[The signatories included the former foreign secretaries Shyam Saran, Shivshankar Menon and Sujatha Singh. The letter urged the government to repeal the citizenship law, passed last month, and desist from setting up detention centres for Indians who do not qualify as citizens.]
By Amrit
Dhillon
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Demonstrators
at the Vidhana Soudha (seat of state legislature in Karnataka state)
protesting against
India’s new citizenship law on Thursday.
Photograph: Manjunath Kiran/AFP
via Getty Images
|
More than 100 retired senior civil servants,
including three former ministers, have written an open letter to the Indian
public condemning government policies they called “morally untenable”,
“wasteful” and certain to cause hardship to millions.
The letter specifically criticised a controversial
new citizenship law widely seen as anti-Muslim and the government’s proposed
national register of citizens. Critics allege that, when combined, the law and
the register could lead to millions of Muslims being declared illegal migrants.
The signatories included the former foreign
secretaries Shyam Saran, Shivshankar Menon and Sujatha Singh. The letter urged
the government to repeal the citizenship law, passed last month, and desist
from setting up detention centres for Indians who do not qualify as citizens.
“We are apprehensive that the vast powers to
include or exclude a person from the Local Register of Indian Citizens that is
going to be vested in the bureaucracy at a fairly junior level has the scope to
be employed in an arbitrary and discriminatory manner, subject to local
pressures and to meet specific political objectives,” they said in the letter.
The letter is unlikely to cause anxiety in
government ranks. Since the prime minister, Narendra Modi, first came to power
in 2014, public intellectuals and celebrities have come together to rebuke the
government in open letters over the lynchings of Muslims and the suppression of
freedom of expression. No one in the government has acknowledged the letters.
In April 2018, following two particularly
horrific rape cases, 49 former civil servants wrote to Modi lamenting the
“terrifying state of affairs” in the country and blaming his Bharatiya Janata
party for its “culture of majoritarian belligerence and aggression”.
A few days later, to express their solidarity
with these civil servants, more than 600 academics from India and abroad,
including Noam Chomsky, wrote to Modi expressing their “deep anger and anguish”
over the rapes.
“They are part of a pattern of repeated
targeted attacks on minority religious communities, Dalits, tribals and women,
in which rape and lynching have been employed as instruments of violence by gau
rakshaks [cow vigilantes] and others,” the letter said.
Far from taking such criticism on board, in
October the police in Bihar state charged a group of movie personalities and
writers with sedition for writing an open letter to Modi censuring him for hate
crimes and mob violence.
