‘Enemy of the State’ (Part One)

The process of the “Internal Disciplinary Inquiry” and “Development” Ideology

By Citizen-Ordinary

Introductory

(July 21, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Development, it is often said from the highest level of the administration in the country, is the key policy objective of the government. We hear many an administrative head of Ministry, Department, state or public sector institute expressing the same sentiments on various occasions. It is emphasised that whatever the work their respective establishments engage in, they are contributions to the overall goal of national development.

But, judging by the evidence I have been gathering recently on a particular issue, some of which I will enumerate below, one may, at a first glance, come to wonder whether such pronouncements by the state bureaucracy are genuine. This article will attempt to develop an argument answering this question from the perspective of the bureaucracy itself.

(For the convenience of discussion, at the outset I would like to distinguish between the two key perspectives that are examined within this article: the perspective of the Establishment and the perspective of the Non-Establishment. The former refers to the views of the category of senior administrators discussed here and those who support their views whereas the latter refers to the views of those who are critical of the stance of the Establishment. However, the writer is well aware that always there can be a middle ground between the two perspectives and in fact considers this article as an attempt to develop such a middle space.)

Here, I am referring to the process known as the “internal disciplinary inquiry” (hereafter IDI) which from the perspective of the Non-Establishment, in the hands of a few senior state administrators can become a means for witch-hunting of those employees whom the administrators come to consider “trouble makers.” They claim that bogus charges can be framed with the malevolent intent of punishing the so-called “trouble makers” – trade union activists, professionals, academics and other employees - in varying degrees of severity, mostly with dismissal from service and subjecting them to various unjust, severe penalties, simply because they have dissenting views to those of the administrators and act on them.

A question that would naturally arise in the minds of those like me who get to know the details of how these IDI s are conducted is ‘how can, even though only a few, senior administrators act in such a manner in using the power and authority entrusted to them by the positions they have come to hold?’

The Civil Service and the SLAS

A related question that would come to one’s mind here is that ‘How would the attitudes of the present generation of administrators compare with the attitudes of those of the yesteryear? Would the latter have treated employees under them in a similar manner?’

Wikipedia, the free internet encyclopaedia, lists the following as notable members of the Civil Service, the predecessor to the Sri Lanka Administrative Service: Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, Cathiravelu Sittampalam, Nissanka Wijeyeratne, Bradman Weerakoon, Bernard Tilakaratna, S. M. L. Marikkar, Leonard Woolf, Gunasena de Soyza, Sir Richard Aluvihare, and M.D.D Pieris. When we think of senior administrators of our own time who have won public recognition, some of the well known names that come to our mind, in addition to Bradman Weerakoon, are Neveill Jayaweera, Lionle Fernando, Leel Gunasekera, Devanesan Nesiah, Sarath Amunugama, Chalres Abeysekera, and Susil Siriwardane. I believe that all these and similar people whose names are not mentioned here earned public respect during their tenure by winning the hearts and minds of the public and the employees with their enlightened attitudes to issues of governance, state service or “development.”

Now, what about the present generation of senior administrators? Many of them, like many in Sri Lanka, would have come from humble beginnings, benefiting from free education and therefore are aware of the difficulties in developing a successful career and achieving social mobility through education. They are also graduates, belonging among the brightest of them, having successfully entered the service through a competitive examination. Being such people, how is it possible that the hearts and minds of some of those who are responsible for initiating the type of “IDI” I would discuss below, have become apparently so insensitive to the fact that they hound out certain employees identified as trouble makers, treating them like common criminals.

It may, at a first glance, appear as if these senior administrators who initiate these “IDIs,” and others in the directorates/ boards of governors who authorise them, do so out of self-interest, for their personal gain. I believe reasons are much more complex than common sense would assume. Hence my attempt below to develop a critique of the common sense on the subject and at the same time hold a mirror to the state administration to see its own image from a theoretical perspective that would respect their own take on the subject.

Seniority

On the surface it may appear the issue of seniority as a significant one. In the administrative service which is highly hierarchical, seniority is highly respected. It is said that if you have served under a senior as a junior officer then you cannot speak against his/her decisions, at least not to his face. Seniority becomes doubly important if your senior has been an instructor of yours at the training one undergoes as an inductee into the service and later. Despite Buddha’s famous teaching on the Kalama Sutta, ‘How can you go against the authority of your teacher and trainer?’ However, as I elaborate further below, the issue of seniority itself is more complex than it appears.

The “ IDI”

Secondly, there is the notion of the “IDI” as an innocuous means of maintaining the discipline within the state/ public sector institutions. The gentlemen at the Attorney General’s office concur. Even the law courts would generally want the public sector employees to go through the “IDI” before they come to the courts. The idea seems to be that in order for a state institution to maintain its discipline, its administration must have recourse to the process of “IDI.” The “IDI” is truly internal in the sense that it is generally protected from being immediately subjected to the normal laws of the country thus giving a free hand to a great extent to the state administrators.

While at present there is a demand for transparency from the state, as the Non-Establishment perspective points out below, the “IDI” seems to be one sure way of being protected from having to be transparent, at least in the short run.

To be continued ....
-Sri Lanka Guardian