Bureaucracy icon Anita Turab slapped with dismissal notice

Ansar Abbasi
Saturday, June 08, 2013

ISLAMABAD: In an unbelievable move, the civil bureaucracy’s iconic lady officer Anita Turab who, in the recent years, had put up an unprecedented fight to protect the government servants from humiliation at the hands of rulers and politicians, has been issued a show cause notice for dismissal from service for seeking the Election Commission’s intervention against shady appointments by the last PPP regime during its last days.

The officer, whose fight for the depoliticisation of the bureaucracy had led to the Supreme Court’s 2012 landmark judgment in the Anita Turab case, is facing the major penalty of dismissal from service for her letter that she wrote in her private capacity to the chief election commissioner early this year, which resulted into a ban on all appointments by the PPP government.

Anita, instead of being rewarded for her remarkable contribution to get the bureaucracy protected from being unfairly dealt by the rulers and politicians at the cost of her own career, is being removed from the service. She is under suspension for the last five months. Initially, she was suspended by the Pervez Ashraf government, but later the caretaker government extended her suspension twice.

While the corrupt and those who follow the illegal dictates of their senior and rulers are enjoying good positions in the bureaucracy, this lady has been issued the show cause notice for dismissal from service despite the fact that her inquiry officer had merely recommended a minor penalty for her.

The crime of the lady is that she being a concerned citizen of Pakistan wrote a letter to the CEC to prevent political appointments in the government departments during the dying days of the PPP regime. She neither used her official position nor mentioned it but wrote the letter as an ordinary citizen.

She became the target of the government as her letter got published in The News and subsequently it ended up in halting the controversial appointments. There has been no evidence of how the letter reached The News, but the lady had been subjected to victimisation by the PPP government and the caretakers on the grounds as to why did she not file a legal suit against the newspaper for publishing her private letter to the CEC.

On flimsy grounds and without any concrete evidence, her inquiry officer Owais Nauman Kundi concluded: “The accused officer Mrs Anita Turab has made slight or modest invasion into the working of the government organs: may be in good faith/reformatory activism for rectification of the alleged faux pas of the government, but such fiat of hers is not in line with the reasonable restrictions imposed upon her (as government servant). In the context of non-probative evidence, the mitigating circumstances of the derelictions or incitement, and the rule of proportionality, she does not attract harsh treatment for her un-reasonable act of doing more than what is required.”

But against the recommendation of minor penalty by the inquiry officer, the authorised officer Iftikhar Ahmad Rao imposed penalty on her by issuing her the show cause for dismissal from service. The show cause notice does not bear any date but merely states “May 2013” and gives her 14 days to respond as why the major penalty of dismissal from government service should not be imposed upon her.

Sources in the Establishment Division confided to The News that in her response Anita approached the Secretary Establishment with the contention that she had responded to her show cause notice but found that the authorised officer was not serving in the Economic Affairs Division where he claimed to be serving.

Anita Turab, who has been standing for the government servants who were mistreated by the rulers and politicians, initially became the target of the previous rulers and senior members of the bureaucracy when in 2011, she approached the chief justice of Pakistan for a suo moto notice against Wahida Shah for slapping a government official.

The News