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What some bureaucrats and politicians could say obliquely, in muffled voices ever since the UPA came to power in 2004, was said bluntly and with remarkable prescience by the former American ambassador to India, David Mulford in his confidential report of 2005, that now in the public domain through WikiLeaks. This is what Mulford has to say: ‘Along with Principal Secretary TKA Nair, Narayanan constitutes what is now a Keralite “Mafia” in the PMO. In a bureaucratic culture dominated by North Indian Hindi speakers, this Keralite lock on the PM’s inner bureaucratic circle represents something of an anomaly, which could in the long term create new faultlines around the prime minister.’ How right he was. He has not gone back on anything he said more than half a decade ago. Indeed, during the UPA years, the civil services have witnessed a steady, swift and almost complete descent from the Westminster model to a spoils systems within India’s permanent civil service, making it a unique sort of permanent spoils civil services.
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