When bureaucrats shared corridors with monkeys

IN the beginning of the 20th century, two men moved to India from South Africa; one to dismantle the edifice of the British empire and the other to build an edifice that would keep reminding us of our colonial past. Seventy-eight years after Mahatma Gandhi — who gave us his three famous ideological monkeys and led India to freedom — the government is moving out of the North and South Blocks designed by Herbert Baker. Both Gandhi and Baker came to India after spending many years of their professional life in South Africa.

When I first stepped into the North Block, joining the Ministry of Finance in the Department of Economic Affairs as a director on September 1, 1997, the inside of the building looked like an unkempt relic of the past. Soon, the same building will become a veritable treasure — a museum replacing a seat of authority that once shaped the nation’s future.

I was allotted a room on the ground floor. I was the director and later joint secretary in the DEA till 2002. I joined another ministry occupying the other end of North Block, the Ministry of Home Affairs, as joint secretary in 2009-10. I bid farewell to my career from North Block in 2017 as finance secretary.

The building will soon cease to be the nerve centre of governance. Internal security, finance and personnel, vital departments of the government, were housed in North Block facing its counterpart, the South Block that housed the critical ministries of defence, external affairs and the PMO. Both these Blocks stood guard to the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Coming from Chandigarh, the city planned by French architect Le Corbusier, to New Delhi, the city created by Lutyens, was like entering a time warp. The former is independent India’s statement of modernity; the latter a glorious inheritance of an inglorious past. The rectangular grids of Corbusier are easy to understand but the circular layout of Delhi requires familiarisation, quite like its political milieu. The prominent roads of Chandigarh are named Uttar Marg, Dakshin Marg and Madhya Marg, and residential areas divided into sectors that follow a numerical order. Delhi is history, ancient, medieval and modern, with some roads proclaiming the nation’s accomplishments and political philosophy — Janpath, Rajpath, Vijay Chowk, Shanti, Niti, Panchsheel. The localities and other roads are a tapestry of its history — Ashoka, Akbar, Aurangzeb, Curzon, Kautilya, Chanakya, Rabindra, Lodhi.

On the first day, as I parked my Maruti 800 in North Block, I saw something frightening yet funny. On the bonnet of a car sat a monkey chewing the wiper, and on another, another monkey was playing with the rear-view mirror. Unsure whether this was a glimpse of bureaucratic shenanigans inside the building, I walked in nervously, now a part of the charmed circle of the power that the centre wielded over the states.

My nervousness turned into shock when my boss called me to his room after 5 pm, but my peon warned me against going. Puzzled by this power equation, as I prepared to step out, he said he would accompany me and quickly got hold of a tubelight rod that he kept behind the almirah like a secret weapon. With the rod in hand, he opened the door. The sight was enough for me to seek an immediate reversion from Central deputation — the corridor was full of monkeys and my peon’s responsibility was to keep them at bay while I walked to my destination.

The administration tried everything to keep the simians away from interfering with people who were attempting to shape the history of a free nation that had commenced its march to modernity. Electronic devices were installed to emit sound waves to scare them, but like bureaucrats, they too seemed to have gotten used to unintelligible noise. Wire meshes were fixed to prevent them from trespassing into the corridors, but they came through the doors meant for humans. A man was employed to walk with a langoor whose dark face supposedly frightened the red-faced monkeys, but the financial adviser of the ministry objected to the procurement of their services without following the rules.

Gradually, I got used to walking in the mighty corridors, with monkeys strutting around or sitting on the almirahs, overflowing with files, lining the verandahs. Nobody could satisfactorily explain the presence of either the monkeys or the countless files.

It took Jaswant Singh to act when he became Finance Minister — removing inanimate objects from the corridors. However, the monkeys, witness to meetings with foreign delegations and economic reforms, management of the elite civil services and mobilisation of the Central police forces, survived his initiatives to spruce up the building, install statues and carpet the main staircase.

Any museum created in North Block would be untrue to history if it didn’t depict the creatures who were an integral part of the North Block way-of-life and unfair to the four-legged animals who believed that it was the two-legged ones who had displaced them in the first place.

This process of displacement started in 1911 when the Crown decided to move the capital from Calcutta to New Delhi. Edwin Landseer Lutyens, British architect, was entrusted with the town planning for New Delhi, and Herbert Baker, another British architect, with designing North and South Blocks. It was a British design executed by Indian skills.

The construction contractors were Sardar Bahadur Basakha Singh Sandhu and Sir Sobha Singh. Their names are inscribed on a stone under one of the small canopies facing Vijay Chowk.

On days when I left office early, I admired the setting sun hiding behind the Rashtrapati Bhavan dome. The sun will soon set on these historic buildings as they move deeper into the recesses of history, housing memorabilia.

Ashok Lavasa is former Election Commissioner of India who has also served as Finance Secretary. His X handle is @AshokLavasa

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