The Constitutional Conduct Group, a group of former civil servants, on Friday urged the Centre to withdraw its order lifting a 58-year-old ban on government employees being members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
In a letter, the group said that the enforcement of the order would cause “enormous detriment” to the soul of the Constitution. The ban was lifted by the Centre on July 9.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindutva group, is the parent organisation of the Bharatiya Janata Party. It has been banned three times since Independence. Critics say it promotes Hindu supremacy and intolerance of minorities.
The Sangh was placed on the list of organisations government officials could not be associated with in November 1966.
On Friday, the Constitutional Conduct Group said that caste, religion and gender continued to be critical fractures in Indian society. “We feel a deep disquiet about this government order that allows government servants, who are tasked with defending secular democracy and minority rights, to openly declare their allegiance to an organisation that is ideologically opposed to both of these,” it said.
The paramount duty of civil administrators and the police is to defend and uphold the Constitution, the group said. “This includes, centrally, the protection of the Constitutional rights – including of life, liberty and worship – of religious and caste minorities.”
The letter said that civil servants should, at all times, demonstrate their humanism, impartiality and adherence to the values enshrined in the Constitution of India.
According to the group, the lifting of the ban would mean that “a district magistrate, a police officer, a secretary to government, a professor, a teacher or a government doctor” could openly be a member of organisation that rejects the “pluralist, secular” core of the Constitution.
It said that the “official defence of this decision” to lift the ban rested on the claim that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was a cultural and not a political organisation.
“This is patently not true,” the letter said. “The goal of a Hindu Rashtra [Hindu nation] lies at the core of the ideology of the RSS, as articulated by its founders and leaders since its formation 99 years ago.”
The group said that this goal of a “theocratic state” where certain religious identities had lesser rights was in opposition to the principles and pledges of the Constitution that “guarantee equal citizenship rights and freedoms to people of every faith and identity”.
It added: “This renders the government order that permits public officials to be members of or to associate with activities of the RSS a violation of the Constitution itself.”
The group also noted the close links between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the BJP.
“Literally millions of RSS members openly campaign for the BJP in every state and national election,” it said. “How then can the integrity of the electoral process be assured when Chief Election Commissioners, Returning Officers and all others tasked with organising a fair election can be members of an organisation which is strongly aligned to one particular political party?”
The group said that members of organisations with ideological affinities to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh had also in recent years made speeches “stoking hatred and sometimes even calling for genocide and ethnic cleansing”.
It added that at least six judicial commissions of inquiry into episodes of communal violence had indicted organisations having affinities with the ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh for their role in these flare-ups that resulted in extensive loss of life and property of Muslims and other citizens.
“Civil servants are servants first of the Constitution; and only after this, of the elected government under which they serve,” the letter said. “If Constitutional pledges or the rights of the most disadvantaged citizen are imperilled by orders of the elected government, it is their duty to resist such unconstitutional orders.”
A month after the Centre’s direction, the BJP government in Rajasthan also lifted its ban on government employees taking part in activities of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
The state government decided to remove the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh from a list of 17 organisations with which public servants could not be associated. The ban had been in place in the state since 1972.
Earlier, several state governments, including Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh, had also lifted the bar on public servants being members of the organisation.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was first banned after the assassination of MK Gandhi, then during the Emergency from 1975 to 1977 and for a third time after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992.
Also read: Harsh Mander: Allowing bureaucrats to join the RSS marks the final burial of India’s ‘steel frame’
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