There is no offence in hitting a civil servant if he does not follow an order properly, an Indian minister has declared. Dayanand Mandrekar, the water and civil supplies minister of Goa, passed this comment recently while attending a state assembly debate. In the year 2011, Mickky Pacheco, a political leader as well as ex-minister of Goa, was alleged to slap an official. The incident caused much talk at that time and now the statement of Mr. Mandrekar has reopened the controversy.
Civil servants in India are answerable to the ministers who are in charge of various government departments known as ‘Ministerial Departments’. These officials are responsible for managing the innate, financial and human resources of the country efficiently. It is necessary for ensuring the proper administrative operation of the nation.
However, there are many complaints regarding the vague accountability of Indian civil servants. Grievances are common to many Indian citizens that civil service professionals do not work in a proper way. Most of the times, they do not follow the orders of their political masters, and that is where the incident was brought out.
According to the report, Pacheco, the former tourism minister of Goa, was convicted to hit one of the officials working under him for 2 years ago. The reason behind the assault was the laziness or inactiveness of the person. It became news at that moment, and Pacheco was sentenced to imprisonment for a whole year.
Mr. Mandrekar has also been reported to follow in the tracks of Mr. Pacheco. While giving speech at the state assembly debate, he expressed his opinion that civil servants who do not care to do as they are told should be punished, and hence, slapping them is absolutely justified.
“Sometimes officials do not do any work properly and do not listen too. Then, like he (Mr. Pacheco) said, they should be slapped”, said Mandrekar.
Apart from Mickky Pacheco, Dayanand Mandrekar is not the only Indian minister to support assaulting of ‘indolent’ civil service professionals in order to put them in their places. In the last few years, the country has seen a series of occurrences of political leaders slapping government officials who had not executed their tasks as per the instructions given to them.
According to the result of the survey conducted by the members of the Maharashtra State Assembly, almost one in every six Indian ministers had been reported to slap their subordinate civil service officials at some point of time.
The members of the assembly have already submitted affidavits. All those documents clearly support the report provided by them. Until now, 50 ministers around the country had been charged with assaulting government officials for more or less similar reasons which is truly surprising.
