It’s a face that will increasingly rise in familiarity and prominence as the Big Cheese of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati’s administration. As Mayawati’s most trusted lieutenant, Cabinet Secretary Shahshank Shekhar Singh, faithfully carries out the character and disposition of the brand new Maya administration.

So, who is Shashank Shekhar Singh? Serial bureaucrat, agent provocateur, big brother? Perhaps all of them. It has been a dream run for the 56-year-old head honcho. For a commissioned rank officer and a pilot in the army, who joined the government after 10 years in service, Shashank Singh has been appointed principal secretary to at least three chief ministers and a governor, apart from heading almost 18 departments, from civil aviation to industrial development to food and civil supplies. He is perhaps the only civil servant to enjoy the rank and scale of a Chief Secretary since he joined office in 1986.

It is easy to see why Maya has reposed faith in this self-styled revisionist and reformer. Though it took her fourth term as CM to appoint Singh as the Big Boss, Maya had made up her mind in her previous reign as CM in 2002-3. Their style of functioning is similar—authoritarian, disciplinary, forbidding. Stories about his administrative style abound—he never takes no for an answer, gush his loyal officers, he is a hands-on and on-site officer, and is fanatically strict about keeping deadlines. Negligent officers are suspended and transferred on the spot, “officials DMs and SSPs have driven trucks and jumped onto bullock carts to keep deadlines”.

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