They owe loyalty to their masters above the nation. They serve them throughout their tenure and preserve their interests. Great ecosystems are not built by narratives alone, but by narrative-builders who sustain them. With every letter written to tell the democratically-elected Prime Minister over what needs to be done, our retired bureaucrats continue to wear their entitlement on their sleeves. This is only one of the ways they keep themselves relevant, while some occupy a chair at a private university in Sonipat.
Be it the award-wapasi posturing or the open letters from the leftist guilds, the toolkit whenever activated, intends to pursue three motives – to insinuate the narrative of ‘Muslim persecution in India’, whitewash hate crimes against Hindus and hence gherao the public institutions who refuse to function in the way convenient to their ‘idea’ of India. Last time in 2019, when a collective of over six hundred left intellectuals, artists and thinkers (many of them who owe their allegiances to the Congress and its regionalist tentacles) signed a letter urging the nation not to re-elect Modi for Prime Minister; the nation in return, unequivocally elected him with higher margins.
The recent letter
Now in yet another move, over a hundred ex-bureaucrats have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to condemn the “politics of hate” allegedly practised by state governments under BJP’s control. The former civil servants have started whining over the anti-encroachment drives across states in India terming them as a “frenzy of hate-filled destruction in the country with Muslims and other minorities at the sacrificial altar”.
The signatories include former National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon, ex-foreign secretary Sujatha Singh, former Lt Governor of Delhi Najeeb Jung, former home secretary G K Pillai and former prime minister Manmohan Singh’s principal secretary T K A Nair among the 103 others.
The letter said that the escalation of hate violence against the minority communities, ‘particularly Muslims,’ in the last few years and months across BJP-ruled states of Assam, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Delhi (where the union government controls the police) – has acquired a frightening new dimension. The former bureaucrats believe that the threat is so ‘unprecedented’ that the constitutional morality and conduct as well as ‘unique syncretic social fabric’ – “which is the greatest civilizational inheritance and which our Constitution is so meticulously designed to conserve is likely to be torn apart.”
The letter demanded the PM to express his concern on the issue saying that his silence ‘in the face of this enormous societal threat’ is ‘deafening’. The entitled bureaucrats mentioned that while appealing to the Prime Minister’s promise of ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwas’, they hope that in the year of ‘Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav’, the PM will – “call for an end to the politics of hate that governments under the BJP’s control are so assiduously practising,” with their letter.
The reality
The onus of incidents of communal clashes has been intentionally and rather conveniently rested upon the Hindus. Since the civil servants of yesterday bask in the limelight as public intellectuals of today, it is imperative that we study their assertions closely. Claims like these, laid with idiomatic expressions should be in consonance with the ground reality; only if the intent is not to spin a narrative with rhetoric. The underlying evidence that lies beyond the diplomatic push is rather exhaustive.
If only the recent attacks on recent Hindu festivals are to be considered, then let us look at what happened when Hindus were celebrating ‘Nav Samvatsar’ while taking out a procession in a Muslim-dominated area in Rajasthan’s Karauli. A Muslim mob attacked the residents on the auspicious day of the Hindu new year. A resident in the locality has noted, “On that fateful day of April 2, around 15:30 hours, Muslim shop owners closed their shops entirely and left the locality.” The angry mob, enraged by the procession threw the shopkeeper, Chandrashekhar Garg and his father out of their store and his business was looted and vandalised.
Reportedly, 43 people, including policemen, were injured in the mob attack while the rally was celebrating ‘Nav Samvatsar’ passed through a Muslim-dominated area. Rajasthan, which is a Congress-ruled state became a victim of Islamist violence of the worst kind. What followed, was CM Ashok Gehlot’s tepid response which tried to cover up the issue. Our eminent bureaucrats have single-handedly kept ‘Rajasthan’ out of their list of states where ‘minorities’ and constitutional morality were under threat.
Then came the upsurge of violence during Ram Navami where in Madhya Pradesh’s Khargone, a Hindu religious procession was once again attacked while it passed through a Muslim-dominated area. Here, it was the ‘songs played during the procession’ a reason enough why the Muslim residents pelted stones during the Shobha Yatra. The Islamists who were involved in the attacks apparently threatened Hindu women with rape and abduction. Women were terrorised with threats like, “Where is your Ram? If he is not here then come out. We are here to abduct you. We will take your Seeta Maiyas with us. We will take your women, sisters, and daughters.”
In Khargone, a Shitala Mata Mandir was also attacked, and the idols of Hindu deities were broken. On April 16, on the day of Hanuman Jayanti a procession that passed through another Muslim dominated area of Jahangirpuri, a Muslim crowd kept pelting stones and glass bottles at the procession. Local residents have maintained that Jahangirpuri is a hub of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants in Delhi. The day saw similar stone-pelting attacks in Andhra Pradesh’s Kurnool and Karnataka’s Hubli.
After the violence spurged in Jahangirpuri, The NMDC started its anti-encroachment drive amid a heavy police presence. Several houses in the locality had built extensions on the road, reducing a 30-feet wide road to a mere 10-feet narrow street. The NDMC officials also razed down illegal structures of a mosque from which the stones and empty wine bottles were pelted on the Hanuman Jayanti. These structures, including a number of roadside shops, were constructed by encroaching the road.
Also, white announced financial assistance to the victims of the Khargone riots MP CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan asserted that rioters greeted with bulldozers, not flowers. Subsequently, the Khargone administration took strict action against the miscreants who had pelted stones at the Ram Navami procession on Sunday. The illegally constructed buildings were bulldozed with JCBs by the administration.
The game of letters
It is difficult to imagine that the people who were then responsible for running the country, have now resorted to making assertions completely devoid of facts. Hindus, all over the country were victimised during Hindu festivals. Mainstream media sympathetic to the erstwhile Congress establishment tried hard to establish the victims as ‘perpetrators’ for daring to enter ‘Muslim areas‘. The Hindu population in the neighbouring Islamic republics of Pakistan and Bangladesh is on the verge of getting wiped out. The Hindus in India are meeting the same fate when they venture into the no-go Muslim-dominated mini Pakistani pockets in the country.
Yet, our former diplomats are ready to craft a narrative of Muslim persecution in India. If at all, the Indian state faces any challenge in the internal security, it is underlined by radical Islam and not the counteractive roadside political reaction by the Hindus. As the opposition continues to fail politically and socially, the diplomatic footsoldiers keep continuing to serve their cause even after retirement. While Muslim appeasement was practised as a policy in Congress rule, ‘Muslim victimhood’ has become its offshoot while it is in opposition today.
As Sreemoy Talukdar writes in the Firstpost, “The dire warnings of ‘pogrom’, fulminations against ‘Hindu Rashtra’ and elaborate constructs of a ‘lost idea of India’ are chiefly cynical expressions of political frustration at BJP’s domination of national politics. Most liberals and Islamists, for whom BJP is an anathema, find the Opposition a divided and defunct political force not worthy of investing hope.” Hence, the quint of cards in the hands of these newly-turned armchair activists include monopoly over violence, victimhood, vilification, vengeance and verdict.
Try hard as they may, but gradually India, in consonance with its civilizational consciousness is confident to put its Hindu identity on its sleeves. Pluralism is not a tenet, but an overflowing tradition over the years which inspires the young democracy that is India today. The relevance of the old order hounds the apostles of the ‘founding fathers’. They may keep revolving from sitting beside a fireplace inside a Lutyens bungalow to a bookstore in Khan Market and to a literature festival in Jaipur, possibly drafting yet another letter to the Prime Minister and a narrative for the nation.
