Modi sarkar has no right to gag civil servants on social media

There is a great buzz in the social media groups of civil servants about the consultation paper of the DoPT (department of personnel and training) that seeks to prohibit civil servants from using social media platforms for expressing views which could be construed as criticism of the government.

It has generated a lively debate and needs closer examination.

The emergence of social media has blurred the distinction between the private and public sphere. Every family has now a WhatsApp group to keep in touch with their kith and kin.

Does posting on such a group qualify as public interaction? It can be argued that when a post is made on Facebook, it can be seen by anyone and hence it is public.

However, if my Facebook setting allows only "friends" to see my posts, will it still be called a public post?

It is common knowledge that sharing of an article on social media does not necessarily imply endorsement. An article may be shared for its literary merit, a photograph or cartoon may be shared for its technical finesse or for wit and humour.

Social media is quite like a huge virtual library and surely, no one is stopped from running a library that may have content critical of government.

The conduct rules for government servants put certain restrictions on them in expressing themselves from a public platform. These restrictions are intended to ensure that government servants remain apolitical.

However, many government servants wrongly assume that publicly identifying with the political and ideological position of the ruling party is fine. A new breed of government servants takes pride in flaunting their political and ideological affiliations on social media because it may tally with those of the ruling dispensation.

The fact remains that identifying with the ruling party is as much a political act as criticism of the government policy and hence, wrong.

A civil servant is bound by his oath to the Constitution which he must uphold at the cost and in all respects.

Unfortunately, few civil servants remember this and they presume that their loyalty is only to the political masters of the moment. This injects a serious distortion in the way civil servants function, often compromising on the institutional and constitutional propriety expected of them.

It would be interesting to see if the proposed rules would take into account this interpretation of engagement on social media or stick to the rather flawed and limited understanding that civil servants should not criticise the current policies of the government.

Indeed one can argue that social media is a misnomer. Social media today is an extension of the private sphere of an individual. It is a part and parcel of an individual's existence as a social being, providing the avenue of interaction with fellow human beings defined by his professional and other associations.

Drawing from the insights offered by Habermas, it could be said that social media represents the collapse of the public sphere into the extended private sphere.

It is, in Habermasian term, a part of the individual's "lifeworld" which gives meaning and content to it. Any attempt to abridge it is akin to restrictions on life as a complete human being.

A distinction needs to be drawn between the active modes of public expression of one's views and the passive ones, done in a closed circle.

For the vast majority of people, the world of social media is quite limited. Mostly, it is no bigger than the number of active contacts over their clan or extended families in a village set up.

On the other hand, publishing an article in a newspaper or on a news portal or speaking on television could be considered an active channel of public engagement.

Reasonable restrictions on government servants in this sphere could have some justification. However, in a practical sense, social media is essentially a passive and closed channel even though it is technically universal.

To restrict government servants from expressing themselves on these channels conceptualised as an extension of one's private space, is neither justified nor practical.

While the majority of the interaction on social media is restricted to innocuous matters like birthday wishes, people also discuss service issues and other burning topics of the times without much inhibition.

It provides a useful outlet for anger and frustration even as some innovative and novel ideas are broached in the discussions. Nobody would argue that this has led to any serious breakdown in the functioning of the government.

Such exchanges on social media could, in fact, provide an avenue for the government to understand the issues that exercise the minds of its functionaries.

In an age when the expansion of modes of communication is taking place at a speed that is impossible to anticipate, much less to control, it is naïve to imagine that such restrictions can be effective.

If the government decides to seriously implement the proposed rules it would mark erosion of the right to live with dignity which includes the right of interaction in our social circles.

However, if it is just a brainwave of some bureaucrat somewhere, then it would only be one more entry to "Swamy's handbook", fit for the dustbin.

Either way, we need to keep our eyes open and mouths shut, perhaps.