Allahabad High Court Quashing NSA Against Akriti and Indicting Civil Servants Captures Sardar Patel and Ambedkar’s Vision

THE LANDMARK Allahabad High Court order quashing the National Security Act (‘NSA’) slapped on a 25-year-old Delhi University student Akriti Chaudhary by the NOIDA district magistrate on the ground that continued incarceration of the petitioner under the provisions of the NSA is violative of her rights under Article 21 of the Constitution of India is of extraordinary significance in every sense of the term. Apart from declaring the employment of NSA as a flagrant violation of the law and Constitution, the order assumes enormous significance not only in the context of the constitutionally mandated fundamental right to agitate peacefully, but also in the context of the role of civil servants to act in tune with the Constitution and not on the basis of the dictates of their political masters.

Orwellian Dystopia if Civil Servants Negate Constitution

The order of the said court employed very strong language because the District Magistrate, NOIDA, a civil servant, invoked NSA on a peaceful agitator without application of mind. It is worthwhile to quote from the order in which the learned judges Justice Achal Sachdev and Justice Atul Sreedharan reminded the concerned civil servants that before they entered service they took “...oath affirming that they shall bear true allegiance to India and to the Constitution of India as by law established, that they will uphold the sovereignty and integrity of India, and that they will carry out the duties of their office loyally, honestly and with impartiality.”

“They (civil servants),” the Judges observed, “should realise that their loyalty is towards the Constitution and not the political executive, and that honesty and impartiality are towards the people whom they serve, while bearing in mind at all times that they are the servants who serve the people, the masters in a democracy.”

They then warned that any of their actions infringing that solemn oath would cause havoc to the State of Uttar Pradesh, and its people would painfully "...view them as an oppressive vestige of the British Empire." The court, in its order, very sharply noted that the actions of civil servants in gross violation of the Constitution and the standards of integrity would create an environment of civil unrest unless those excesses and/or illegalities and despotic conduct, impinging upon the civil liberties of the citizens, are corrected and aggrieved citizens get justice and compensation, in which case the State of Uttar Pradesh would be reduced to an Orwellian Dystopia because of the errants in bureaucracy.

The fact that the learned judges of the Allahabad High Court seriously apprehended that due to errant civil servants there could be an Orwellian Dystopia raises grave concerns regarding the extremely deplorable standards of civil servants in twenty-first-century India.

Sardar Patel’s Vision

In the aforementioned sharp observations of the judges resonate the apprehensions of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who founded the Indian Administrative Service (‘IAS’), and what he said in the Constituent Assembly on the vital role of All India Services was quoted by the Sarkaria Commission in its 1988 report in the chapter on All India Services. Patel had said, “The Union will go—you will not have a united India, if you have not a good all-India service which has the independence to speak out its mind, which has a sense of security that you will stand by your word and that after all there is the Parliament, of which we can be proud where the rights and privileges are secure.... This Constitution is meant to be worked by a ring of Service which will keep the country intact.”

Every word of the last line of Patel’s statement, that "This Constitution is meant to be worked by a ring of Service which will keep the country intact," is echoed in the order of the Court flagging the unflinching loyalty of civil servants to the Constitution and not to the political executive.

It is worthwhile, yet again, to quote Patel, who, as the first Home Minister of India, while addressing the first batch of IAS probationers on April 21, 1947, urged them to be guided by the spirit of public service in day-to-day administration and to remain wedded to the ideals of impartiality and incorruptibility. “A civil servant cannot afford to, and must not, take part in politics. Nor must he involve himself in communal wrangles. To depart from the path of rectitude in either of these respects is to debase public service and to lower its dignity," he warned. Those thoughts he articulated in the context of the vision that civil servants should usher in Swarajya, or good governance, through their conduct and administrative efficiency.

Ambedkar’s Vision

That is why several Articles of the Constitution, including Article 311, provide an architecture to ensure security of tenure to civil servants. On September 1949, B R Ambedkar, the Chairman of the drafting committee of the Constituent Assembly, while replying to the debates of the Constituent Assembly on Article 311 (288A of the draft Constitution), said that for civil servants it was the “best provision … for the safety and security of the civil service, because it contains a fundamental limitation upon the authority to dismiss.”