Augean stables

The present government is faced with the Her culean task of cleaning the Augean stables, which have reached such a state of filth and stench, all thanks to a set of officials in the Assam Public Service Commission (APSC), who have shamelessly indulged in all kinds of corrupt practices possible in recruiting officers for it. Coincidentally, while the Augean stables, which, according to Greek legend, turned dirty over a period of three decades, the APSC also has been literally turned into an Augean stable, allegedly over the past three decades, when persons holding constitutional posts turned the Commission into a kind of auction house. Candidates could walk into the APSC and purchase jobs of gazetted officers by paying huge sums of money, and then get in the government system and get in the act of amassing money left, right and centre. While it is common knowledge that the rot in the APSC had started long ago – allegedly during the first term of the Asom Gana Parishad – the subsequent Congress regimes either turned a blind eye or probably encouraged the process of turning APSC into a fish market. Contemporary folklore in Assam is full of stories of ministers and powerful politicians directing the APSC chairperson to ‘select’ candidates of their choice, which even allegedly included their sons and daughters and other family-members. Folklore has it that certain powerful politicians were also hand-in-glove with some top APSC officials in the ‘selection’ of candidates through the circuitous way. At the moment, while two officers who had made it to the prestigious state-civil-services through the backdoor have been under arrest, several more have reportedly gone into hiding in order to evade arrest. According to media reports, the two arrested officers – both holding the rank of Additional Superintendent of Police – have admitted to having committed fraud in getting selected. One of them is the son of a retired senior police officer of the state. Also, among the 30-plus officers whose names have found place in the report of the one-man Commission of Inquiry, headed by Justice (Retd.) Biplab Kumar Sarma, there are several who are sons or daughters of retired senior officers of the government. This leads to the suspicion that those retired officers too were part of the fraud by way of encouraging their sons and daughters to purchase their jobs, and that they too had some nexus with Rakesh Paul and a couple of his colleagues in the APSC, who had turned the hallowed institution into a bazaar. Hercules probably did not find it so difficult to clean the Augean stables in comparison to the APSC cash-for-jobs scam. He also did not have to take much time to wind up his operation. In the case of the APSC, the rot had been already transferred to the government, and a large number of persons who got through the APSC-conducted examinations are currently holding crucial posts as officers at different levels of the state government, including in running the Chief Minister’s Office and in the Chief Minister’s security team.