Aruna Roy writes: Civil society is not the enemy:
Aruna Roy deserves credit for giving Doval … and indeed to all of us … a refresher crash course through the above newspaper column on the Constitutional duties and responsibility of civil servants …. But then she conveniently forgets that so-called social activists like her too have constitutional rules they must abide by.
There are so many social-activists in India like her who see civil-society activism as alternative political activism .
Political activism demands taking responsibility for its deeds and their outcomes but civil-society activism often considers itself holier than the Pope .
Civil-society activism — and its legionnaire armies of hundreds of murkily funded NGOs that we all know only too well are established and operating widely in India — would be perfectly legitimate citizen-rights groups indeed going about doing their work if only they did not covertly seek also to dislodge elected political institutions and disrupt popular social processes and mechanism which too all do form part of the same Constitution of India that Ms. Roy goes about championing.
Not so long ago Anna Hazare and his motley tribe (of which Ms Roy herself was a member), we know, threatened to gherao Parliament if it did not do his bidding and, in fact, paralysed the Parliament of India for several months while camping on the streets of India and commandeering them. Was that threat constitutional?
Social-activists gathered inside the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus to protest against the abrogation of Article 370 and 35A in Kashmir. They sang slogans for Azad Kashmir and against the Indian nation. Was the “tukde tukde” gang being respectful of the Constitution?
Farming Commission Agents have now been massing and besieging the city of Delhi to press for repeal of Farming Laws which were enacted and voted into law by both Houses of Parliament . Activists like Ms Roy and Mr Yogendra Yadav must tell us whether the “farmers” in driving in thousands of tractors and trailers through Delhi city and in tearing down the Indian flag from the ramparts of the Red Fort and raising the flag of Khalistan there was Constitutional? Was it social activism?
What was wrong then in Ajit Doval warning the new IPS cadre of the “4th generation warfare” that the law enforcement machinery in the country must be prepared for ?
Let me now give the evangelical Ms.Roy a few lessons from the Bible .
“Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye?” (Mathew 7:3) Do not judge, or you will be judged. For with the same judgment you pronounce, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while there is still a beam in your own eye? You hypocrite! First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Luke 6:37–42; Romans 14:1–12)
So please, for the nation’s sake if not God’s, get off your pulpit, stop pontificating to us all, dear Ms Aruna Roy IAS , about the Constitution as if we were sophomore Law School undergraduates. Instead look within at the beam within your own eye before you cast stones against upright civil servants like Doval IPS who work so hard to earn their bread and don’t live off crumbs of it thrown by shadowy donors at activist-NGOs.
Sudarshan Madabushi