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Thursday, Sep 16, 2004

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Haksar is relevant

By Harish Khare

The intellectual concerns and commitments of P.N. Haksar remain relevant in these troubled and confusing times.

LAST SATURDAY, a small group attended a quiet function at the Prime Minister's residence to pay a token tribute to P.N. Haksar, "a great son and a great citizen of India", as Manmohan Singh described him. The occasion was the release of the first two in a "Haksar Memorial Volume" series, a compilation of writings by and about this wonderful servant of the Indian state. Besides the former President, K.R. Narayanan, a handful of Haksar's old friends and comrades were at hand to listen to the Prime Minister note that Haksar's life personified the dictum that "ideas do matter."

As Indira Gandhi's Principal Secretary, Haksar had come to be known as the most powerful man in the country, until he rubbed Sanjay Gandhi the wrong way. No other civil servant, before and after, ever got to exercise so much influence on men and matters as did Haksar. And he did all this by simply making the Prime Minister's secretariat a fountainhead of ideas and polices. And no other civil servant can be deemed to have served India so dedicatedly and so honestly as did this "karmayogi."

In Volume I, there is a letter he had written, on January 17, 1973, to the then Union Home Secretary, Govind Narain. On behalf of the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, the Home Secretary had inquired of Haksar if he would accept a Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian honour. Declining the honour, the great public servant wrote back: "All these years, I have often said to myself that one should work so that one can live with oneself without regret. This gave me a measure of inner tranquillity and even courage. Accepting an award for work done somehow causes an inexplicable discomfort to me. I hope I will not be misunderstood. I repeat I am grateful for the thought that my services should be recognised. For me this is enough. I would beg of you not to press me to accept the award itself. I shall be grateful if you will kindly convey to the Prime Minister my deep and abiding gratitude for the privilege I had to serve under her."

What a shining contrast to all the present day timeservers who want to be rewarded with post-retirement plums for simply being elegant lickspittles. No Raj Bhavans, no Rashtrapati Bhavans, no ambassadorship, no Election Commissionership for this dedicated civil servant. What is more, he was never tempted to wash Indira Gandhi's dirty linen in public, as some of his predecessors have been all too prone to do. Haksar could have named any office and Indira Gandhi would have been happy to nominate him to that post. Of course, that would have reduced him to the ranks of a durbari. He remains the ideal role model for any civil servant who cares for the country. But more than his personal predilections, it is Haksar's intellectual concerns and commitments that remain relevant in these troubled and confusing times.

One single dominant theme that runs through Haksar's writings and actions is that the governance of the country must be "charged with a social purpose." First, he was unambiguously clear that "the democratic process and democratic structures constitute the minimum necessary condition for designing and fashioning India's future." To that extent he was uncompromisingly a Nehruvian. Secondly, democratic India must be a society guided by modern spirit, spurred on by a forward-looking mindset rather than replaying ancient prejudices and medieval feuds. "The only justifiable purpose is to build a modern nation-state in India, to fight against the primordial and primitive social structures, which are dissonant with any concepts of equality, to find a mode of transcendence over the divide of Hindus and Muslims by seeing that there is a wall between the religion and the state." In Haksar's mind, the big picture meant an India moving forward, embracing science and rationalism and releasing the suppressed creative energies of the millions of Indians.

This grand social purpose could not be achieved without the political class being able to keep in mind the essence of the sacred trust reposed in it by the citizens. "Our politics must harmonise the aspirations promoted by the political processes and by the enormous expansion and reach of the modern media of communications. Politics conceived in any other terms is guaranteed to destroy the country," he wrote. Haksar was convinced that a leader could not take his political legitimacy for granted just because he happened to hold a constitutional office, but this legitimacy had to get operationalised in relation to the citizens' aspirations.

Haksar was also clear about the instruments needed to give a concrete shape to the social purpose of the Indian state. Three elements can be discerned in Haksar's writings: the prime ministerial leadership, a vibrant political party and an efficient civil service. Since he made his most creative contributions as Indira Gandhi's chosen instrument of administrative and political renewal, it is only natural that prime ministerial leadership should be the key element in his grand scheme of statecraft.

In 1987, Haksar noted, in passing, that, "Prime Ministers by definition are not idiots — they ought to know, they ought to understand, and they ought to have at their disposal analysis of a situation." This basic requirement of prime ministerial leadership remains unchanged, irrespective of the nature of the Government he or she may head. A coalition Government cannot become an excuse for a dilution of prime ministerial leadership and primacy.

A Prime Minister may or may not be a complete master of his Cabinet, but there is nothing to prevent him from using his perch to manufacture a sense of moral direction and policy clarity behind his ideas and preferences. Those who get to preside over the Indian state do not have the luxury of intellectual waffling or moral cowardice.

The second requirement is what Haksar called a political instrumentality. A national political party becomes the sine qua non for democratic transformation and nation-building in a traditional society. In undertaking this democratic transformation, the state leadership has to have the willing cooperation and acquiescence of the masses. This task can be performed only by a political party. The Congress served the Nehruvian state well for the first two decades and as Haksar saw it, "the apparent historical role of Indira Gandhi was to renew the Congress by breaking it." It was this "renewed" Congress that enabled Indira Gandhi to redefine the country's political economy in the 1969-71 period.

It is a different matter that the "renewed" Congress, too, eventually became a victim of a number of debilitating aberrations; but this in no way distracts from the basic requirement of an all-India political party as the instrument to mobilise the popular will behind the national leadership. Otherwise, as Haksar noted, governance becomes a daily exercise in coercion rather than a fair and joyful exchange between the ruler and the ruled: "To treat deep social, political and economic discontent as merely a law and order problem arises from the circumstances that we just do not have the political instrumentality for intervention. Consequently, all problems are sought to be resolved through state intervention and administrative apparatus."

The third element in Haksar's scheme was the civil service as an essential tool of statecraft — an instrument that needed to be rescued from the politician. "Politics, as it is played in our country, has wrought havoc with the morale and integrity of the civil services." He did not mince words as to what needed to be done: "Unless selection, appointments, postings, transfers, promotions of civil servants are ruthlessly objective and not criminally politicised and corrupted as at present, we will be witnessing the collapse of the administrative apparatus." His words remain relevant as ever.

Above all, Haksar talked passionately of reconciliation as the ultimate tool available to a ruler. Dissecting Jyoti Basu's success as the longest-serving Chief Minister, he wrote: "I may be wrong, but it is my view that Indian diversities give to reconcilers and to those who possess the healing touch an honoured place in its history. Ashok and Akbar, Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru were such great reconcilers. I rather suspect that Jyoti Basu's rise to eminence in the public life of our country is in some way related immensely to his capacity as a reconciler."

Haksar's was a life devoted to making India a modern, powerful and orderly nation. At a time when there seems to be considerable confusion about our collective objectives and purposes, it may not be a bad idea for the nation's new rulers to spend a weekend with Haksar's writings.

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