-Ramphal Kataria
When Authority Forgets Its Limits: Classical Warnings and the Vij Episodes in Haryana
The recurring public confrontations between Haryana cabinet minister Anil Vij and women police officers—first with Sangeeta Kalia in Fatehabad (2015) and now with Upasana Singh in Kaithal (2025)—must be read not as episodic lapses of civility but as symptomatic of a deeper constitutional disorder. These episodes reveal how political power, when unrestrained by institutional norms, seeks to transform professional administration into a stage-managed performance of dominance. These incidents invite analysis not merely through contemporary service rules, but through the long intellectual tradition that separates political authority from administrative power.
At stake is not the ego of one minister or the resilience of two officers. What is at stake is the idea of the Indian state as a rule-bound entity, governed by law rather than temperament, and the survival of bureaucratic independence in the face of increasingly personalised political authority.
That tradition exists precisely because history has shown, repeatedly, that unchecked political impulse corrodes governance.
The Illusion of Ministerial Supremacy
In parliamentary democracy, ministers are politically supreme but administratively constrained. This distinction is neither semantic nor optional; it is foundational.
The Constitution of India does not vest ministers with operational control over statutory authorities. District policing is governed by:
The Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973
The Police Act
Judicially evolved doctrines of fair investigation and due process
The Superintendent of Police is not an extension of ministerial will but a statutory authority required to exercise independent judgement, particularly in matters affecting life, liberty, and reputation.
This is codified in Rule 3 of the All India Services (Conduct) Rules, 1968, which mandates:
Integrity and devotion to duty
Exercise of best judgement in official functions
Subordination to lawful directions of superiors—but with a crucial safeguard
The safeguard is decisive:
Directions should ordinarily be in writing; if given orally, they must be confirmed in writing as soon as possible.
This requirement is not bureaucratic pedantry. It is the institutionalization of accountability. Written directions:
Fix responsibility
Create audit trails
Enable judicial scrutiny
Protect citizens from arbitrary coercion
Protect officers from political scapegoating
When a minister insists on instant oral compliance in public, he is not expediting governance—he is bypassing the architecture of responsibility.
Politics Decides, Administration Acts
Woodrow Wilson, often cited as the founder of modern public administration theory, made the distinction unmistakably clear in his 1887 essay The Study of Administration:
“Administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Administrative questions are not political questions.”
Wilson did not argue for bureaucratic supremacy. He argued for functional separation—politics sets goals, administration executes them according to law and professional judgement.
Kaithal: From Oversight to Command
The Kaithal episode unfolded during a District Grievance Redressal Committee meeting—an institutional forum designed for review, not command. Minister Vij demanded immediate punitive action in an alleged land fraud case and sought an on-the-spot suspension. In Kaithal, that boundary collapsed. A minister attempted to convert a review forum into an operational command centre, demanding immediate coercive action. This is not democratic oversight; it is administrative capture by political temperament.
SP Upasana Singh responded with what administrative law expects:
She stated the limits of her authority
She insisted on procedure
She refused to act ultra vires
This was neither insubordination nor obstinacy. It was constitutional compliance.
The minister’s reaction—raised voice, public rebuke, threats—marked the precise moment where democratic oversight mutated into coercive instruction. What followed was not governance but political theatre, performed for cameras, audiences, and headlines.
As Max Weber warned in his analysis of bureaucratic authority, when charisma and personal dominance displace rule-bound rationality, administration degenerates into arbitrary power.
The Rule of Law vs the Rule of Men
A.V. Dicey’s classic formulation of the rule of law warned against precisely this tendency:
“Wherever there is discretion, there is room for arbitrariness.”
The Indian constitutional system mitigates this danger by insisting that discretion be structured, recorded, and reviewable. That is why Rule 3 of the All India Services (Conduct) Rules insists on written directions. It is why the CrPC insists on jurisdiction, procedure, and reasoned action.
When a minister issues oral orders in public, backed by threats, discretion is no longer structured—it becomes personalized power.
Dicey’s fear was not abstract. He warned that once authority flows from personality rather than law, citizens are governed not by rights but by the mood of those who rule.
Weber’s Warning: From Rational Authority to Personal Rule
Max Weber described bureaucracy as the triumph of legal–rational authority over patrimonial and charismatic domination. Its defining feature is impersonality:
“The authority of office differs fundamentally from all forms of personal domination.”
The Vij episodes represent a reversal of this evolution. Authority is asserted not through file, record, or law, but through voice, posture, and threat. The public meeting becomes a theatre where power must be displayed, not justified.
When administration is forced into such theatre, Weber warned, it degenerates into arbitrary rule cloaked as leadership.
Ambedkar and Constitutional Morality
B.R. Ambedkar’s most enduring warning remains profoundly relevant here. Speaking in the Constituent Assembly, he observed:
“Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated.”
Constitutional morality demands self-restraint by those in power, especially when the Constitution technically allows them influence. It requires ministers to respect institutional limits even when they can override them informally.
Public humiliation of statutory officers, verbal commands bypassing procedure, and performative dominance are all failures of constitutional morality.
Ambedkar cautioned that without such restraint, constitutional forms could survive while constitutional substance withers.
Verbal Governance and Its Dangers
Verbal orders in open forums are uniquely destabilizing:
They are deniable (“I never ordered that”)
They are unrecorded
They corner officers into instantaneous compliance
They privilege optics over legality
An SP who complies risks illegality.
An SP who insists on procedure risks reprisal.
This is the classic authoritarian bind.
Over time, such practices produce what political scientists describe as anticipatory obedience—officers begin to act not according to law, but according to what they believe will please power. Policing then becomes risk-averse, selective, and politically aligned, rather than lawful.
Fatehabad Revisited: Punishment by Marginalisation
The 2015 Fatehabad confrontation with Sangeeta Kalia followed the same trajectory. Kalia refused to submit to an improper public rebuke and asserted procedural correctness. The aftermath was not formal punishment but something more insidious: career stagnation through inconsequential postings.
This is a familiar technique in Indian administration—discipline without paperwork, punishment without record.
That Kalia belongs to a Scheduled Caste is not incidental. In a system where informal power networks matter more than formal rules, caste and gender profoundly shape vulnerability. Lacking political patronage, she faced the consequences alone.
The silence of the police hierarchy then—and now—speaks volumes.
The Neutral Civil Service as Democratic Safeguard
The British civil service thinker Sir Ernest Barker once wrote:
“The permanent service is the steel frame of democracy.”
India retained the All India Services precisely for this reason—to ensure continuity, neutrality, and legality beyond political cycles.
When ministers treat SPs as personal subordinates, and when officers are punished informally for insisting on legality—as in the case of Sangeeta Kalia—that steel frame begins to bend.
Over time, it does not break dramatically. It silently deforms, producing officers who anticipate power rather than interpret law.
Gender, Power, and Institutional Cowardice
The pattern is striking: such public humiliation is selectively directed at women officers. Comparable confrontations with senior male SPs or above are conspicuously absent.
This is not coincidence. It reflects:
A deeply patriarchal administrative culture
An assumption that women asserting authority are “defiant”
A policing hierarchy socialised into submission before political masculinity
Senior male officers often choose quiet compliance over institutional defence, conserving their careers at the cost of constitutional principle. The coercive capacity of the state is then deployed downward—against citizens—never upward, against political power.
Hannah Arendt made a crucial distinction between power and violence:
“Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent.”
Public shouting, threats, and humiliation are not expressions of power—they are symptoms of its fragility. The repeated targeting of women officers who insist on rules reflects not strength but insecurity of authority.
That no comparable spats occur with male senior officers suggests not harmony, but pre-emptive surrender. As Arendt warned, when obedience is extracted through fear, institutions rot from within.
This asymmetry hollows out the idea of neutral administration.
The ‘Gabbar’ Persona and Toxic Authority
Minister Vij’s fondness for the sobriquet “Gabbar”, borrowed from Sholay and its iconic villain Gabbar Singh, is revealing. It reflects a political imagination in which fear substitutes legitimacy and dominance substitutes authority. It normalizes fear as governance
In such a worldview:
Obedience is moral
Dissent is personal insult
Law is inconvenience
Psychologically, this aligns with what scholars term hypermasculine leadership syndrome—an inability to tolerate challenge, especially from women, combined with performative aggression.
The Kaithal confrontation fits this pattern precisely: a woman officer refuses an illegal order, and authority responds with rage rather than reason.
But as Montesquieu cautioned:
“It is a perpetual experience that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it.”
Modern constitutionalism exists precisely to prevent the state from becoming a personality cult of toughness.
From Arbiter to Actor: The Khemka–Verma Episode
The same disregard for institutional distance emerged when Vij personally accompanied retired IAS officer Ashok Khemka to the police to press for registration of an FIR against Sanjeev Verma, then MD of the Haryana State Warehousing Corporation.
As Friedrich Hayek warned:
“The more the state ‘plans’, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”
When ministers insert themselves into individual cases, neutrality collapses. Law becomes selective. Sanction becomes political. Administration becomes factional.
This was an egregious breach of ministerial propriety.
A minister is not meant to:
Escort complainants
Pressure police stations
Publicly side with one civil servant against another
The selective invocation of Section 17A of the Prevention of Corruption Act—used to block proceedings against one party while facilitating counter-action against another—only reinforces the perception of politicized legality.
When the minister becomes a litigant’s ally, the state ceases to be neutral..
Constitutional Morality and the Limits of Power
B.R. Ambedkar warned that constitutional democracy depends not merely on institutions but on constitutional morality—a restraint on power even when power permits excess.
What we witness in these episodes is the collapse of that restraint.
As Dicey argued, the rule of law demands:
Supremacy of law over arbitrary power
Equality before law
Legal accountability of all authorities
Public oral commands that bypass law violate all three.
Conclusion: The Cost of Silence
The Vij–Kalia and Vij–Upasana episodes show what happens when this wisdom is ignored. Governance becomes loud, fast, and headline-friendly—but also arbitrary, gendered, and deniable.
When women officers are isolated for upholding the Constitution, and when senior bureaucrats retreat into silence, the damage is not individual—it is systemic.
Written directions, lawful process, and institutional respect are not procedural niceties. They are the last defences against the conversion of the state into an extension of personal power. If these defences continue to erode, Haryana will not merely face administrative dysfunction. It will confront a deeper crisis: the steady replacement of constitutional government with governance by temperament.
If ministers refuse restraint, and if institutions refuse to defend their own rules, the state does not collapse—it mutates. It begins to resemble a hierarchy of temperament rather than a system of law.
The classical thinkers were unanimous on one point: good administration is quiet. It works through files, reasons, and restraint—not through volume, threats, or spectacle.
As Edmund Burke warned long ago:
“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.”
That is the real warning embedded in these episodes. And it is far more serious than any viral clip. And that is a price no democracy can afford to pay.
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