Directions : Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words are printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions. It is said that the British ruled India with the help of just two laws, the Revenue Recovery Act and Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, whereas the present governments in India, with hundreds of laws on the statute book, are unable to either recover their revenues or control law and order! It is true that the British Government’s strength was its unfaltering commitment to the collection of revenues and enforcement of the law. It is not, however, my case that the country should now be run the way it was run by the British or that governments should do nothing but collect revenues and maintain law and order. But does one build a house without any mason to lay the foundation and by concentrating only on plans for interior decoration?

In post-Independence Indian public administration, there has always been a controversy, if not a conflict, relating to the roles of specialists and generalists. The former feel that the latter are cornering jobs for which they are not suitable and the latter feel that the former do not have breadth of perception and are blinkered by their narrow specialist knowledge. The IAS, especially, has been in the eye of this storm, so to say. I have heard my colleagues in functional departments say that the IAS was fit only for collecting revenues and maintaining law and order. The implication was that, apart from being unglamorous and pedestrian, these jobs were only for the unintelligent or the unscrupulous!

In the post-Independence era, the IAS too, presented with opportunities in the economic development sector and with the vanishing of land revenue as an important source of revenue for the States, began to regard tax collection and law and order jobs as not being promising enough from the job satisfaction or career points of view. With greater politicisation of the people and the spread of the populist cult, these activities came to be regarded as not merely non-developmental and feudal but almost as anti-people. No wonder that, while premier civil servants distanced themselves more and more from taking them seriously, the politicians seized the opportunity to undermine their importance and effectiveness.

An oversimplified, naïve and misunderstood version of development economics that public finance has nothing in common with private finance and that for a sovereign, especially democratic government, expenditure and income could be independent of each other, has contributed to a dangerously complacent view of poor tax recovery. A government’s sovereignty, alas, does not extend to the laws of arithmetic! A divine faith in the seductive comfort of the Laffer Curve and the emerging philosophy of privatisation and liberalisation have made strict enforcement of any rule or law appear not merely rigid and bureaucratic but almost retrograde and reactionary. (At the same time, the government is accused of not enforcing the law strictly against one’s competitors!) 

Today, immunity from payment and prosecution and the impunity with which both can be evaded— even defied—are the most coveted symbols of political importance, and the prime goal of coming to power is to do this on a scale of ever-increasing magnitude and frequency. Immunity from law and impunity of violation have become the modern political equivalents of the ancient sceptre and the crown. Kaleidoscopic coalitions in which the constant goal is to stay in power but the members keep changing almost randomly, have made every politician with at least one other member in his party a potential MLA/MP/Minister! This has made the tax collection and law enforcing agencies diffident and unwilling to stick their necks out. Political scientists who wax eloquent over how the emergence of the concept of coalition is a sign of the maturing of Indian democracy have completely missed, or slurred over, its adverse impact on administration (which includes tax enforcement as well as law and order) and how a coalition is a convenient, indirect and legal way of defection— defecting from principles without defecting from the party!