India After Independence: 1947-2000 by Bipan Chandra

1977-79, was probably the watershed in the history of the Indian bureaucracy. Mrs Gandhi had pushed the notion of a ‘committed’ bureaucracy, albeit with the proviso that the commitment expected was to the Directive Principles. In practice, especially with the ascendancy of Sanjay Gandhi, this tended to degenerate into commitment to a person. Those who showed ‘commitment’ were rewarded and those who did not were punished. With Janata coming to power in 1977, the pendulum swung all the way back. ‘Victims’ of the Emergency were rewarded with high posts and ‘committed’ officers sent into the wilderness to cool their heels. Subsequent regimes at the national level have mercifully not indulged in such visible, large scale, playing of favourites though the slow process of the increasing politician-official nexus continues apace with caste-based parties such as the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) or Laloo Prasad Yadav’s Janata Dal adding a new dimension by favouring officials belonging to the castes on which their electoral base rests. At the national level, the BJP’s action, after it had lost the vote of confidence in April 1999, of wholesale transfers of senior officials, obviously with an eye to the impending elections, is a disturbing trend.
Conclusion
India would do as she had done for centuries: take what she desired from other cultures and bend it to her needs.
    —Granville Austin 16
    The framers of the Indian Constitution had borrowed freely and unabashedly from other Constitutions, confident that the soil had been prepared sufficiently for exotic plants and the more homegrown ones to take root. The wisdom of the US Constitution and its Supreme Court, the innovations of the Irish Constitution, the time-tested conventions of the British Parliament, the administrative minutae of the Government of India Act 1935, and much else, especially the essence of their own people’s struggle for freedom—all went into the design and content of the Indian Constitution. There were many sceptics who wondered whether India could actuallydeliver on the freedoms she promised.
    In retrospect, it may be said that the Indian Constitution has not disappointed its architects, though it may have let down the sceptics. First and foremost, the institutions created by it for fashioning a democratic structure have survived and evolved to meet the changing needs. Despite stresses and strains, perhaps inevitable in a situation of rapid transition, the basic framework of responsible government, with the necessary balance between elected legislatures, functional executives, and vigilant judiciary, has acquired a legitimacy that would be difficult to erode. Notwithstanding rarified academic debates about whether Indian democracy is formal or substantive, Indians have accepted the democracy enshrined in their Constitution as real enough. They are not wrong in doing so, for when they look around at their neighbours in Asia and Africa, and even at faraway Latin America, and at the troubled peoples of the erstwhile Socialist world in eastern Europe, they know the worth of what they have.
    The Constitution has also been remarkably successful in providing a framework for protection of the Fundamental Rights of freedom of speech and expression, including the freedom of the press, freedom of association, including the right to join political parties of one’s choice and form trade unions, etc. Courts have acted as guardians of citizens’ interests against encroachment by the state as well as private organizations and individuals. Courts have also been creative in expanding the meaning and scope of rights. For example, the right to life in article 21 was expanded to include the right to livelihood in the judgement of the Supreme Court in the case of Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation, popularly known as the ‘Pavement Dwellers’ Case’. 17 The right to personal liberty guaranteed in article 21 has been interpreted to mean that a poor