When bureaucrats go for career change . . .

The whisper, a pretty loud one, that Haider Ali is keen to take the plunge in politics, and that too on the side of the fence occupied by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, has been acquiring increasingly thicker shades of colour. Now, of course, we are tempted to suggest that the newly made OSD is perfectly within his rights to go into politics and that, as a citizen, he is eligible to look for opportunities for making newer contributions to public welfare.

But temptations must be resisted, indeed, must be rolled back, when the matter is one of what the bureaucracy has been doing lately in this country. Having watched with amusement, combined with revulsion, the sinister doings of nearly a couple of score of serving and former bureaucrats at the Uttara office of a former energy advisor only weeks ago we, as a people, are quite naturally keeping watch over all these members of the civil service who are so keen to give a rough shake to our sensitivities.

Tap here to add The Daily Star as a trusted source

And, speaking of sensitivities, let your mind wander until it comes to rest on the story of Abu Hena. He enthused us not long ago and gave us to believe that there were men like him ready and willing to spot wrong and then repudiate that wrong. His principled stand against the political patronization of terrorists operating in the guise of the Islamic faith renewed our faith, somewhat, in the ability of men doing less than transparent politics to understand, at a point in time, that they have been among the wrong kind of crowd. Abu Hena used to be a good bureaucrat, one of those old-timers in whose judgment there was always the flavor of administrative good sense. It was good sense that he ultimately did not see reflected in the programs of his party. His expulsion from the BNP, and his subsequent linking up with the Liberal Democratic Party, were a natural corollary to his changing moods.

And now Abu Hena has turned his back on the LDP and retraced his steps back to the BNP. You might now inform us, in the infinity of your wisdom, that there is no last word in politics, that men like Abu Hena keep playing with words until they find the right ones to base their work upon. We do not have to buy your line of reasoning because, contrary to what you might advise us, there is, of course and definitely, a last word in politics. That word may have turned into a cliché. But if it is good enough for me, it might as well be good enough for you. It is called principle. Even bureaucrats must adhere to principles, and they do in all civilized societies.

In our social milieu, once upon a time, there used to be civil servants who made it a cardinal point in life to serve the administration and so remain, as it were, faceless. You could think of Mujibul Haq and AKM Ahsan. You could go back to the times of Anisuzzaman. And then there were Kafiluddin Mahmud and M. Asafuddowlah. They were men, as long as they served the republic as civil servants, who upheld the conventions of the bureaucracy through not being seen but, nevertheless, being an integral part of the process of governance.

How many instances can you point to of these men, and of others in their era, calling in the media and speaking to them in clear, full and outrageous violation of the rules of service? This generation of civil servants, for all the charges of elitism and social snobbery hurled at it, operated on the basis of etiquette and on the core belief of the bureaucracy being subservient to the political leadership of the land.

That is not what you can say about many of the higher functionaries of the civil structure today. Forget the fact that the bureaucrat in our times is a mediocre being that his intellectual accomplishments may not necessarily be at par with the generation, which preceded his. But that ought not to be an excuse for him and his friends to fling rules and conventions to the winds. When a couple of weeks ago the two home secretaries, the one being reassigned and the one who had just come in, chose to speak to the media pack the overwhelming question of how audacious and rude the civil administration has become in these times came upon us yet once more. The sadder reality is that there is hardly anyone in the political tier of government who can pull these men up and then send them packing.

A bureaucrat who minces no words in publicly articulating his indignation at being moved to a new department deserves to be disciplined in much the same way that a secretary who toys with political ambitions even as he serves the state needs to be swatted down. ASM Abdul Halim, clearly enjoying the power that came with being cabinet secretary, went on tours of his local area trying to drum up support for his probable political future. The politicians he served saw little that was wrong with that, in their narrow partisan interest.

And because they ignored such lapses on the part of such politically motivated bureaucrats we now have the spectacle of Haider Ali linking up with a politician, of other government officials (all with pronounced political leanings) meeting in conspiratorial darkness and so compelling the goodness in our collective being to take on the disconcerting shape of cynicism.

There is, after all this talk of the bad doings of bad bureaucrats, the matter of how we in Bangladesh can deal with the menace of a politically indiscreet, in effect rapacious, bureaucracy. There are some pretty simple things that can be done. In the first place, see to it that a bureaucrat retires when he must retire. But if you give him a contract to carry on, and then let him go on and on because his political beliefs tally with yours, you simply punch yet one more hole in the heart of civil administration.

Kamaluddin Siddiqui spoke for a lot of us when, a few weeks ago, he noted on television that contractual appointments needed to be discouraged. But that statement of belief, assuming it was belief, came rather late in the day. He would have made much better sense of it all had he declined his own contractual appointment in the early days of the BNP-led alliance government. He did not; and like him, many other such officials could not hold themselves back from happily picking up what came their way. The result was administrative chaos, with good officials watching, in dismay, their chances of promotion go up in smoke.

And in the second place, make sure that bureaucrats, of both the civil and military variety spend a fairly reasonable amount of time, once they have passed into superannuation, staying away from politics. Let three years or, ideally, five years go by before these gentlemen, desirous of a career change after their careers are actually over, are welcomed into politics. It becomes a worrying situation when the gap between the end of a civil service career and the beginning of a political one turns out to be perilously close. Bureaucratic proximity to the powers that be, or have been, has generally produced some of the more disturbing of times for us in these parts.

Field Marshal Ayub Khan's patronization of elements of the Altaf Gauhar brand in the 1960s clearly damaged much of the administrative process in Pakistan. In General Ershad's era, some of the most loyal of civil servants he banked on for support were soon -- and that was after his fall -- to veer off into different political camps. In the years since the return of an elected government in 1991, bureaucrats have leapt across and trampled upon one another in demonstrations of fealty to the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, with results that have been as quixotic as they have been damaging for grassroots politics.

And the damage? Take a peek inside the secretariat, inside the ministries, inside certain dark rooms in the Uttara twilight. The truth will dawn on you with astonishing clarity.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, Dhaka Courier.