Once in almost every five years, all senior bureaucrats at the Centre face this dilemma: what should they do when, after the general elections have been ordered, their ministers ask them to push for clearance of proposals and new schemes?
This is the dilemma over enforcing the code of conduct, which stipulates that the government should desist from taking new policy decisions after the elections have been ordered.
The logic is simple: in a free and fair election, politicians belonging to the ruling party cannot enjoy an unfair advantage over their rivals from other parties and, therefore, should not be allowed to use the government machinery to further their electoral prospects.
Which is also why the Election Commission (EC) of India has barred any further use of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government's India Shining campaign on television. In fact, the EC has gone a step further by completely disallowing the use of television by any political party for running its campaign propaganda.
But what often happens in the Central ministries is quite different. Smart ministers ask their officers to work out schemes that will benefit sections of people in an apparent bid to influence their vote.
There will be no formal announcements of the schemes. But by using the media selectively, these ministers can spread the broad message of some people-friendly measures that are under their consideration.
Some years ago, the government of Uttar Pradesh initiated a proposal to create a huge number of new posts of schools teachers in the state. The move helped the ruling party politicians in tilting the voters' mind in their favour to some extent.
No such report of any Central ministry planning people-friendly measures in the wake of the elections in April and May has come to light so far. But can bureaucrats rely on anything under the rulebook to ward off such opportunistic and patently unfair moves by the ruling party politicians?
Retired civil servants will tell you that the responsibility of bureaucrats increases tremendously between the time the elections are called and a new government is voted to power. The first rule they should remember is to say "no" to any inauguration or the launch of a new scheme, even on the files.
Yes, there will be occasions when the postponement of the inauguration of a new project might lead to missing the deadline for its completion. In such cases, the bureaucrats must ensure that the project gets started on schedule without any fanfare and without any minister cutting the ribbon or making a speech at any inauguration.
There is a lesson to be learnt from what the Delhi Metro chief, E Sreedharan, has done in this respect. The third section of the Delhi Metro is scheduled to start its service by the end of March.
In the normal course, a Central minister and the Delhi chief minister would have been invited for the inauguration of the new service. The inauguration of the earlier two sections saw even Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani as chief guests.
But Sreedharan has now decided that the third section of the Delhi Metro will get started on schedule without any formal inauguration. No minister, no chief guest and no function. There will be newspaper advertisements announcing the extension of the service to the new destination -- Rithala in west Delhi.
Politicians, particularly those belonging to the ruling party at the Centre as well as the Delhi state government, are not happy. But that is how bureaucrats should handle such situations once elections have been ordered.
Even during the unprecedented economic crisis of 1991, caused by fiscal indiscipline and a deteriorating balance of payments situation, bureaucrats played a stellar role in upholding the spirit of the code of conduct, not by just blindly following it, but by differentiating between decisions that were urgent in the interest of the nation and those that could be postponed until a new government came to power.
The Chandra Shekhar government had lost its legitimacy after the Congress withdrew support to it by the end of February 1991. Elections had not been announced till then. But the finance minister had cleared a proposal for awarding high-value oil exploration contracts to a clutch of influential industrial houses.
The bureaucrats in the finance ministry rose to the occasion and brought this to the attention of Cabinet Secretary Naresh Chandra who, in turn, got President R Venkataraman to force the finance ministry to defer a decision on that till a new government came to power.
The same Naresh Chandra acted differently at the time of the historic decision to mortgage gold to help India avoid a default on meeting its international payments' obligation.
The decision to mortgage gold was taken when the general elections had been ordered. Yet, Naresh Chandra got the decision cleared and implemented because the issue was far more serious and was badly needed to save the economy from an imminent disaster.
This shows that senior bureaucrats are not completely powerless in ensuring compliance of the code of conduct after the elections are announced. They can act judiciously, make exceptions when it is a question of national emergency and, thus, follow both the letter and the spirit of the code of conduct.