The change of power in UP has split the state bureaucracy vertically. The officers who ruled the state from a certain floor of the Secretariat during the previous regime have been relegated to the background. Mulayam’s Secretariat had Principal Secretary Anil Kumar, Secretary Anand Mishra, Secretary D Dipti Vilas, Special Secretaries Anita Singh, Chandrama Prasad Yadav, Shambhu Singh Yadav and Jagdev Singh. Of them, Anita Singh enjoyed the CM’s trust the most. When an anonymous letter circulated in the state about her relations with Mulayam, he held a press conference and called the contents of the letter shameful. This has raised eyebrows as no CM had ever addressed the press in defence of any bureaucrat.
Two of the Mulayam regime’s Chief Secretaries, Akhand Pratap Singh and Neera Yadav, were voted the most corrupt officers of the state by the UP IAS Association in 1996 Yet Singh was granted an extension. He fitted into Mulayam’s social engineering in the High Court. The court asked, “Does Uttar Pradesh not have any other able officer?” So Singh had to go. Similarly, Neera Yadav had to relinquish the post after a Supreme Court directive. She was subse quently made Chairman of the Revenue Board.
The third Chief Secretary, Naveen Chandra Bajpayee, was removed by the Election Commission after he participated in a political gathering organised by the Samajwadi Party to celebrate three years in office. Bajpayee showered poetic praise on Mulayam from the dais.
Now it is the turn of Mayawati’s favourite officers to court controversy. Among the new arrivals on the fifth floor are Cabinet Secretary Shashank Shekhar Singh, Principal Secretaries Rohit Nandan, Shailesh Krishna, and Ashok Kumar, Secretaries Navneet Sehgal and Anup Pandey. The frontline officers have their own favourites – resulting in a vertically divided bureaucracy
Gunning for Goel: Vasectomy licence furore
In a move reminiscent of the dark days of the 1970s, an overenthusiastic district collector of Gorakhpur, Rakesh Goel, recently made the headlines by offering the men of the area a gun licence in return for undergoing vasectomy. When the news reached Lucknow, a furious Mayawati ordered his dismissal. Goel was posted in the district by the previous regime following the communal tension that gripped Gorakhpur division after the arrest of the saffron MP,Yogi Adityanath. Goel had the single agenda of taming the belligerent politician.
Now Goel is at pains to clarify to everyone that he never laid down any such condition for obtaining a gun licence.All he meant to do was to encourage voluntary vasectomy, he says. A senior IAS officer in the CM’s Secretariat is on his side, fuming,“When the government itself takes into account our performance in the field of family planning while granting promotions and increments, why this double standard and punishment?” Precedence is also in Goel’s favour. The district collector of Jaunpur, Anurag Yadav, earned praise for issuing 20 gun licences to men who had undergone vasectomy during the previous regime of Mulayam Singh Yadav. Why Goel has been targeted for similar work is something that is baffling the bureaucracy.The grapevine says his reluctance to offer inducements to higher ups made him a victim of discriminatory action.
Sunny days for kith and kin: Pandey bounce-back
Under the aegis of the UPIAS Association, Vijay Shankar Pandey, an IAS officer of the 1979 batch,
spearheaded the secret ballot campaign in December 1996 to identify the three most corrupt IAS officers of the state. Ironically, the crusader himself faced charges of corruption during his stint as Managing Director, UP Spinning Mills.
Pandey was Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Human Resource Development during Atal Behari Vajpayee’s regime. He was sent back to UP immediately after the UPA came to power and served in obscure departments until Mayawati became Chief Minister. The new Brahmin-friendly dispensation came as a boon to him. Aware that a dissatisfied Pandey would create more problems for governance in the state through his campaign against corrupt officers, the Mayawati government rehabilitated him as Divisional Commissioner, Lucknow.
The officer now spends most of his time on the famous fifth floor of the Secretariat Shailesh Krishna, the powerful Principal Secretary to the CM, sits on this floor and, being junior to Pandey, reportedly obliges him in matters of transfers and postings. Pandey has three brothers in the Provincial State Service and each has wangled a prized posting.
Harishankar Pandey was Joint Managing Director of the Uttar Pradesh State Industrial Corporation and became its chief within 20 days of his brother’s rehabilitation. Ajay Shankar Pandey was Municipal Commissioner, Kanpur and now occupies the lucrative post of MC, Ghaziabad. The third
brother has become Joint Director, Mandi Parishad. This has led to resentment among PCS officers as a number of them, serving in the Secretariat for five years, covet field postings.
Boot for Mayawati pet: Fifth-floor tussle
THE inter-service rivalry between IAS and IPS officers is never ending and pervades every nook and cranny of the entire country. Immediately after coming to power in Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati inducted an IPS officer,Vijay Singh,as her Secretary. Singh got a seat on the fifth floor of the Secretariat, which houses the most powerful officers of UP. If Mayawati’s track record is any indica tion, she has an affinity for IPS officers and always likes to keep them at the centre of power.
The IAS lobby was incensed by Singh’s presence on the fifth floor.They also knew that he enjoyed direct access to the Chief Minister and this made them insecure.They collaborated in a conspiracy and started poisoning Mayawati’s mind against him.The story fed to her was that Singh had misbehaved with the senior officers over differences regarding the sitting arrangements on the fifth floor. Singh has since been shifted out of the fifth floor, which amounts to being shifted out of power. In a similar incident in 2002, again under Mayawati as Chief Minister, IPS officer Kashmira Singh had been shunted out of the fifth floor.Vijay Singh probably failed to learn from the past
