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The Rediff Special/Nirad C Chaudhuri

'The chief weakness of India today is that she is caught in the net of Babuism'

I wrote an article on this peculiar political situation in India in 1994. It was published in The Statesman of Calcutta under the title 'British Rule' is Dead, Long Live British Rule!' which was an adaptation of the French cry on the death of one autocratic king and the succession of another autocratic ruler. It simply meant that even if a particular monarch passed away, the monarchy remained: that is to say, only the person disappears, but not the institution.

By adapting this saying to the Indian political situation, I wanted to say that what disappeared from India with the going away of the British had created remained, intact in all its features and above all in its spirit. The present government of India is pursuing policies, especially in regard to the so-called minorities, which is British days used to be defined by the phrase: Divide et impera.

But it must not be assumed that my perception of the continuation of British rule in India after Independence dates only from the end of the Nehru dynasty; it dawned on me with the very inauguration of Independence, when I had not realised that Nehru was to create a dynasty. So, I wrote in the article for The Statesman: 'The immense noisy crowds that greeted the end of British rule in India with deafening shouts of joy on August 15, 1947, did not recall the old saying: they thought nothing of British rule would survive in their country after the departure of the White men who had carried it on. They never perceived that British rule in India had created an impersonal structure.... a system of government for which there was no substitute. In this system, the actual work of government was carried on by a bureaucracy consisting of the highest British officials together with a hierarchy of officials whose lowest but the most numerous personnel was formed by the clerks. Actual initiation of government action was in the hands of the men in the lowest position, viz, the clerks.

'Lord Curzon was infuriated by this system but failed to remove it. It kept its hold, and around 1924, Field-Marshal Lord Rawlinson, who was commander-in-chief in India, wrote in his diary: "The chief weakness of India today is that she is caught in the net of Babuism -- which she had herself created during long years of parochial and pedantic administration. She is hampered on all sides by precedents, vested interests, and ancient customs. What Lord Rawlinson had in mind was a system of government in which initiative had to surge to the highest level from the lowest level and execution had to seep down to the lowest from the highest, and since the lowest level of the government at first was composed of Bengali clerks, he used the word 'Babuism'.

In the same article I described the basic character of the Indian bureaucracy as it is now in these words. 'Theirs is a solid, egocentric, and rootless order, which by its very nature, is not only uncreative, but even unproductive. Its only purpose is to perpetuate itself by inbreeding, and ensure its prosperity. Government by such a bureaucracy can by itself be regarded as a decisive sign of decadence of a people in their political life. But in India it has been taken further down by making the 'dealing clerk' the initiator of the motive force of all action by the government. The 'dealing clerk' by taking leave of absence or even by his truancy can stop governmental action. If this is the reductio ad absurdum of government, it is also making decadence in respect of government triumphant. This decadence no longer has to be militant.

Excerpted from Three Horsemen Of The New Apocalypse by Nirad C Chaudhuri, Oxford University Press, 1997, Rs 250, with the publisher's permission.

Nirad C Chaudhuri, continued

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