“You are bloody sh*t. I can always talk to you like this.” There is something particularly revealing about those words, allegedly uttered by a senior IAS officer during an official meeting in Jammu and Kashmir. Not merely the vulgarity, not merely the public humiliation of a junior colleague, but the assertion that he can speak that way because he is her boss. It is the language of a hierarchy that has begun to mistake authority for entitlement and subordination for submission. 

The video of the exchange involving a senior IAS officer has understandably triggered outrage. The reported threats of suspension and dismissal, following the junior officer’s objection to his language, make the incident even more disturbing. An officer responsible for implementing government programmes may be questioned about performance, targets and accountability. But when a review meeting descends into personal insults and threats, the question is no longer simply whether a subordinate has done her job. It is whether the administration itself understands the limits of power. 

Yet the most important question raised by this incident goes beyond the conduct of one officer. It concerns the peculiar position in which Jammu and Kashmir finds itself today: governed by an elected Chief Minister, but without the full authority that a state government would ordinarily exercise over its administration. 

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has publicly stated that he took up the matter with the Chief Secretary and directed that the JKAS officer face no retaliatory action. He has also made an important distinction between Jammu and Kashmir as a Union Territory and what it would mean to have a state government with the corresponding administrative powers. Had Jammu and Kashmir been a state, he observed, the officer could have been attached to the General Administration Department pending an inquiry into his conduct. 

That is the heart of the matter. In a full........

© Greater Kashmir