State recruitment as media spectacle

 

There are many ways in which the media narrative in this country has a peculiar cast of characters on prime time or the front pages, the kind of people who are usually invisible in the media space. It is the time of year when the national media engages you in the annual ritual of heralding examination gladiators as the results of competitive examinations for recruiting civil servants, are declared.

You are entitled to wonder whether there are other countries in the world, particularly countries India aspires to be in league with, where the yearly human resource hiring drive of the state is such big news and successful candidates are accorded minor-celebrity status for a few months.

There is something very Indian about transforming the banality of a recruitment test result into a media spectacle. Last week the declaration of results had this ritualistic effect on your news channels, websites and dailies. The coverage of examination stars was often supplemented by decoding the sociology of examination success or digging out human interest stories (about ‘empowerment’, of course) in these results.

It often amounts to revealing the editorial naivete and journalistic overdrive in assigning meaning to what is basically a mundane rote-based evaluation system. In the process, the media fail to ask more relevant questions such as what such a frozen template of nineteenth century aspirations for a lifelong ticket to governmental privileges tell us about the myth of change in India in general and the middle class in particular?

The media finds itself as a willing collaborator in talking up the assembly line of bureaucratic aspirations rather than critiquing it as a lingering sign of the unimaginative career landscape in this country where the obsession with competing for a secure perch continues to smother creativity, excellence, enterprise  and innovation.

Three years back I had pitched a story idea about the underbelly of the multi-crore civil services coaching industry in Delhi to the then editor of Open magazine and novelist Manu Joseph. He responded by suggesting that the story should also probe “why do they want to be in the service when the world around them has changed so much?” It’s this aspect of questioning the sterile indifference to forces shaping the contemporary world which has unfortunately not become a topic of the media narrative on the young entrants to Babudom in India.

The clues for answering this riddle can be found all around if the media sought them. The explanation obviously doesn’t serve as an advertisement for the post-liberalisation middle class story of exploring, dynamic and innovative people. On the contrary, the causes are to be found in the yearning for a government job which in turn assure instant social recognition, and also in the feudal attraction of being part of the Mai Baap state apparatus.

That constitutes a conservative check on any narrative about how middle class India engages with the ideas and challenges that the increasingly open world has to offer. Such a bland script of an unchanging India predictably has not found space in media reports which are more likely to grab the romantic ‘save the world’ moralizing which the successful candidates cite as motives for joining the state workforce.

Journalistic accounts miss the irony that their sense of social conscience is worthy of the privileges of a comfortable life in the civil services but not of meeting the daily challenges of working as doctors, engineers, biotechnologists, teachers, researchers or for that matter, entrepreneurs, which many of them are qualified to do.

In fact, the same awestruck gullibility in media reporting also extends to larger-than-life accounts of incumbent civil servants which appear with regularity in Indian newspapers and news channels. Often routine bureaucratic actions - nothing more than, say, holding  a contractor accountable for some public construction work - somehow gain news value.

Recently symbolic gestures such as an IAS officer eating a mid day meal in a school to dispel superstitions about the widow cook or a District Magistrate walking to the office ostensibly to save fuel, have found their way into the news.  Interestingly, the space given to such accounts is rooted in the nature of their readership or viewership. Such media stories try to cater to the ingrained middle class bias which glorifies salaried civil servants and demonises the political class.

 A case in point was how last December, the media gave a definite slant to a video showing a spat between a Haryana minister and a woman IPS officer. If you are not prejudging the case, there was nothing in the spat video which proved that the minister was wrong. The facts (with the video being the only source) were less conclusive. In fact, if politician-bashing had been given a break,  it could be seen that the minister was raising a genuine public concern and the officer was obdurately misbehaving which is unbecoming when interacting with a minister.

Coming back to the commentary on the civil service results. This year the naivete with which Indian Express was trying to decipher sociological clues in the pattern of selections for the civil services was an unwarranted attempt at intellectualizing -- a symptom which often leads to the vice of ‘over-analysis’.  The daily chose to herald a Dalit and a Kashmiri securing first and second ranks as triumphs -over -social barriers tales.

It was a clichéd line of argument which tried to forcibly embed the idea of social inclusion with the democratization of activities as professional as the process of hiring human resources for state machinery (three years ago, in a piece published in the Hoot, I  had pointed out what was insidious about such reasoning).

However, even more stretched is how Seema Chishti has profiled this year’s topper and her family. Apart from falling for the same contrived narrative of social engineering, Chishti is misleading in her bid to credit the topper with making an unconventional career choice. She tries to naively juxtapose the LSR graduate’s career move with the conventional choices made by a character from the popular Hindi movie ‘3 Idiots. That’s plain wrong. Chishti seems oblivious of the fact that the pursuit of the civil services after graduation is as conventionally mainstream as engineering and medicine.

However, what is quite paradoxical is Chishti’s assumption that the topper’s story is that of ‘individual excellence’. That’s a blatantly flawed assumption to begin a profile with because one of the prime motivations for aspirants joining the civil services is  quite the opposite -  a lifelong ticket to escape all possibilities of excellence because the assurance of a secure job shields you from all challenges.

Chishti has obviously not mapped the hubs of civil services coaching in Delhi where the unimaginative assembly lines of people mugging up the same set of assorted cut-and-paste study material would dispel her illusions about anything ‘individual’ or anything resembling ‘excellence’ in the examination process.

There is no better case study than Bihar for empirically refuting perceptions about civil servants being agents of social change or development for their region or for the social segment they come from. Every year, large number of young men and women from the state join the civil services, a fact which is duly chronicled in the local dailies and the Patna edition of national newspapers as a statement of what now seems to be deceptive pride.

Yet that has failed miserably in pulling the state out of the dehumanizing conditions of poverty and disease and the scourge of underdevelopment. Bihar continues to be at the bottom of all significant indices of human development. Interestingly, though not surprisingly, states like Gujarat where young people have been far less dependent or even less keen on joining the bureaucracy, have witnessed far better development through enterprise, innovation and private initiative. This is what an IAS probationer said in a recent piece in the Huffington Post: “Our country needs lots of doctors, teachers, entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, not that many civil servants!”.

Within the journalistic fraternity, the most well argued critique of the relevance of  IAS in our times was offered by Mihir S. Sharma, Opinion page editor of the Business Standard and author of Restart.  Almost a year back, in his column for the same daily, Sharma persuasively built a case for doing away with the colonial baggage of the under-informed, unimaginative, obstructionist and overrated governance device, namely, the IAS.

Sharma quite refreshingly began developing this attack on bureaucracy in Restart, one of the most thought-provoking books on the Indian economy published in recent years. It’s one of the rare examples of a commentator dissecting the anachronistic nature of our civil services, and not pandering to what the unchanging middle class perceives it to be.

In a country where having a young bureaucrat as your son-in-law entitles you to that smirk of feudal superiority over your neighbour, young people will continue flocking to write the civil services examination. The incentives are more alluring when it promises an escape from the challenges of innovation and accountability.  What is, however, intriguingly disturbing is that instead of attacking its irrelevance for the times we live in, the news media acts as an echo chamber of stagnant middle class aspirations which often end at the safety of a towel-covered chair in a government office.