Darpan letter · No. 121 October 2026

A hundred years, and one blank column

On the UPSC’s centenary, a molestation FIR that named the accused as “unknown”, the Gītā’s skill in action and its worker who does not say “I”, Tulsīdās’s leader who is like the mouth, and the three A’s of a Karma Yogi officer

प्रिय साथी,

Today the institution you are trying to enter turns one hundred. On 1 October 1926 the first Public Service Commission was set up in India, with Sir Ross Barker as its chairman, on the recommendation of the Royal Commission on the Superior Civil Services in India, the Lee Commission, which reported in 1924. The Government of India Act, 1935 reconstituted it as the Federal Public Service Commission, and on 26 January 1950 the Constitution gave it the name and the standing it has today, in Article 315. It was born as a body that recruited for an empire. The Republic took it and made it the gate through which the children of farmers, clerks and labourers walk into the highest offices of their own country. When you sit in the examination hall next year, you are not only taking a test. You are asking to join a century-old line, and it is fair to ask what that line expects of you.

I want to answer with a file, not a speech. Read today’s first case card after this letter. The Supreme Court has castigated the Uttar Pradesh police for registering a molestation case against an “unknown person”, although the accused had been caught on the spot and handed over. The complainant says the accused column was left blank, the rider’s name was added only after the High Court sought a status report, he was then given a clean chit, and his bike, seized without a number plate, later appeared on paper with a registration number. The Bench asked one question that every officer of the next hundred years should keep on the wall: “How will people trust you if this is how you proceed?” The card then puts you in the Superintendent of Police’s chair, with a Station House Officer telling you the man caught is locally influential and a Circle Officer advising you to write “unknown” for now. The ideal civil servant has been described in three words: Ability, Anonymity, Austerity. Call that officer a Karma Yogi. Each word answers one part of the blank column, and each was described in our own texts long before any commission sat in Delhi.

Begin with ability. In the second chapter of the Gītā, Kṛṣṇa gives the most quoted definition of yoga in our language: बुद्धियुक्तो जहातीह उभे सुकृतदुष्कृते। तस्माद्योगाय युज्यस्व योगः कर्मसु कौशलम्॥ — buddhiyukto jahātīha ubhe sukṛtaduṣkṛte, tasmād yogāya yujyasva yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam — one whose understanding is steady casts off, here itself, both good and bad results; therefore devote yourself to yoga; yoga is skill in action (2.50). People quote the last three words alone and turn them into a motto about efficiency. Read the whole verse. The skill Kṛṣṇa means belongs to a buddhi that is no longer pulled by what the act will bring back to the actor. Kauśalam is not cleverness. It is the steadiness that lets the hand do the right thing well, because the mind is not busy calculating the reward or the risk.

Now look at the police station. Was the blank column a failure of ability? In one sense, no. Someone knew exactly how to write an FIR so that it would protect a powerful man: leave the column empty, add the name only when a court asks, issue a clean chit, and let the bike’s papers change. That is skill of a kind. But it is skill tied to sukṛta and duṣkṛta, to what the act would bring the writer: favour from the influential, trouble avoided. The Gītā’s skill points the other way. Lalita Kumari (2013) already told every police station that a complaint disclosing a cognizable offence must be registered. Ability, in your first posting, will rarely look like brilliance. It will look like a record written exactly as the citizen spoke it, on the day she spoke it, when it would have been easier to write less.

The second word is anonymity, and here the Gītā gives a description so exact that it could be printed on an appointment letter. In the eighteenth chapter Kṛṣṇa describes the sāttvika kartā, the doer in whom clarity rules: मुक्तसङ्गोऽनहंवादी धृत्युत्साहसमन्वितः। सिद्ध्यसिद्ध्योर्निर्विकारः कर्ता सात्त्विक उच्यते॥ — muktasaṅgo ’nahaṃvādī dhṛtyutsāhasamanvitaḥ, siddhyasiddhyor nirvikāraḥ kartā sāttvika ucyate — free from attachment, not speaking of “I”, endowed with firmness and zeal, unchanged by success or failure: such a doer is called sāttvika (18.26). Anahaṃvādī, the one who does not keep saying “I did this”, is the root of what we call anonymity. And notice that it sits beside dhṛti and utsāha, firmness and zeal. The Gītā’s anonymous worker is not a timid one. He works hard and holds firm; he simply does not need his name on the result.

There is a sharp irony in the case card, and I want you to see it. In that station, anonymity was given to the wrong person. The accused, who should have been named, became “unknown”. The officers, who should have been the anonymous servants of the law, made themselves visible as the people who decide whose name goes into a public record. A sāttvika officer reverses that. The citizen’s complaint is written in full, the accused is named, and the officer disappears behind the procedure. If you are the SP, you will order the correct entry, record in writing why the file was reviewed, and ask why the bike’s identity changed on paper. You will not hold a press conference about it. Nobody may ever know your name. The complainant will know only that the system worked, and that is the whole point.

The third word is austerity, and for it I want to take you to Chitrakūṭ. Bharata has come to take Rāma back to Ayodhyā, and Rāma, refusing, gives him counsel on how to hold the kingdom in his absence. Tulsīdās puts it in one image: मुखिआ मुखु सो चाहिऐ खान पान कहुँ एक। पालइ पोषइ सकल अँग तुलसी सहित बिबेक॥ — mukhiā mukhu so cāhiai khān pān kahuṃ eka, pālai poṣai sakal aṅga tulasī sahit bibeka — the head of a people should be like the mouth, which alone does the eating and drinking, yet with discernment nourishes and sustains every limb of the body (Rāmcharitmānas, Ayodhyā Kāṇḍ, Dohā 315). The mouth receives everything that enters the body and keeps nothing for itself. That is austerity as our tradition understands it: not poverty, not a show of simple living, but the habit of letting whatever comes to you — power, information, favour, the goodwill of the powerful — pass through you to the whole body.

An influential suspect offers an officer one thing above all: an easy life. No angry phone calls, no hostile local leaders, a quiet transfer season. Taking that ease is the mouth keeping the food. Austerity is refusing it, and refusing it without bitterness, because the office was never yours to feed on. And Bharata shows what the dohā looks like when it is lived. The Mānas tells us that he took Rāma’s sandals back to Ayodhyā and placed them on the throne, and ruled for fourteen years as their servant from Nandigrām, in a hermit’s life. That is ability, anonymity and austerity in one person: he ran a kingdom, refused to call it his, and lived on less than the people he governed.

Be fair to the station, as the card is. An SHO in a small town lives among the people he polices, and the threat of a transfer is real. The card asks you to hear him and the Circle Officer in a fair inquiry, let discipline follow the facts, and then build what will stop the next blank column: spot audits of FIRs against the complainant’s copy, a tamper-evident entry log, and supervision that reaches the supervisor and not only the constable. A good officer builds the three words into the system, so that the next officer does not have to be a hero to do the right thing.

Let this make you proud. In a hundred years the Commission has changed its name twice and its master once, from an imperial government to a sovereign people. Through all of it, the idea it serves is older than any of those names. Kṛṣṇa described the doer who does not say “I” on a battlefield. Tulsīdās described the leader as a mouth that feeds every limb, and gave us a prince who ruled a kingdom in another’s name. When the Supreme Court asks, “How will people trust you?”, it is asking a question our tradition has been answering for a very long time. You are not importing the ethic of public service from anywhere. You are inheriting it, and the UPSC is only the newest gate to it.

For your preparation, three things. In GS2, the centenary gives you a ready frame for any question on the UPSC or on the independence of constitutional bodies: Lee Commission and 1926 for the origin, the 1935 Act for the expansion, Articles 315 to 323 for the guarantees, and the case card’s FIR for why recruitment alone does not secure good administration. In GS4, Gītā 18.26 is a strong opening for any question on anonymity, neutrality or the foundational values of civil service, and the mukhiā dohā fits any question on leadership, integrity or conflict of interest. In the essay paper, “yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam”, read as a whole verse, can carry a paragraph on why competence without detachment becomes cleverness in the service of the powerful.

And now something about you. You are already practising the three words, whether you know it or not. Ability is the answer you write every day, not the plan you make every Sunday. Anonymity is the year of preparation that nobody sees, the hours no one will ever praise, the mock test that went badly and that you analysed anyway. Austerity is the phone you put away, the wedding you skip, the comfort you postpone so that something larger can be fed. Do not resent these. They are not the price of the service. They are the service, begun early.

A hundred years from now, someone will write about the second century of the Commission, and your name will probably not be in it. That is as it should be. What should be in it is a country where a woman walks into a police station, says who touched her, and sees that name written down. Go and read the case card with Rāma’s counsel beside you. Be the mouth that feeds the whole body. Be the doer who does not say “I”.

— आपका साथी, दर्पण

Sources: Bhagavad Gītā 2.50 · Bhagavad Gītā 18.26 · Rāmcharitmānas, Ayodhyā Kāṇḍ, Dohā 315