Realising Lohia’s vision among top posts

October 12 marked the beginning of the 60th year since Ram Manohar Lohia’s passing. In his essay ‘The Meaning of Equality’, Lohia writes, “Equality has not been stated comprehensively. Equality is perhaps as high an aim of life as truth or beauty, but the complete meaning of equality has not been adequately investigated in serenity”. Channelling that serenity, one should, at this point in history, examine the minuscule presence of marginalised sections in the highest echelons of bureaucracy, for apex posts such as Cabinet Secretary, IB Director, DG of the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF), and Director General of Police (DGP)/Chief Secretaries of States, despite entry-level representation through affirmative action.

Entry/exit barriers

Two structural features of the civil services work as barriers to the entry of the marginalised to top posts. First, inter-se seniority within a batch, maintained in the civil list of services, is fixed by the rank officers get in their UPSC (Union Public Service Commission) exam and their performance at the training academy. Officers who enter through reservation typically begin lower on the civil list due to their UPSC rank and the allocation of a higher preferred service. That place on the civil list remains rigid till retirement. Inter-se seniority, disguised as administrative convenience/fairness, functions more as a permanent memory device working silently and punitively to never allow candidates arriving through reservation mobility.

Exceptional service does not erase this initial handicap. Reserved category officers remain ranked as if frozen at birth, forever trailing their colleagues whose starting line was never handicapped in the first place. The result is a lifetime deficit that quietly excludes them from apex posts.

Secondly, the age relaxation granted to reserved categories in the civil services exam, while essential for opening the exam to historically disadvantaged candidates, shortens their total years of service. They enter later, but the retirement age remains uniform for all. Fewer years in service translate to fewer opportunities for promotion to top posts. What begins as a necessary concession at the entry gate becomes a barrier at the exit.

These mechanisms produce a subtler form of ostracism which a mere selection in the exam cannot automatically neutralise. Officers from marginalised sections spend decades knowing that the arithmetic of the civil list places them at a permanent disadvantage within their own batch; top posts/empanelment will find them last in their own batch. This can be called administrative untouchability; not the crude kind, but a paperback version of psychological injury, dressed in an otherwise seemingly neutral language concerning the civil list, inter-se seniority, rank and batch position.

The most educated, articulate and influential intellectuals from these communities are systematically sidelined from top positions, policy making, and informal channels of power causing a persistent deficit in their social capital. The community is thereby deprived of its strongest advocates inside the system, weakening the pace of collective mobility. Lohia had warned that when more than four-fifths of a nation’s vital leadership is drawn from only one-fifth of its population, atrophy follows. The same rationale applies to administrative leadership.

Some measures to correct the system can include an equal number of service years regardless of the age of entry, with the retirement rules being aligned with entry relaxations. After training, all batchmates should be treated at par, ending the lifelong shadow of inter-se seniority that resurrects the very birth-based hierarchy the Constitution buried. The UPSC examination should determine entry, not serve as a permanent retrospective judge for someone’s entire career. The civil list can be redesigned on more egalitarian lines.

Lohia insisted that the talk of equality in abstraction without concrete results is either hypocrisy or lethargy of the mind, while insistence on a single formula of equality establishes the status quo. India, he said, suffers from a complete divorce between abstract equality as a dream and concrete equality as it exists. Representation at the entry level that evaporates at the top is precisely that kind of divorce.

To realise Lohia’s vision, equality should cease to be a distant ideal and instead become an operative reality in the corridors of power.

Vipul Anekant is DCP, Delhi Police. Views are personal.