When a majority government led by an all dominant Prime Minister rolls on like a juggernaut, reducing the opposition into a bystander and the national media into a zone of passivity or subjugation, it doesn’t pause for reality checks or course corrections. But an unlikely unexpected and brutally frank “open letter” by 65 of India’s most renowned and respected former bureaucrats, to the nation, has to be accepted as a serious fire alarm and responded to. Even if the government contemplates commencing its response to the letter- which castigates the Modi government for veering from the very idea of India – by terming it as an exaggeration, it should pause at the list of signatories on that letter and calculate the number of years of their credible service to the nation.
For those in Goa, it is significant that one of the senior most and respected signatories is our proud Goan top cop Julio Ribeiro, former DGP in Gujarat and Punjab and also remembered very fondly for this role as Mumbai’s police Commissioner.
Each signatory has been a true servant of India, when they were in uniform or in government and some of them continued from where they left off, post their retirement, each a member of a very elite hall of distinction who have expressed pain at the India of today.
Some of them are, first chief information commissioner Wajahat Nabibullah, former I&B Secretary Bhaskar Ghose, former Prasar Bharati CEO Jawhar Sircar, former Calcutta Metro general manager Geetha Thoopal, former Bengal chief secretary Ardhendu Sen, former Planning Commission secretary N.C. Saxena, former ambassador to Nepal Deb Mukharji, and former health secretary Keshav Desiraju and former Additional Chief Secretary West Bengal Kalyani Chaudhuri among others.
What they have said isn’t out of the ordinary. Their thoughts probably echo much of the suppressed sentiment of many. The take away is that THEY have said it, the manner in which they did and the fact that they were stirred enough to do so.
The letter, and this is important, is not addressed to any one, and it is addressed to what matters to all of us – our country, India. And what was their purpose in their own words? To “chronicle our reservations and misgivings about recent developments in the body politic”.
It speaks of “rising authoritarianism and majoritarianism choking dissent, growing climate of religious intolerance aimed primarily at Muslims, and disagreement and dissent considered seditious and anti-national”. The letter targets the ruling class which “reduces any critique to a binary since if you are not with the government, you are anti-national.”
The letter strikes some very raw nerves, especially because it’s not written by any party or vested interest group. It covers the expanse of India’s concerns, from “gaurakshaks functioning with impunity to the behaviour of vigilantes, “who act as if they are prosecutor, judge and executioner rolled into one.”
The canvas of hurt has been mapped with vividness, in pens dipped with ink blended with shock and fury. From the “victimisation” of students and JNU and Hyderabad, to the lynching of cow herds by mobs, the letter goes down as a single window document of record, not of an uprising, but of a ground reality, which hitherto had remained wrapped in a discourse, which attempted to turn India away from it.
The 65 bureaucrats, like the ‘Charge of the Light brigade’, wrote “We are also seeing an ugly trend of trolling, threats and online intimidation of activists, journalists, writers and intellectuals who disagree with the dominant ideology. How does this square with free speech,” they asked.
The ‘dominant’ option is quite obviously to ignore this. And in all likelihood, it will allow time and tiredness to do the job of gradual fading and obliterating this sudden wave in the ocean of calm. But that script may not quite work. This script needs engagement and a response, if for nothing else, than out of respect for the credibility of the signatories. If this is indeed not the true India painted by these stalwarts, then what is?
The answer to questions and observations in the letter could lead to an outside chance of a new door of hope opening or another one leading into the heart of darkness.
And in Goa, these questions troubling the mind of true nationalists like these officers should always be remembered and the need to preserve values which have made Goa different and inclusive should be felt more than ever before.
