Retired civil servants call upon PM Modi to take five steps

In an open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, 39 retired civil servants remind him that his belated condemnation of the rapes in Kathua and Unnav is not enough.

• Reach out to the families of the victims in Unnao and Kathua and seek their forgiveness on behalf of all of us.
• Fast-track the prosecution of the perpetrators in the Kathua case and request for a court directed SIT in the Unnao case, without further ado.
• In the memory of these innocent children and all other victims of hate crime, renew a pledge to offer special protection to Muslims, to Dalits, to members of other minority communities, to women and children so that they need not fear for their life and liberty and any threat to these will be extinguished with the full force of State authority.
• Take steps to remove from government anyone who has been associated with hate crimes and hate speeches.
• Call for an all-party meeting to deliberate on ways in which the phenomenon of hate crime can be tackled socially, politically and administratively.

The letter ends by stating “It is possible that even this may be too little too late but it will restore some sense of order and give hope that the free fall into anarchy can be arrested. We live in hope.”

Earlier in the letter the signatories voiced their anguish at the toxic situation in the country and held Prime Minister Modi, the BJP and the Government responsible.

The letter reads, “ 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 turning point – the way the government responds now will determine whether we as a nation and as a republic have the capacity to overcome the crisis of constitutional values, of governance and the ethical order within which we function,” they went on to state.

The signatories include Julio Ribeiro, S P Ambrose, Chandrashekhar Balakrishnan, Meeran C Borwankar, E A S Sarma, Sujatha Rao, NC Saxena, Aftab Seth, Navrekha Sharma, Harsh Mander and Wajahat Habibullah among others.