Image: PTI

The Constitutional Conduct Group (CCG), which comprises eminent former civil servants, diplomats and political commentators, has collectively written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the “frenzy of hate filled destruction in the country.” The letter has been signed by 108 eminent citizens, and states that placed on “the sacrificial altar are not just Muslims and members of the other minority communities but the Constitution  itself.”

The former civil servants write that the violence against the minority communities, particularly Muslims, in  the last few years and months across Assam, Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, states in which the Bharatiya Janata Party  (BJP) is in power, has acquired “a frightening new dimension.” 

They further say that “the subordination of the fundamental principles of our Constitution and of the rule of law to the forces of majoritarianism, in which the state appears to be fully complicit” is alarming, adding, “The administration of law, instead of being an instrument for maintaining peace and harmony, has become the means by which the minorities can be kept in a state of perpetual fear.” 

According to the CCG, state power is now being “used not only to facilitate vigilante violence  targeted against a community but to make ostensibly legal means available to the administration (e.g., anti-conversion laws, laws proscribing consumption of beef, encroachment removal, prescription of uniform codes in educational institutions) to strike fear in the community.”

They analyzed that there is a difference in the incidents that are taking place now from earlier communal conflagrations. It is not merely that a “master design is being unveiled to prepare the grounds for a Hindu Rashtra, but that the constitutional and legal framework designed to prevent such a  development from taking place is itself being twisted and perverted to make it an instrument of  majoritarian tyranny.” The group put on record that “the bulldozer has now become the new metaphor for the exercise of political and administrative power, literally and figuratively.”

They remind the Prime Minister that they, the members of the Constitutional Conduct Group, are all former  civil servants who have “spent decades in the service of the Constitution,” and that they believe that the “threat we are facing is unprecedented” 

“Your silence, in the face of this enormous societal threat, is deafening,” they stated, asking the PM to act “rising  above partisan considerations.” They further urged him to “call for an end to the politics of hate that governments under your party’s control are so assiduously practicing.”

The letter by the Constitutional Conduct Group signed by eminent citizens including Anita Agnihotri, Salahuddin Ahmad, Meeran C Borwankar, M.G. Devasahayam, A.S. Dulat, K.P. Fabian, Tirlochan Singh, Hindal Tyabji,  Jawed Usmani Shiv Shankar  Mukherjee, Amitabha Pande, Maxwell Pereira, G.K. Pillai  and others may be read here.

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