A senior Indian Administrative Service officer has resigned so he could speak freely about the ‘Emergency’ like situation in Kashmir.
Frustrated IAS from Kerala, Kannan Gopinathan, has resigned from the prestigious service due to the virtual ‘Emergency’ that he says has been imposed on the people of Jammu and Kashmir. He is currently attached to the government of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and sent in his resignation on Wednesday, August 21.
Gopinathan is particularly concerned about the manner in which Shah Faesal, the former IAS topper who resigned from the IAS in January 2019, has been arrested.
“This is not Yemen, this is not the 1970s, that you can deny basic rights to an entire people and nobody will say anything about it,” Gopinathan told The Wire. “It has been 20 days since there has been a lockdown on a whole region with all kinds of restrictions. I cannot remain silent over this even if this means I have to resign from the IAS in order to speak freely and that is what I have done.”
Talking to The Wire, the officer said that though he had been growing disillusioned with the civil service for some time – especially with the politician’s expectation that civil servants only concern themselves with implementing instructions and not bother to analyse what is morally right or wrong – the unacceptable situation in Kashmir had forced his hand. “If I owned a newspaper, my headline tomorrow would just be the word ’20’ because it is the twentieth day that the people of Kashmir have been subjected to these restrictions on their freedoms.”
Indian constitution allows for the imposition of a state of emergency (and the suspension of freedoms) if there is external aggression or armed rebellion, but in Kashmir, people’s freedoms have been curtailed on the grounds that if they are not, then there could be an internal disturbance. In any case, after the 44th amendment to the constitution, an ‘internal disturbance’ is no longer grounds for the imposition of emergency.
When asked by The Wire what his plans are, Gopinathan said, “I have not thought that far. But twenty years from now, if people ask me what I was doing when a virtual Emergency was imposed like this on a part of the country, at least I will be able to say that I resigned from the IAS.”
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