All’s fair in IAS pursuit, cheating was just next step

In a country where jugaad is elevated to the status of technology and a fashion statement of the man (or woman) of the world, cheating can’t be an aberration, if not the norm. Its incentives are any time far more attractive than the blurred subjectivity of a leisurely exercise called moral reasoning. There is something amusing about the startled reactions to the arrest of Safeer Karim, 2015 batch Indian Police Service (IPS) probationer, for cheating in the Civil Services (Mains) examination which he was taking again to have a shot at getting into the Indian Administrative Service. With the premium placed quite high on careerist success, what matters in the name of work or education is the rationality of strategies. It’s not surprising that after a point, cheating would appear as an extreme of such strategic rationality.

Cheating, as the logical extension of exam strategies which mark exam preparations in India, might not still be a banal thing for civil services examination but it was never unimaginable for reasons not rooted in lack of vigilance but in the exam-centric crafts that the lure of social mobility has spawned in its wake. Nobody should be shocked by an IPS probationer getting caught, the incentive for it is too high in class-changing exams if you aren’t caught. It saves you from the rituals of mugging up, the rituals which define examination scores in this country, including Civil Services examination conducted by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC).

The very fact that Safeer’s wife could dictate to him in real time answers to descriptive-type questions, which constitute the main examination, is an indicator of how mechanically frozen and robotic are the expectations from candidates – surely an invitation to strategise. When a rote learning-based examination system has the power to catapult you from being nobody to the higher echelons of country’s bureaucracy, you replace learning by cramming and an even easier (and perhaps more rewarding) method is to cheat your way, as Karim did.

There has also been a naïve sense of indignation expressed in the light of the fact that Karim ran a chain of IAS coaching institutes in south India, and besides being a trainee officer, was also looked up to as a teacher. Such outrage has obviously not mapped the coaching industry in this country where the only type of teaching that works is success. More specifically, they seem not to have come across the strategic chambers of IAS coaching hubs in Delhi marked by an assembly line of teaching shops in which teaching is a euphemism for facilitating the cracking of an examination. Where examination merchandise outlets are masked as bookshops selling assorted class notes dictated by people who discourage reading anything, except the cut-and-paste stuff more akin to a spell of so-called swotting. The author has delved into some aspects of this high-profit industry in an earlier piece.

As education has conveniently morphed into success at competitive examinations, the reverential value of the alleged teacher has to be seen in the same frame as that of making students crack tests. On the fringes of such obsession, cheating was always been lurking as a calculated option.

While reacting to the disgraced Tamil Nadu cadre IPS officer story, people haven’t missed the irony that he had scored very high in the Ethics paper in his previous attempt – something which contributed to his securing the 112th rank. There is no irony in it. A separate paper for Ethics (introduced in 2013), for all practical purposes, always seemed like UPSC showing that it has a sense of humour. The lack of evaluative imagination is too obvious – what you write in such tests have to be taken only as seriously as you take your ministers’ oaths when they are sworn in. By introducing the paper, the UPSC took the fourth report of Second Administrative Commission for an amusing implementation in the recruitment process itself. The report is about, and is blandly titled, ‘Ethics in Governance’. Well, that says a lot about what homilies to expect there.

A set of reactions, bordering on disbelief, to Karim’s fall from grace is also rooted in how media reports and discourse in India generally contribute to valorisation and glorification of salaried civil servants while demonising the political class. This ingrained educated middle-class bias while talking about probity, efficiency and meritocracy in public life is something the author has addressed in an earlier piece.

The reactions to an IPS officer cheating in an examination reveal more about ourselves than about the accused. The moral currency of a position is a social implant, not a reality to live with. The intrusive luxury of morality gets blurred to give way to make cheating an attractive option – ranging from marriage to work and, of course, examination. There was nothing in every day India to suggest that a Safeer Karim isn’t coming. He came (as he was expected to), he cheated (as he strategised), and he was caught (that’s the only thing of new value).