Shunted Aside

There have been more dramatic dismissals--Harry Truman's firing of General Douglas MacArthur in 1951, for example, or Harold Macmillan's simultaneous sacking of seven Cabinet ministers in a 1962 action that earned him the sobriquet "Mac the Knife." But rarely has a top government official been given the boot in as bizarre a fashion as was the chairman of India's Railway Board, B.C. Ganguli.

Since he was appointed to the Cabinet earlier this year, Railway Minister K. Hanumanthaiya, 63, has been at loggerheads with Ganguli, his top civil servant. Ganguli, 57, who was with the railroad for 34 years, was known to regard all ministers as meddlesome, and the officious Hanumanthaiya as particularly so. The Railway Minister reciprocated that feeling, and last week he saw an opportunity to get rid of his adversary.

Ganguli, who had scheduled a nine-day inspection tour of the state of Gujarat, had just got comfortably ensconced, along with his wife and personal staff, in his air-conditioned railroad car at a suburban Delhi station. Shortly before the train was to pull out, a junior official rushed up with a notice from Hanumanthaiya that the trip had been canceled. The official also carried instructions that the special car be detached. Angered, Ganguli ordered it recoupled. It was, but some minutes later it was quietly detached once more and the train pulled out.

Sputtering with rage, Ganguli called a press conference on the platform. He deplored this "attempted rape of the constitution." Not only would he die for his cause, he said, but "I will appeal to the Supreme Court and to The Hague." With that, he disappeared into his car, which by now had been shunted to a siding, vowing not to come out until justice had been done.

Hanumanthaiya's next move was to obtain a forced-retirement order from Indian President V.V. Giri. The order was duly tacked to the side of the immobilized railway car. After six days, Ganguli ended his sit-in, but as a symbolic protest he had his private car chained to the tracks.

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