We discussed in the previous chapter about basic legal and practical considerations describing acts of malice and victimisation directed by the management against individual employees based on personal animosity and hostility. How to meet the situation, when you are at the receiving end of malice and victimisation by your management? Power and authority are vested with management, while obedience and compliance of orders of superiors mark the burden of the employee. In this unequal relationship the situation warrants extreme tenacity and determination on the part of the employee to withstand the pressure of consequent stress and suffering, unless he is ably supported by a informal group of fellow officers, organised to deal with situations of the kind. But even if mass support from co-officers is not forthcoming, at your own level, you can consider a few steps to cope up with the situation.

• When you confront malicious acting, in first instance politely but firmly represent your grievance to the authority concerned and also to the next higher level. You need not directly question the malicious motives, but you may express critically and graphically the unjust policy and action, pinpointing the resultant hardship that is being inflicted on you. Do not critically or explicitly comment about the hostile intentions or motives of the acting-individual. But clearly highlight the case from the sufferer's point of view. That is, more by way of an expression of grievance instead of a complaint, though both may appear to deal with the same problem. Do not initially find fault directly at the boss, but vividly bring out the effects of his particular action to you as harmful and unjust.(e.g. we submit in an appeal against the judgement of a court, that the "judgement of the Learned Judge is contrary to facts". We do not submit that "the Hon'ble judge has totally erred in his judgement or delivered unjust or wrong judgement to us". Both statements in effect refer to a same development looked at from different points of view. The "cause" gets reflected when you dwell graphically the "effects". Here the "effects" are concrete and visibly discernable facts, while the cause i.e. malice, the attitude is inhibiting in the minds of the authority concerned and hence invisible, and can only be explained and pointed out as a conclusion. It can be made cognizable by only demonstrating the attendant adverse results and leaving the cause to be tacitly inferred.

• Follow the line of this firm resistance up to the point of forbearance before going to the court, but generate sufficient evidence that you are being subjected to capricious handling. Do not lose heart, facing malice is equal to facing a formidable challenge. Equip yourselves and develop your talents to face inflicted injuries or damages. This is the occasion as you will know, to learn who are your real friends and who are the time-servers. Consider this as an indirect opportunity, as you will come out as an individual with added strength and talents, though you may lose part of your material benefits

• The war of attrition will start. Equip yourselves to meet the attacks, but face calmly and with coolness. Do not precipitate a crisis. Do not react forcibly or emotionally. It is right that a man becomes inanimate, when he lacks emotions or quits feelings. But also remember we are not for emotions, but emotions are to be for us. We are not to be controlled by emotions, but we must control our emotions. Maintain emotional-control and mind-control (a concomitant for successful leadership development) and this will sharpen your capacity to think, to deliberate and take right actions at the right moments. You may be served a few memos calling for your explanation. Do not cry hoarse. The authorities are within their sphere to demand explanations. Do not lose heart. Stay cool and develop your capacity to cogently reply memos with convincing explanations. Be brief and precise to the point needed and firmly deny malicious allegations. Once you have replied, behave as though nothing has happened. In other words remain cool. The purpose of the memos is to provoke you. But refuse to be provoked. Next you may be the recipient of inconvenient transfers. In Banks you may be transferred to branches located in Bihar or the Northeast. A change upsets many of us, but many changes have shown the doors of new opportunities to us. For once you go to these places, you will find that better potential to show your talents. The only precaution that you take, at the new centre is that you will keep away from participating in local issues.

• Next the attempt will be to present you charge sheets. Do not react. Management has the right to exercise their inherent vested powers. Do not react, when they exercise their powers, but respond properly when they fail in their responsibilities to you. You are not concerned when you are charge-sheeted, but only when a bonafide process of inquiry is denied to you, your are affected and you have to protest. It is at that point you have to come out.

• At the background of the desire to serve charge sheets, management would find that it lacks material issues. Hastily contrived charge sheets on flimsy assumed issues, quite a few, may be dumped on you. Do not falter. Read MyMessage and the web pages on departmental inquiries exhaustively. If necessary read also the Legal Supplement and chapters on "Safeguards & Remedies". It is here that you should bring out that a "Pen" could be sharper than a "stick". In my lifetime I had proved it several times, and anyone in such circumstances can prepare himself and prove accordingly.

• One weak point of the management is that they seldom hear or respond to the employee's point of view. Ego and status consciousness keep them self-oriented and act one-sided. They lack capacity for self-correction and assume self-righteousness. It is likely that most of your pleas will be filed without reply, i.e. with no response. Else there may be a curt reply ("we have considered you submissions and we do not find any merit in them"). Indirectly it amounts making no defence, which in other words amount to tacitly accepting (by default to deny with reasons) the allegations made by you.

• When you approach the Court file all the relevant correspondence and you can bring out factual evidence of malice and victimization without initially bringing malice and victimization explicitly as the projected or prime disputed issue.

• By calm, firm and by tactful handling, you are to implicitly lay the foundation.

• To re-emphasise what is stated above, When you approach the Law Courts in the initial stage of the plaint do not highlight "malice" explicitly as a principal issue, but keep it implicit. Highlight and seek relief in respect of injustice meted out to you and suffering inflicted on you and how they are unjustified, and how your pleas for relief and justice were fallen on deaf ears. But file all the evidences bringing out clear instances of malice as part of your exhibits.

• Reserve the amplification of malice to be focussed in the final arguments, after bringing out all factual information strengthening the same. After clearly establishing the main issues, this is brought as the logical conclusion. It is not then a plea raised as a first statement or as an after-thought, as you can support your pleading pointing out each and everyone of the evidence that you have already built in your favour, where you have already made the repeated submissions to the management earlier and filed in the court as exhibits on your side. The management has no evidence rebutting or denying with reasons any of your letters. Your evidence is therefore categorical and clear.

• Malice or victimisation is not a physically-perceived-reality, but injury and suffering caused are real and can be positively cognized. The former cannot be seen being an abstract reality, but can only be inferred and concluded, while the latter can be felt and sensed. Put the physical facts in the forefront, and keep the conclusion implicit. Otherwise it will amount to putting the cart before the horse. At the end bring out with concrete details, the element of malice and victimization, the conclusion in your final arguments.

• This is a logical way of developing your case and courts are likely to have more sympathy with your case, when you highlight pointedly your own hardships all the time of establishing by way of the premises, that you have a cause for action and discuss about motives of the management only as an epilogue or conclusion at the end

• Conclusion is the ceiling at the top. It cannot hang in the air. It can only rest supported by hard facts. facts are the "foundation", the pillars and walls to support logical conclusions. This should be presented in this way. We do not first construct the ceiling, but lay the foundation, then pillars etc.

• We do not organise a complaint forum, but a grievance cell against an organization. Both are one and the same, but the emphasis is from different perspectives. We cannot and should not reform management, but we should use our limited resources to redress our sufferings and grievances

A discussion on malice and victimization is incomplete without citing concrete cases, to make understanding complete and I cannot quote better cases than my own. Please refer to my web page My Encounters with Corporate Corruption in my Career starting from the title page up to the epilogue. There are several instances, but I will narrate about the 10th and 11th (the last two) charge sheets.

Before that it will be more appropriate to narrate what I submitted to the Bank by way of my complaint Nos.7 and 8. The earlier complaints - 1 to 6 deal with my investigations of frauds at Delhi in my tenure as Chief Inspector of the Bank during 1992 to 1994. Complaints No.7 and 8 are titled "A Chronicle of Sardonic Animosity and Mordant Vengence - A Servile Reprisal and Frenzied Pursuit". This is narrated in the following pages.

This was the ambience in the first phase of my confrontations between 1977 and 1988, when the majority of charge sheets (9 out of 11) were served on me. Assaults by the more formidable authority holding domination and authority was counter-acted by coolness and unconcern at the end by the weaker recipient. When it all ended and normalcy restored between 1988 to 1992 as if re-enacting an old chronicle from the archive, came the fresh phenomenon leading to the final two charge sheets in the last lap of my career. These charge sheets are final because, for once my service had ended and so the power to charge sheet me. This is the spirit of deliberate fervor that reflects the opening statement of my autobiographical sketch "My Encounters with Corporate Corruption in my Service" when I expressed as under.

"It is my painful duty to have to recall objectively my sordid experience of being the depository of a series of charge sheets from my employer, a premier nationalized bank, in two particular segments of my service. I served the Bank for 39 years, secured seven promotions from clerk to senior management, Scale IV Officer, and retired honorably in 1996/97. In between I was served nine charge sheets in the first phase from 1978 and 1985 and two charge sheets later in the last lap at point of my retirement in 1996-97. In the first period, I also filed nine-writ petitions against the Bank in four different High Courts and in the Supreme Court of India."

Where I possessed no more the power to change the order of things, my efforts were limited to ensuring my own preservation and survival. This temperament is well demonstrated in my subsequent statement, where I had stated -

Though repeatedly charge sheeted, I withstood and retained my calm, cool composure and never felt insecure, such that at no time any of my colleagues could sense that I was facing a trial. I could distinguish between the Public Institution I served, and the individuals at the top management, who controlled the Bank. Loyalty to the Bank was the instinct feeling. I showed no disrespect or failed in due obedience to the top management, but not total or blind subservience against the recorded rules of the Bank or the interests of the Bank. I consider Bank's Conduct Rules applicable in both directions for all public servants within the Bank, irrespective of the position or place they occupy.

The situation that developed and my approach to endure the onslaughts on me are vividly portrayed by me in the following words-

With charge sheets chasing me one followed by the other, I adjusted myself to face the changed environment. I shifted, since then from studying Finance, Banking, Mercantile law and Economics, to an intensive and deep interest in service laws, functioning of anti-corruption bodies and type of legal remedies available to a besieged officer on eternal trial. Working as branch Manager of the Bank, no threat was perceived by me from Employees or Unions, or difficult customers. But the only threat to me was emanating from my own authorities at the top and I had to be alert and vigilant always to guard myself against this lurking danger.

But how I could wade through the straits? I only ensured the crisis to be stalled through the mechanisms of filing several writs petitions in different High Courts, at Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and in the Supreme Court. Then what happened? An interregnum was created and things came to a standstill. Personal animosity melts away, when the persons bearing this feeling cease to continue in pivotal points. Once these people were not there, the problem was no more. The content goes away with the container, when it is discarded and thrown away. Please refer to what I have stated-

A tree after a season withers it's infected and dried leaves and fresh foliage sprouts. Similarly Public Institutions change horses at the top periodically. This happened in 1985, when the then chairman was removed from office. I had no grievance with the Institution and those in the management who were against me were no longer holding the reins of control. What was viewed earlier seriously became subsequently irrelevant and a routine affair in course of time in a changed environment of a new set up. The pending charge sheets against me underwent this transformation and received now a carefree attention. A temporary truce was established in 1988. I was given back branch posting and transferred from Kerala to Mysore, where I took charge as Senior Manager of the main branch in August 1988. I was allowed to function without further impediments. Pending charge sheets were cleared with token penalty of 'censure'. In 1990 when I reviewed and felt that I had only six more years left in service, I unilaterally decided and withdrew all pending writ petitions filed by me against the Bank and still not disposed off from Karnataka and Kerala High Courts.

The new management responded in 1991 by releasing my promotion to Scale IV. I was posted as Chief Inspector in Scale IV with all-India jurisdiction to inspect VLBs, ELBs, Regional, Zonal Offices and Departments of Head offices. So far the good. This honeymoon started in 1988 continued to 1992."

This should set at rest any particle of speculation that I bear personal emotions now in this subject. I am touching them vividly only from a broader perspective, that of establishing the effect it leaves on the competent functioning of the Institution. The aim of this extract is rather to pin point a general problem confronted in service by many; how efforts are made by those in power to obstruct and muffle the voice and mute expressions by those, who venture to unwrap and led bare unpalatable truth. In a prevailing iniquitous atmosphere, where power and authority are in wrong hands, a desire on your part to be upright or clean, gets you labeled as a backslider and a non-conformist. You are treated as a dissident to the established authority, otherwise referred as an anti-incumbency apostate. Those who agree and follow are honest and good workers and those who are treated as anti-incumbency dissidents are put down with unscrupulous abuse of executive powers ruthlessly. It is the situation of a public body being converted by those in authority as a sole-proprietorship concern, a forum for satisfaction of personal greed and ambitions. Possessed with power of audit and discipline control, these vile power holders misuse these control functions in a reverse direction to harass the honest and innocent and to buttress the wrong doers.

There is no other avenue for a lone crusader placed in a situation like that than to remain alert and wait for the maleficent to destroy itself by its own weight and by operation of subtle forces of nature, as it does happen. Until then your options are only to disarm your antagonists and preserve yourselves. Once the crisis is over and there is no more threat continue to keep calm and do not pick a counter-fight, this was my policy. Pursue action and not exhibit reaction. A public servant in the discharge of his duties in a society crowded with vested interests does face overwhelming restraints. If he starts crusading against this secondary menace, the main path is lost. This ideally suits the aims of these, who choose to distract him with intent to shift the battlefront and halt progress on the prime objective. This I state and re-state to focus the comprehension that all my present venture and narratives express a single purpose, i.e. that of restoring the Institution to its credible functioning and rebuild the environment that will facilitate employees to work honestly and fearlessly.

It is power that corrupts the person. The men in power always strive to make that power absolute, when they start editing and renovating the system to suit their calculated needs. Occupy, hold and entrench power and authority. Such unique examples are demonstrated by Mr.MKM" and Mr."A". In the exceptional cases of facing isolated resistance from the remnants of the older order, the desire is to extinguish the subordinates, who dare to adopt an independent perspective and refuse to yield or move on dotted lines. I will quote examples first in respect of Mr."A" and then to Mr."MKM".