The Hindu : An outstanding civil servant

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Sep 04, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

An outstanding civil servant

By Inder Malhotra

Some years ago I had occasion to write, in both sorrow and anger, that one of the country's military heroes, Harbaksh Singh, who had led the Indian Army in the battlefield during the 1965 war with Pakistan, had died practically unsung and even unwept.

The same feeling of distress and dismay has now returned because of the capital's utter indifference to the passing of one of its outstanding denizens, Nirmal Kumar Mukharji, who had done the country much service. A former civil servant of exceptional ability, dedication and integrity, he had served three Prime Ministers as Cabinet Secretary and later done a stint as Governor of Punjab at a time when the State was torn by insurgency. And yet, on the morning after, of the 10 newspapers that I take, only one, The Hindu, mentioned his death in some, though incomplete, detail. Another major paper dismissed it in exactly four lines. Most others ignored it altogether. Is the Indian State and society, including the media, of course, committed to fussing only about those who die while in office, even if they were whipper snappers?

Strangely, even serving bureaucrats, for whom Nirmal should be a role model — to say nothing of his peers still around — failed to do anything to honour his memory and learn from his legacy. Let this gap be filled by the salute to him that follows.

Nirmal, son of the first Indian Principal of Delhi's famous St. Stephen's College, was the last of the long line of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), the ``steel-frame'' of the Raj and predecessor of today's IAS. He was one of those members of the ``heaven-born'' service who flowered to the fullest after the dawn of Swaraj and surprised the sceptical nationalists by their devotion to independent India.

Having made a tremendous impression in Punjab during the earlier part of his career, Nirmal attracted the Union Government's attention in 1964 when it invited him to head the newly-formed Administrative Reforms Division of the Home Ministry. His outstanding work earned him rapid promotions. In the early Seventies, he was appointed to the coveted post of Home Secretary.

But the rough always accompanies the smooth. When the times turn bad, good men are bound to suffer. So it was that one hot afternoon in June 1975, during the short interval between the Allahabad High Court's famous judgment and the hammer-blow of the Emergency, an unsuspecting Nirmal received orders transferring him to the Ministry of Civil Aviation. His immediate reaction was that he must resign but was dissuaded by the much-respected P.N. Haskar, once Indira Gandhi's all-powerful Principal Secretary who had also fallen from grace by then.

In March 1977, the electorate overthrew the Empress and the Janata Party came to power, under Morarji Desai's leadership. The first appointment he made was that of Nirmal as Cabinet Secretary with a fixed three-year tenure. Only those familiar with that turbulent period, during which the Desai Government disintegrated, that of Charan Singh could not face Parliament even for a day and Indira Gandhi returned to power resoundingly, know of the dexterity with which Nirmal steered the administration during the three tortuous transitions.

What has remained unknown so far, and has been brought to light in Bharat Karnad's excellent book Nuclear Weapons & Indian Security (Macmillan, Rs. 795), is that, but for Nirmal's skilful handling, ``Morarji's absolutist views (on the nuclear issue)'' would almost certainly have ``resulted in terminating India's nuclear weapon option''.

The story is long, complex and so full of unbelievably sordid bureaucratic intrigue and skulduggery that, in the available space, it has to be summarised most tersely.

It was as early as December 1978 that the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), then headed by the doyen of Indian strategists, K. Subrahmanyam, who was also Additional Secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat, concluded that Pakistan had already ``gone nuclear'' by acquiring ``a nuclear weapons capability with China's help''.

As Nirmal had anticipated, the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) even refused to call a meeting of the Cabinet's relevant Committee to discuss the JIC's finding of supreme concern to those responsible for India's security. When the meeting was belatedly held, it was ``by a vote of three to two'' that the committee ``approved preparations for (nuclear) testing and weaponising''.

The two dissenters were, unsurprisingly, the then Prime Minister, Morarji Desai, and, ironically, his Foreign Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, who, as Prime Minister in 1998, conducted the nuclear tests and declared India to be a nuclear weapon power!

There was a further twist to the tale. Nirmal asked Subrahmanyam to fly to Bombay with a ``hand-written copy'' of the Cabinet Committee's directive to the then Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Homi Sethna.

But ``Morarji separately instructed the Chairman, AEC, to ignore the Cabinet (Committee) decision and to do nothing about testing without his specific permission. Asked what he would do with these contradictory orders, Sethna told Subrahmanyam that he would manage. It turned out that he was unable to do so.''

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An outstanding civil servant