Apparently unable to tighten grip over bureaucracy, the new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has given confused signals by undertaking a major reshuffle of IAS officers within just four months of rule.

The government not only shifted Principal Secretary to CM, Manisha Nanda, but changed the departments or gave additional charge to 17 other IAS officers earlier this week, which has widened the rift in already divided bureaucracy in Himachal Pradesh.

“The government has done the reshuffle for the general good of the state. Some officers, who had come back from the central deputation were to be adjusted, so some departments have been changed,” said the state BJP chief, Satpal Singh Satti. Satti, however, said every government takes time to settle down.

The general feeling is that lack of experience is showing up in the functioning of BJP government, which has half of new faces in the cabinet.

Right from from day one, new BJP Chief Minister, Jai Ram Thakur has to function with various pulls and pressures, from within the party factions and even RSS, especially as he unexpectedly rose to top chair after the defeat of BJP’s CM candidate, Prem Kumar Dhumal, in 2017 polls.

The bigger challenge was to handle the bureaucracy, which was badly tagged with two former CMs- Virbhadra Singh (Congress) and Dhumal (BJP)- over the last two decades.

The bureaucratic environs in the state had gone too bad that in any government that the officials worked with vendetta against each other and used their political proximity to settle personal scores.

The previous Congress government broke all heights of administrative decorum when it sidelined the serving officers and gave much power to retired officers in CM office on the posts of Principal Secretary to CM and Principal Private Secretary to CM.

HP is a small state with over 100 IAS officers working in the state at a point of time, excluding those on Central deputation.

While people expected something new in this new era of BJP, the present government too toed the old line of shuffling the whole administrative machinery from top to bottom in one go and even after that, immediately after taking over.

“The government has tried to make some amends in the choice of officers based on feedback,” justified a senior BJP leader.

All said and done, the bureaucracy is perplexed over the assessment of efficiency of officers in a short period, as much as sidelining of some honest and plain speaking IAS officers from HP by the present government.