounts Service but was devoted to the field of education. He had held a number of positions in the Ministry related to education, had been in

NIEPA, the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, and in the Planning Commission looking after education, but had been suddenly moved as Secretary, Culture when the powers that be wanted to remove M. Varadarajan, an IAS officer from the UP cadre, from that post. Veeraraghavan may have been new to the department, but he was not only a scholar but a man with a very deep knowledge of the arts, and of culture in its many aspects. He called me to his room and asked me what I would like to take charge of, from among the subjects given to the department.

‘Anything,’ I said sullenly. ‘Sweeping the rooms, getting stationery, things like that.’

‘I know you are resentful,’ Veeraraghavan said gently. ‘But take this list of subjects and go over it. Let me know what you would like to do later on.’

‘I don’t need the list,’ I told him rather rudely, I fear. ‘I have one on my desk.’

I went to my room, watched by a young Deputy Secretary, Anshu Vaish, an IAS officer of the Madhya Pradesh cadre. One of her charges in the department at the time was administration, that is, the internal administration of the department.

A few minutes after I returned to my room she came in, knocking on the door and asking timidly, ‘May I come in, sir?’

‘If you want to,’ I said.

‘I came in to ask if there was anything you might need,’ she said. ‘If the room’s all right, and if you are happy with your personal staff.’

‘I have a table and a chair,’ I said acidly. ‘What more do I need?’

She said nothing and got up to go. At the door she turned and said, ‘Sir, many of us junior officers have admired the way you worked in Doordarshan. We admired the way you stood up to pressures and did what you thought was right. You were a kind of role model to us.’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘But now,’ Anshu continued, ‘you’re being so … so disinterested, and dismissive and so negative. We didn’t expect you to be like that, sir.’

I was astonished and must have looked it.

‘We all get transferred, sir,’ Anshu said quietly. ‘We … just have to make the best of it.’ Finally I replied. ‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been behaving badly, I realize that.’

‘I’m sorry if I spoke out of turn, sir,’ Anshu said and left.

She left me feeling very foolish. I had indeed been behaving churlishly; as she, a young officer, pointed out, we just have to make the best of it. I had, without being aware of it, allowed myself to presume I had a consequence that exceeded my identity as an IAS officer; how dare they treat me like this, me; that was really what was eating me up. It could happen to others. Not to me.

I saw the Secretary the next day and told him I would like to look after museums, the

Archaeological Survey of India and a few other items. He looked relieved and said he would issue the orders. As I came out of his room I met Anshu Vaish in the corridor. I told her what I’d said to the Secretary. She smiled radiantly, and it was as if the sun had come out on a dark, grey day. Make of it what you will. My return to serious work began with that smile.

The interface between government and matters cultural has always been, and will always be, uneasy. The uneasiness begins when attempts are made to spell out what ‘culture’ means; there are

immediately several voices raised demanding to be heard on the issue, there is anger, indignation, passion, amusement, and a large number of other emotions and reactions. As Hermann Goering

apparently said, ‘When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.’ Fascist he certainly was but the exasperation he expressed is something many less extreme in their worldview share.

Government rules and regulations make matters worse. The anxiety of all those in the ministry given responsibility for culture and who have some respect for the concept—such as it is—has always been to try to smoothen the jagged edges of the interface, and no one has been totally successful. Some have actually made matters worse, others have achieved a very limited kind of smoothening out in limited areas. This was what I slowly realized as I began my first days in the department.

Again and again one came up against the question of the suitability of IAS officers to handle responsibilities in this department—and one came across, also, the ineptness of persons of great standing in the cultural field in their different areas as administrators. This was and, I should imagine, still is, a dilemma that doesn’t seem to have any resolution in sight. I met and worked with directors general of the Archaeological Survey of India who were fine archaeologists, had done major

excavations and published books and papers that had been acclaimed in the world of scholarship, but who were hopeless when it came to managing the ponderous system—the ASI itself. I met directors of museums who were fine scholars, but who simply couldn’t manage their institutions. Ultimately, at the top, one had to manage—but that also needed some knowledge of the skill, the subject itself. As far as I know just one IAS officer has a doctorate in archaeology and would have been suitable to head the organization.

In the department, however, the situation was different. The department was a part of ‘government’ and therefore the legitimate stamping ground of the IAS; policy formulation, allocation of funds and other aspects of governmental work were what we did, and, of course, the inputs and arguments and proposals from the professional units were a valuable input. But they are never the only factors that go towards policy formulation, as is generally known and accepted. Political realities are, to take an example, another major concern.

My summary removal from Doordarshan still rankled though, and while I engaged myself with the work in the Department of Culture I did air my grievance to a batchmate, S. Gopalan, then an

Additional Secretary in the Department of education, in the same ministry. Gopalan had little time for my moaning and groaning, and said, ‘Why the hell don’t you go out and take a look at the protected monuments of the ASI, the museums and other places you’re supposed to be looking after? Get out of Delhi. It’ll help you.’

I took his advice and entered, as a result, into a world filled with wondrous, awesome monuments, manuscripts, and artefacts. The magnificent ruins of Hampi, the great city of Fatehpur Sikri and the immense grandeur of the Brihadeeswara Temple at Thanjavur, were offset by the exquisite Chola bronzes in the Government Museum in Madras (now Chennai), and the unbelievably lovely

illuminated manuscripts kept in the Khuda Baksh Library in Patna.

The more I saw, the smaller I felt, and my grievance seemed silly and petty. And the more I saw the more alarmed I felt at the enormous work needed to preserve and restore these priceless monuments

and artefacts. We needed specialist restorers of manuscripts and paintings, engineer-conservators, archaeologists and epigraphists in much larger numbers than we had, and with greater skills. Sadly, the few who had those skills found more lucrative employments in the US and in Britain; and we could not give them the kind of salaries that would bring them back.

Not that we did not have any skilled personnel in these fields, far from it. But we needed more, much more, and the worrying fact that became apparent was that fewer and fewer young people were taking to these professions—archaeology, museology, epigraphy and so on—so that in time there would be a major problem that the country as a whole would have to face.

‘Today,’ the then DG of the ASI told me when we were in Agra, ‘there is no one who knows how to restore the dome of the Taj Mahal, if, God forbid, it collapses.’

I was aghast. ‘No one?’ I asked.

‘No one,’ he said firmly. ‘Not in the ASI. There may be someone in the Roorkee College of Engineering or in the Railways. But even that is doubtful.’

‘Why the Railways?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘They build arches for their bridges, and may know how to rebuild a fallen dome. But, as I said, it is a possibility, that is all. I myself am not sure.’

‘So what happens if the dome does collapse?’ I asked him. He smiled. ‘Let us hope that it does not,’ he said.

And there was always the basic question. Should government get involved with this kind of activity, or set aside funds for organizations and autonomous public bodies? In other words, leave executive action to professional bodies which were independent of the government. We had a body— an infant at the time—in INTACH and that could perhaps be encouraged to develop into a major body actually to take on the kind of work being done by the ASI and other governmental agencies. In those first days in the department I did think of these issues, more particularly because the thought of these being done by governmental agencies made me uneasy, but it also seemed to me that there weren’t enough agencies, and more importantly, a general sense of public awareness to be a credible and practical substitute.

But if this was a worry at the back of my mind regarding monuments, it was a positive sense of alarm when it came to our museums. They were, all of them, in desperate need of professional and contemporary expertise in the care of their holdings, their storage and above all in their display. The distinguished scholar Dr R. Nagaswamy showed me the condition in which the exquisite Chola bronzes were kept in the Government Museum in Madras; that, fortunately, has changed now, I

understand, and they are being cared for and have been stored in much better conditions. But that was my first glimpse, and following that there were other distressing examples; the Indian Museum in Calcutta, the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad and the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta were crying out for complete renovations and for urgent care and protection of their artefacts. But their budgets were pathetically small, and there was always a shortage of trained museum staff.

There was little that I could do about all this, but I did bring it to the notice of the Secretary and on his advice took these matters up with the Financial Adviser. I have mentioned earlier the enormous power that these worthies had in the bureaucratic system; in the Ministry of Education and Culture

there was one FA who was a part of the Department of Education—to the extent that he was part of anything other than his real ministry, the Ministry of Finance. He ‘looked after’ the work of the

Department of Culture rather like the master in the pauper’s home and Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist and his reaction was exactly the same if, like Oliver, we asked for more. Permit me to refresh your

memory with that fearful account:

[Oliver] rose from the table, and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said, somewhat alarmed by his own temerity:

‘Please, sir, I want some more.’

The master was a fat, healthy man, but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds; and then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralysed with wonder; the boys with fear.

‘What!’ said the master at length in a faint voice. ‘Please, sir,’ replied Oliver, ‘I want some more.’