Former national security advisor (NSA) Shivshankar Menon, ex-foreign secretary Sujatha Singh, former home secretary GK Pillai, former lieutenant governor of Delhi Najeeb Jung, and former PM Manmohan Singh's principal secretary TKA Nair are some of the participants with signature on the letter.
In the letter, the “constitutional edifice created by our founding fathers” is at the risk of destruction. This risk is the motive behind their expression of their anger and anguish.
"Which is our greatest civilizational inheritance and which our Constitution is so meticulously designed to conserve, is likely to be torn apart,” said the letter.
An excerpt from the letter said: “As former civil servants, it is not normally our wont to express ourselves in such extreme terms, but the relentless pace at which the constitutional edifice created by our founding fathers is being destroyed compels us to speak out and express our anger and anguish. The escalation of hate violence against the minority communities, particularly Muslims, in the last few years and months across several states – Assam, Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand, all states in which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in power, barring Delhi (where the union government controls the police) – has acquired a frightening new dimension,
“The hate and malevolence directed against Muslims seems to have embedded itself deep in the recesses of the structures, institutions and processes of governance in the States in which the BJP is in power. 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. Their constitutional right to practice their own faith, follow their own customs, dress code and personal laws and exercise their own food choices, is threatened not merely by letting vigilante mobs inflict violence on them with impunity but, by twisting the law itself, to circumscribe their freedom of choice and make it convenient for a prejudiced, communal executive to make colourable use of state power. State power is thus 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, deprive them of their livelihoods and make it evident to them that they have to accept their status as inferior citizens who have to subordinate themselves to majoritarian political power and majoritarian social and cultural norms. The likelihood of our becoming a country that systematically makes sections of its own citizens – minorities, Dalits, the poor and the marginalized – targets of hate and knowingly deprives them of their fundamental rights is now, more than ever, frighteningly real."
The ex-bureaucrats ask the PM to actualize the promised moto 'Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwas',
