(a) " Refugees should not be turned back to the country where they would face prosecution or human rights violation." Examine the statement with reference to the ethical dimension being violated by the nation claiming to be democratic with an open society. (b) Should impartial and being non-partisan be considered indispensable qualities to make a successful civil servant? Discuss with illustrations.

(a) Non-refoulement and a democratic open society

• The statement is the principle of non-refoulement: do not push a person back to a place of persecution, torture or threat to life and freedom.
• It is the ethical core of the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, and is widely treated as customary international law even for States that have not signed.
• India is not a party to the 1951 Convention, yet it has hosted Tibetans, Sri Lankan Tamils, Afghans and others, and Article 21 has been read to restrain arbitrary expulsion.
• A nation that claims democracy and an open society violates several ethical dimensions when it turns such people back as a crowd.
• Dignity: Kant’s person-as-end is broken if a human is treated as a demographic threat without an individual hearing.
• Justice: the already persecuted pay twice; the comfortable citizen does not.
• Truth: calling a genuine refugee an “infiltrator” without process is a lie that a free press and an independent court exist to resist.
• Fraternity and Article 51’s respect for international law sit uneasily with a pushback that ignores UNHCR screening.
• Open society, in Popper’s sense, is one that can criticise itself. Secret night pushbacks close that society.
• Limit: non-refoulement is not an open invitation without security screening. A State may detain, identify and exclude a person who is a genuine combatant or a mass-crime suspect, with process, not with a mob.
• Rohingya and other hard cases require individual status determination, humane holding, and burden-sharing — not a slogan of either “all in” or “all out”.
• Ethical close: a democracy that returns people to torture to please a vote has used openness as a brand and closed the door on the weakest stranger.

(b) Impartial and non-partisan as indispensable

• Impartiality is equal application of the rule regardless of caste, class, religion, kin or party. Non-partisanship is not using the office to win an election for anyone, including yesterday’s minister.
• They are indispensable to a successful civil servant if success means constitutional delivery, not a fast promotion.
• Illustration: a returning officer who tilts a booth for the ruling party has succeeded as a courtier and failed as a civil servant under the Representation of the People Act, 1951.
• Illustration: a District Magistrate who registers an FIR against a ruling worker and a protestor by the same standard is impartial; one who files only against the protestor is a partisan in khaki files.
• Illustration: disaster relief that skips an opposition mandal, or a lockdown pass for donors only, is success in a WhatsApp group and failure under Article 14.
• The All India Services (Conduct) Rules, 1968 require political neutrality. The Second ARC treated it as a condition of a professional service.
• A partisan officer may look “successful” in a captured State: postings, houses, a post-retirement board. That is not success; it is a deferred scandal.
• Limit: non-partisan does not mean politically illiterate. The officer must understand a manifesto enough to implement a lawful policy, then stop at the unlawful oral extra.
• Impartiality is not both-sides-ism that treats a lynch mob and a victim as equal claimants. It is the same law, including protection of the weaker.
• Without these two qualities the civil service becomes a faction with a gazette. They are therefore indispensable to real success.