Warrant of Precedence conundrum
Monday, 8 February 2010
Maswood Alam Khan
A practice I never really liked was offering me to sit on the chair of an office-head who happened to be junior to me by rank or by pay-scale and I always hated the weird protocol of hanging a bath towel to wrap the backrest of a chair as a distinction of honor to the chair-holder. During my long career as an executive in different state-owned banks I always requested the officers, while visiting their offices, to let me sit on a chair that was meant for a client and not to wrap the chairs with bath or kitchen towels.
Wrapping chairs with bath towels, as I later came to learn by digging into history, was the custom in the early days when a shopkeeper used to keep his body from waist to head completely bare in a sultry weather and had to keep a towel handy to wipe his sweat off his body.
But a manager of a bank branch had to a pay a heavy premium when he religiously followed my advice on the arrangements of chairs on an occasion when a high-ranking bureaucrat was vexed as he found the chair meant for him neither befitting nor wrapped by a towel. Bureaucrats in our country are fastidious in flaunting their power and vanity.
Many bureaucrats in our civil service don't have minimum sense of propriety. When I was manager of a bank branch in the early 80s I used to feel embarrassed conversing with a client of my bank who was a high-level bureaucrat. He always spoke in English that I couldn't really fathom out. Laughter used to bubble up inside me when he used to mess with English grammar. Lest I should laugh at his Benglish expression I spoke to him in Bangla hoping that he would stop speaking in English. But the gentleman was so happy speaking in English that my attempt to persuade him into Bangla didn't burst his bubble.
But what really used to vex me was his insistence that I realized his position in the Warrant of Precedence as Joint Secretary which he claimed was comparable only with the Managing Director of my Bank. But he became furious one day when I pointed out that a senior principal officer of my bank draws the same salary as he draws and my managing director, being a hundred percent government official, draws the salary of a full secretary. He tried to explain that position in the Warrant of Precedence is dependent on power and status of a government official. Then I said, in that case an officer-in-charge of a police station who draws the salary of a junior officer of my bank should be placed above the secretary of a ministry on the basis of real power a government functionary can wield. My explanation infuriated him.
The High Court on Thursday declared the Warrant of Precedence, 1986 illegal and asked the government to frame a new one within 60 days. May I request the concerned authority in the government to take special care while tailoring the new Warrant of Precedence so that government officials don't bubble over with too much excitement and try to equate his or her power and position with that of kings and queens of the world.
..........................................
maswood@hotmail.com
A practice I never really liked was offering me to sit on the chair of an office-head who happened to be junior to me by rank or by pay-scale and I always hated the weird protocol of hanging a bath towel to wrap the backrest of a chair as a distinction of honor to the chair-holder. During my long career as an executive in different state-owned banks I always requested the officers, while visiting their offices, to let me sit on a chair that was meant for a client and not to wrap the chairs with bath or kitchen towels.
Wrapping chairs with bath towels, as I later came to learn by digging into history, was the custom in the early days when a shopkeeper used to keep his body from waist to head completely bare in a sultry weather and had to keep a towel handy to wipe his sweat off his body.
But a manager of a bank branch had to a pay a heavy premium when he religiously followed my advice on the arrangements of chairs on an occasion when a high-ranking bureaucrat was vexed as he found the chair meant for him neither befitting nor wrapped by a towel. Bureaucrats in our country are fastidious in flaunting their power and vanity.
Many bureaucrats in our civil service don't have minimum sense of propriety. When I was manager of a bank branch in the early 80s I used to feel embarrassed conversing with a client of my bank who was a high-level bureaucrat. He always spoke in English that I couldn't really fathom out. Laughter used to bubble up inside me when he used to mess with English grammar. Lest I should laugh at his Benglish expression I spoke to him in Bangla hoping that he would stop speaking in English. But the gentleman was so happy speaking in English that my attempt to persuade him into Bangla didn't burst his bubble.
But what really used to vex me was his insistence that I realized his position in the Warrant of Precedence as Joint Secretary which he claimed was comparable only with the Managing Director of my Bank. But he became furious one day when I pointed out that a senior principal officer of my bank draws the same salary as he draws and my managing director, being a hundred percent government official, draws the salary of a full secretary. He tried to explain that position in the Warrant of Precedence is dependent on power and status of a government official. Then I said, in that case an officer-in-charge of a police station who draws the salary of a junior officer of my bank should be placed above the secretary of a ministry on the basis of real power a government functionary can wield. My explanation infuriated him.
The High Court on Thursday declared the Warrant of Precedence, 1986 illegal and asked the government to frame a new one within 60 days. May I request the concerned authority in the government to take special care while tailoring the new Warrant of Precedence so that government officials don't bubble over with too much excitement and try to equate his or her power and position with that of kings and queens of the world.
..........................................
maswood@hotmail.com