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After
having spent nearly four decades as a "public servant",
he feels he has been used and abused. Worse, he has been made a
scapegoat and singled out for criticism by a committee of lawmakers
simply because it was the "safest thing to do".
Meet Ajit Kumar, a 1964 batch Indian Administrative
Service (IAS) officer, who retired as Secretary, Planning Commission,
in January 2002. He had been appointed to this post for barely three
months, having served as Finance Secretary for roughly one year
from November 2000. Earlier, he had been appointed Industry Secretary
after a controversial tenure as Defence Secretary between June 1997
and December 1998.
His move from South Block to Udyog Bhavan coincided
with the government's decision to unceremoniously remove Admiral
Vishnu Bhagwat as Chief of the Indian Navy. Kumar was ostensibly
moved because the government received a lot of flak from the media
not only for the manner in which Bhagwat was dismissed but also
because of the alleged attempts made by civilians (read bureaucrats
like Kumar) to dominate men in uniform.
Kumar says he was happy in his job as Industry Secretary. But the
then Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha had other ideas. He was reportedly
unhappy with his seniormost secretary-level officer, Piyush Mankad.
What made matters worse was the decision of E. A. S. Sarma, the
then Secretary, Economic Affairs, in the Finance Ministry, to resign
his post after being treated in a shoddy manner. A suitably senior
bureaucrat had to be found barely two months before the presentation
of the Union budget. Kumar thus came to occupy the second-largest
room in North Block.
His stay in the Finance Ministry "was
not exactly a happy experience". He did not endear himself
to some of his colleagues with his objections to the way public
sector banks were being regularly recapitalised using public funds
and the indiscriminate manner in which foreign loans were obtained.
Then came the fiasco involving the Unit Trust of India's Unit Scheme
of 1964.
According to Kumar, the weekend before the
UTI's board of trustees met on July 2, 2001, the then UTI Chairman
P.S. Subramanyam "sneaked" letters to the residences of
Finance Ministry officials informing them about what would be on
the agenda of the board meeting.
An important item on the board's agenda was
a proposal to freeze all transactions in us-64. The Joint Parliamentary
Committee, comprising 30 mps belonging to different political parties,
which inquired into the episode concluded that Kumar should have
discussed the matter "immediately" with Sinha and that
by not doing so, "the Secretary considered the problem in a
routine and casual manner that is not expected from an officer of
his rank."
Months before the JPC presented its report
in Parliament on December 19, 2001, copies of the draft report of
the panel had been leaked to journalists. After reading news reports,
on July 26, 2001, Kumar wrote to the JPC Chairman, Lt. Gen. Sri
Prakash Mani Tripathi, saying he was "shocked and greatly perturbed"
about the comments reportedly made against him. In that letter,
Kumar pointed out what Sinha had himself acknowledged in Parliament.
"...it may be an error of judgement, I don't know, but at that
point of time, that was the judgement that we made in the Ministry
of Finance-to intervene only after the UTI board took the decision..."
Sinha told the Rajya Sabha on August 1, 2001.
After the JPC report was made public, a Congress
member of the committee, Mani Shankar Aiyar, stated that Tripathi
had gone back on his assurance that Kumar's name would be deleted
from the final report. Tripathi then blamed unnamed junior officials
for the so-called goof-up. Not surprisingly, Kumar feels he has
been unfairly maligned. I hold no brief for him. Many consider him
to be a pliable bureaucrat. Still, one can't help but feel sorry
for a retired IAS officer, now shorn of pelf and power, who is aware
that he won't be appointed as a government consultant.
The author is Director, School
of Convergence at IMI, New Delhi, and a journalist. He can be contacted
at paranjoy@yahoo.com.
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