Big fight in UP over the ubiquitous white towel draped on the babu’s chair: Everyone wants one

A towel, Douglas Adams says in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is just about the most important thing in the universe: it can be wrapped around for warmth, spread out on the ground to lay down on, serve as a mask to fend off noxious fumes, or used as a distress signal.

Adams was likely unacquainted with the eccentricities of power circles in Uttar Pradesh. The state, decades ago, devised a most unique use of the towel – a spotless, white one hung off the back of a thick leather chair; an honour reserved for only the most senior officers, and a ubiquitous symbol of power.

To be sure, towels, not necessarily white, are a common sight on the chairs of bureaucrats across India.

Now, it emerges, not all is well with the towel in Uttar Pradesh as evident in an emergency video conference called by chief secretary Manoj Kumar Singh earlier this month. It was to ensure that administrative protocol, which places elected representatives above public officers, is followed to the tee (or to the towel, in this case). In simple terms, the government ordered that MPs, MLAs and MLCs be given towel-adorned chairs “of the same height and decor” at meetings across the state.

The emergency meeting was a response to complaints of insubordination after a meeting of the state’s parliamentary monitoring committee on September 6. A clutch of MLAs attending the discussion, being chaired by legislative assembly Speaker Satish Mahana, pointed out that officers were “sitting on tall, betowelled chairs”. The elected representatives themselves, they pointed out, were not.

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“The legislators are given ordinary chairs and the officers sit on ones with white towels. If the officers cannot respect the legislators, how will they treat the people well,” said Pankaj Malik, the Samajwadi Party MLA from Charthawal, Muzaffarnagar.

Officers also sat on sofas, even as MLAs were given “ordinary chairs”. Such treatment, they said, was “highly objectionable”.

The Uttar Pradesh secretariat in Lucknow changes about 1,000 towels twice a week – on Mondays and Thursdays. Most of them are white, except chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s saffron.

The towels are full-length (up to 180x90cm). There is no centralised purchase system and secretariats, departments, divisions and districts procure them from approved agencies.

A practice that began in the state secretariat has, over the years, trickled down across the large province.

“The practice is also followed across the police system and chairs of officers from station house officers (SHO) to the level of director general of police (DGP) are decorated with white towels,” said OP Singh, former DGP, Uttar Pradesh and former director general of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF).

“I joined the service in 1982, and this system was in practice even then,” said former IAS officer Rohit Nandan.

The complaints prompted JP Singh, the principal secretary of the parliamentary affairs department, to issue a government order on October 7 taking rather stern note of the tacit towel norms being undone.

The chief secretary’s meeting did wonders, said officials. No complaints have surfaced since and the towels all appear to be on their rightful backrests.

“We have not received any complaint about violation of protocol from anywhere after a meeting chaired by the chief secretary, was organised to ensure that there is no violation on the issue. Action will be taken if the state government gets any reports of violation of protocol,” said Singh.

But several legislators, primarily from opposition parties, pointed out that several of their chairs remain unadorned.

“There has been no change at official meetings even after the GO (government order). This is mainly because the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) leadership does not believe in the democratic system and so democratically elected public representatives do not get the desired treatment,” said Rajendra Chaudhary, Samajwadi Party MLC and spokesperson.

In these chair wars, neither side seems ready to throw in the towel yet.