Ex-bureaucrats urge Narendra Modi to end ‘deafening’ silence

 Escalation of hate violence against minority communities has acquired a frightening new dimension, says letter

Narendra Modi.: File photo

TT Special Correspondent   |   New Delhi   |   27.04.22: A collective of retired bureaucrats has appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to break his “deafening” silence and end the hate-fuelled violence against minorities in mostly BJP-governed states and flagged the complicity of the State in the atrocities perpetrated by “the forces of majoritarianism”.

“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,” the Constitutional Conduct Group said in a letter.

“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 on 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,” the letter added.

The Constitutional Conduct Group, which has retired officers from the all-India services and the central civil services, has been periodically highlighting the threats to democracy posed by the actions of the government and has also alleged lacunae in the election machinery.

The latest letter is signed by 108 retired civil servants, including former lieutenant governor of Delhi Najeeb Jung, former foreign secretaries Shivshankar Menon, Shyam Saran and Sujatha Singh, former Research and Analysis Wing chief A.S. Dulat, former Union home secretary G.K. Pillai, then adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh T.K.A. Nair, former finance secretaries Narendra Sisodia and Sunil Mitra, and several retired chief secretaries, directors-general of police and ambassadors.

The signatories said: “The administration of law, instead of being an instrument for maintaining peace and harmony, has become the means by which the minorities can be kept in a state of perpetual fear. Their constitutional right to practise their own faith, follow their own customs, dress code and personal laws and exercise their own food choices, is threatened not merely by letting vigilante mobs inflict violence on them with impunity but, by twisting the law itself, to circumscribe their freedom of choice and make it convenient for a prejudiced, communal executive to make colourable use of State power.

“State power is thus used not only to facilitate vigilante violence targeted against a community but to make ostensibly legal means available to the administration (e.g., anti-conversion laws, laws proscribing consumption of beef, encroachment removal, prescription of uniform codes in educational institutions) to strike fear in the community, deprive them of their livelihoods and make it evident to them that they have to accept their status as inferior citizens who have to subordinate themselves to majoritarian political power and majoritarian social and cultural norms.”

The signatories alleged facilitation of hate crimes by the administrative and political machinery.

They explained: “While we are not aware if the current spurt in communal frenzy is coordinated and directed by the political leadership, it is evident that the administration at the state and local levels provides a facilitating environment for mischievous lumpen groups to operate without fear. Such facilitation and support is not limited to that offered by the local police and other administrative officials; it appears to have the tacit approval of the highest political levels in the state and central governments, which provide the enabling policy and institutional environment for local level tyranny.”

“What distinguishes the incidents that are taking place now from earlier communal conflagrations is not merely that a master design is being unveiled to prepare the grounds for a Hindu Rashtra, but that the constitutional and legal framework designed to prevent such a development from taking place is itself being twisted and perverted to make it an instrument of majoritarian tyranny. No wonder then that the bulldozer has now become the new metaphor for the exercise of political and administrative power, literally and figuratively,” the letter added.

The signatories concluded with the appeal to Prime Minister Modi.

“Your silence, in the face of this enormous societal threat, is deafening…. It is our fond hope that in this year of ‘Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav’, rising above partisan considerations, you will call for an end to the politics of hate that governments under your party’s control are so assiduously practising,” they wrote.