As if the Election Commission didn’t have enough troubles already, senior bureaucrats — typically belonging to the IAS and IPS, but also other Class “A” services of the Government of India — who are retiring, or are on the verge of leaving, haven’t made the work of the election watchdog any easier. Many of them take to politics like duck to water. There are notable instances of this. Typically, what they do is to warm their seats in government, and by the time they are ready to bid adieu they have fixed up with the political party of their choice to nominate them for Assembly or Parliament elections. Naturally, this is not deemed to be without a quid pro quo. In clever ways, a civil servant intending to chance his arm in politics begins to do his preferred party favours at the policy or implementation level. More, an official-turned-politician successful at the hustings also seeks to use his influence with his former colleagues in service to press for favours for his party in a variety of ways. Not to put too fine a point on it, the practice amounts to plain and simple corruption, and it is the job of the EC to keep polls free, fair, and taint-free.
Chief election commissioner S.Y. Quraishi has decided to blow the whistle on this undesirable practice. In recent times, the numbers of civil servants aiming for a second career in politics have clearly risen noticeably, and warranted a frown from the CEC. There are indeed several instances of senior officials in the nomination lists of various parties in the current round of Assembly elections in five states. The CEC has thus seen it fit to urge the government to change the rules to introduce a “suitable cooling-off” period, meaning a bureaucrat wishing to plunge into politics must only do so after a suitable lapse of time so that his ability to bestow unfair advantage on a party may be negated.
Such a move is long overdue. Perhaps no one bothered with it earlier as in times past the culture of the bureaucracy was such that civil servants thought it beneath their dignity to rub shoulders with politicians, who as a class they saw as being boorish or uncouth. Such an attitude has long since vanished, with politics being widely viewed as an arena to gather spoils rather quickly even if you are not in the ruling party. Earlier the so-called cooling off period applied only to departing civil servants aspiring for a place in the private sector. But times have clearly changed, and the CEC appears to have a point. The government should lose no time in giving effect to his proposal.