Here’s the full text of the open letter written by 49 senior Indian bureaucrats:
We are a group of retired civil servants who came together last year to express
our concern at the decline in the secular, democratic, and liberal values
enshrined in our constitution. We did so to join other voices of protest
against the frightening climate of hate, fear and viciousness that the ruling
establishment had insidiously induced. We spoke then as we do now: as citizens
who have no affiliations with any political party nor adherence to any
political ideology other than the values enshrined in our Constitution.
We had hoped that as someone sworn to upholding the Constitution, the
government that you head and the party to which you belong would wake up to
this alarming decline, take the lead in stemming the rot and reassure everyone,
especially the minorities and vulnerable sections of society, that they need
not fear for their life and liberty. This hope has been destroyed.
Instead, the unspeakable horror of the Kathua and the Unnao incidents shows
that the government has failed in performing the most basic of the
responsibilities given to it by the people. We, in turn, have failed as a
nation which took pride in its ethical, spiritual and cultural heritage and as
a society which treasured its civilisational values of tolerance, compassion
and fellow feeling. By giving sustenance to the brutality of one human being
against another in the name of Hindus we have failed as human beings.
The bestiality and the barbarity involved in the rape and murder of an eight
year old child shows the depths of depravity that we have sunk into. In
post-independence India, this is our darkest hour and we find the response of
our government, the leaders of our political parties inadequate and feeble. At
this juncture, we see no light at the end of the tunnel and we hang our heads
in shame. Our sense of shame is all the more acute because our younger
colleagues who are still in service, especially those working in the districts
and are required by law to care for and protect the weak and the vulnerable,
also seem to have failed in their duty.
Prime Minister, we write to you not just to express our collective sense of
shame and not just to give voice to our anguish or lament and mourn the death
of our civilisational values – but to express our rage. Rage over the agenda of
division and hate your party and its innumerable, often untraceable offshoots
that spring up from time to time, have insidiously introduced into the grammar
of our politics, our social and cultural life and even our daily discourse. It
is that which provides the social sanction and legitimacy for the incidents in
Kathua and Unnao.
In Kathua in Jammu, it is the culture of majoritarian belligerence and
aggression promoted by the Sangh parivar which emboldened rabid communal
elements to pursue their perverse agenda. They knew that their behaviour would
be endorsed by the politically powerful and those who have made their careers
by polarising Hindus and Muslims across a sectarian divide.
In Unnao in UP, it is the reliance on the worst kinds of patriarchal feudal
mafia dons to capture votes and political power that gives such persons the
freedom to rape and murder and extort as a way of asserting their own personal
power. But even more reprehensible than such abuse of power, it is the response
of the state government in hounding the victim of rape and her family instead
of the alleged perpetrator that shows how perverted governance practices have
become. That the government of UP finally acted only when it was compelled to
do so by the high court shows the hypocrisy and half-heartedness of its intent.
In both cases, Prime Minister, it is your party which is in power. Given your
supremacy within the party and the centralised control you and your party
president exercise, you, more than anyone else, have to be held responsible for
this terrifying state of affairs. Instead of owning up and making reparations,
however, you had until yesterday chosen to remain silent, breaking your silence
only when public outrage both in India and internationally reached a point when
you could no longer ignore it.
And even then, while you have condemned the act and expressed a sense of shame,
you have not condemned the communal pathology behind the act nor shown the
resolve to change the social, political and administrative conditions under
which such communal hate is bred. We have had enough of these belated
remonstrations and promises to bring justice when the communal cauldron is
forever kept boiling by forces nested within the Sangh Parivar.
Prime Minister, these two incidents are not just ordinary crimes where, with
the passage of time, the wounds inflicted on our social fabric, on our body
politic and the moral fibre of our society will heal and it will soon be
business as usual. This is a moment of existential crisis, a t