Retired civil servants condemn India’s new citizenship law: Reports the Guardian

Retired civil servants condemn India's new citizenship law: Reports the Guardian

LONDON Jan 12 (APP):The British Newspaper the Guardian has reported that more than 100 retired senior civil servants, including three former ministers have written an open letter to the Indian public condemning its government policies they called “morally untenable”, “wasteful” and certain to cause hardship to millions.

The letter especially criticized a controversial citizenship law widely seen as anti-Muslims and the government’s proposed national registered of citizens, and the critics allege that,when combined,the law and the register could lead to millions of Muslims being declared illegal migrants, the paper added.

The British newspaper further reported that the signators included the former foreign secretaries Shyam Saran, Shivshankar Menon and Shujatha Sing.

The letter urged the Indian government to repeal the citizenship law, passed last month, and deceit from setting up detention centers for Indians who do not qualify as citizens, the Guardian said.“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 British newspaper further said that the letter was likely to cause anxiety
in Indian government ranks.

The Guardian newspaper further said that since the Indian 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, the paper added.

The Guardian Newspaper further reported that in April 2018, following two particularly horrific rape cases,49 former Indian 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”.

It added that 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 the rape and lynching have
been employed as instruments of violence gau rakshaks (Cow vigilantes) and
others”, the Guardian quoting the letter said.

The paper said that 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.

APP Services