From Our Bureau
NEW DELHI: Former senior bureaucrats have formed a Constitutional Conduct Group with 108 signatories challenging Prime Minister Modi on his “deafening silence” on the frenzy of hate against the Muslims in the BJP-ruled states and appealed to him “for an end to the politics of hate that government under his party’s control are assiduously practising.”
In a 6-page open letter to the Prime Minister, they assert that “it is evident that the administration at the state and local levels provides a facilitating environment to the mischievous lumpen groups to operate without fear.” The signatories held top posts in the government in the cadre of IAS, IPS, IFS and IRS.
They said: “Such facilitation and support is not limited to the local police and administrative officials, but it appears to have the tacit approval of the highest political levels in the state and Central government, enabling policy and institutional environment for local level tyranny.”
“The escalation of hate violence against the minority communities, particularly Muslims, in the last few years and months across several States – Assam, Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, all states in which the BJP) is in power, barring Delhi (where the union government controls the police) – has acquired a frightening new dimension.
“It is no longer just the politics of an assertive Hindutva identity, nor the attempt to keep the communal cauldron on the boil – all that has been going for decades and in the last few years had become a part of the new normal. What is alarming now is the subordination of the fundamental principles of our Constitution and of the rule of law to the forces of majoritarianism, in which the State appears to be fully complicit.”
Alleging that the violence is outsourced to fringe groups, they said: “There is little doubt as to how the ground for their operations is made fertile, how each of them follows a master script and shares a common “tool kit” and how the propaganda machinery of a party as well as the State is made available to defend their actions.”
“All of us are former civil servants, who have spent decades in the service of the Constitution, believe that the threat we are facing is unprecedented and at stake is not just constitutional morality and conduct,” they said, warning that “hate will engender hate, rendering the environment too noxious for the idea of India envisioned by our founding fathers who fought for a climate of fraternity and communal harmony to survive.
Signatories to the hard-hitting statement include Kutty Nair, former principal secretary to Dr Manmohan Singh, foreign secretaries Shyam Saran, Sujatha Singh, Shiv Shankar Menon, who was also former National Security Advisor, top cop Julio Rebeiro, former RAW chief A S Dulat, Amitabh Mathur, former special secretary, cabinet secretariat and a score of chief secretaries of the states.
