IAS officers from Vokkaliga community

I was reading T V R Shenoy's column in Rediff titled The decline of Bangalore and one strange sentence caught me off guard. The relevant portion is reproduced here (note in italics mine).

... A few months ago, he (S M Krishna) was invited to a function to congratulate newly selected IAS officers from the Vokkaliga community, scarcely an official duty of the governor of Maharashtra! (The Vokkaligas and the Lingayats by far the two most powerful castes in Karnataka politics.) ...

I can't believe this. There is a function to congratulate the IAS officers of a particular community, mind you these people are supposed to act without any bias of caste, language religion etc. and still IAS officers go on and participate. (And more worse, a person of the stature of Krishna - formerly a chief minister and presently a governor - also attends the function). If this happens, what is the gaurantee that they will act impartially in any event of communal clash or in the postings of junior officers? Just a few weeks ago EC has to recall a Gujarat IAS officer, who didn't wanted any Dalit and OBC colleagues.

Isn't there any code of conduct for IAS officers? Or the Ministry of Personnel (which, I believe deals with these) doesn't see this incident as a gross violation by the IAS officers, who participated in the function? The caste/religion/language syndrome has earlier inflicted our politicians. But, if it also penetrates in the bureaucracy, it spells more ills for the nation.