Harsh Mander: Allowing bureaucrats to join the RSS marks the final burial of India’s ‘steel frame’
With its history of stoking communal violence, the Sangh is antithetical to the values of the Constitution, which civil servants swear allegiance to first.
Join our WhatsApp Community to receive travel deals, free stays, and special offers!
- Join Now -
Join our WhatsApp Community to receive travel deals, free stays, and special offers!
- Join Now -
When in 1980, I first walked through the gates of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie, the director who led our initiation into public service was a man of towering moral stature, the legendary PS Appu. My batch-mates in the Indian Administrative Services and I were fortunate that in our months under his tutelage, we were inspired by Nehruvian ideals of secular democracy and Ambedkarite principles of constitutional morality. I have no memory in all of those months of any public display, either among the faculty or my own comrades, of communal or caste prejudice. Those were still times in the journey of the Indian republic when any of this was unthinkable.
It was already a very different India when I returned to Mussoorie 13 years later in 1993, now as a member of the faculty in the National Academy. We learnt there that a year earlier, after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the topper of the earlier batch – an alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology – had organised a massive celebration in the campus of the academy. I was harrowed imagining this officer heading a district in Uttar Pradesh that is charred by a...
