The National Security advisor Ajit Doval, while addressing the passing out parade of IPS probationers at the National Police Academy  in Hyderabad, recently proclaimed, “The new frontiers of war, what you call the fourth-generation warfare, is the civil society.”

A group of former civil servants of the All India and Central Services on Sunday wrote an open letter to Indian citizens, expressing their concern and criticizing recent statements made by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other high-ranking government officials about the country’s civil society. The open letter signed by 102 former bureaucrats noted that the civil society is being demonized and held in the same category as terrorists and insurgents. Referring to Ajit Doval’s speech, they wrote, “It is pertinent to note that the term ‘fourth-generation warfare’ is normally employed in relation to a conflict where the state is fighting non-state actors, such as terror groups and insurgents. Civil society now finds itself placed in this company. Earlier, the term “Urban Naxal” was being used to denigrate individual human rights activists. Clearly, under the New Doval Doctrine, people like Father Stan Swamy would become the arch enemy of the Indian state and the prime concern and target of its security forces.”

Calling the NSA’s clarion call for an onslaught on civil society, a part of the narrative of hate targeting defenders of Constitutional values and human rights, the signatories, under the Constitutional Conduct Group, ended the open letter hoping that the government will realize the pitfalls of demonising dissent and  trying to suppress civil resistance by brute force.

Copy of the open letter is attached below.

CCG OPEN LETTER TO CITIZENS OF INDIA 

CIVIL SOCIETY: ENEMY OF THE STATE? 

28 November 2021 

Dear fellow citizens, 

We are a group of former civil servants of the All India and Central Services who have  worked with the Central and State Governments in the course of our careers. As a group, we  have no affiliation with any political party but believe in impartiality, neutrality and  commitment to the Constitution of India. 

A disturbing trend in the direction of the country’s governance has become discernible  over the past few years. The foundational values of our republic and the cherished norms of  governance, which we had taken as immutable, have been under the relentless assault of an  arrogant, majoritarian state. The sacrosanct principles of secularism and human rights have  come to acquire a pejorative sense. Civil society activists striving to defend these principles  are subjected to arrest and indefinite detention under draconian laws that blot our statute book.  The establishment does its best to discredit them as anti-national and foreign agents. 

Civil society, a diverse mass of formal and informal groups pursuing their own interests,  occupies the vast democratic space outside of government and business. As the locus of  critique, contestation and negotiation, it is an important stakeholder in governance, as well as  a force multiplier and partner in the project of meeting popular aspirations. But civil society is  viewed through an adversarial prism today. Any entity, which dares to highlight deviations  from the norms of Constitutional conduct, or question the arbitrary exercise of executive  authority, runs the risk of being projected as a foreign agent and enemy of the people. At a  systemic level, the financial viability of civil society organisations is being progressively  undermined by tweaking the legal framework governing foreign contributions, deployment of  corporate social responsibility funds and income tax exemptions.

Our anxiety with regard to the articulation of the state-civil society interface has been  heightened in recent weeks by statements emanating from high dignitaries of the state. On the  occasion of the Foundation Day of the National Human Rights Commission, its Chair, Justice (retd.) Arun Mishra, asserted that India’s creditable record on human rights was being tarnished  at the behest of international forces. The Prime Minister, on his part, discerned a political  agenda in what he felt was selective perception of human rights violation in certain incidents, while overlooking certain others. And quite shockingly, General Bipin Rawat, Chief of  Defence Staff, gave a fillip to the growing menace of vigilantism by endorsing the killing of  persons believed to be terrorists by lynch mobs in Kashmir.  

Taken together, these portents indicate a deliberate strategy to deny civil society the  space and wherewithal for its operation. The contours of this strategy have now been revealed  in the New Doval Doctrine propounded by the National Security Adviser (NSA).  

Reviewing the passing out parade of IPS probationers at the National Police Academy  in Hyderabad, Shri Ajit Doval proclaimed:  

“The new frontiers of war, what you call the fourth- generation warfare, is the civil society.  Wars have ceased to become an effective instrument for achieving political or military  objectives. They are too expensive and unaffordable and, at the same time, there is uncertainty  about their outcome. But it is the civil society that can be subverted, that can be suborned, that  can be divided, that can be manipulated to hurt the interests of a nation. You are there to see  that they stand fully protected.” 

Instead of exhorting the IPS probationers to abide by the values enshrined in the  Constitution to which they had sworn allegiance, the NSA stressed the primacy of the  representatives of the people, and the laws framed by them. 

It would be pertinent to recall here that the term “fourth-generation warfare” is normally  employed in relation to a conflict where the state is fighting non-state actors, such as terror  groups and insurgents. Civil society now finds itself placed in this company. Earlier, the term  “Urban Naxal” was being used to denigrate individual human rights activists. Clearly, under  the New Doval Doctrine, people like Father Stan Swamy would become the arch enemy of the  Indian state and the prime concern and target of its security forces. 

The NSA’s clarion call for an onslaught on a demonised civil society is of a piece with  the narrative of hate targeting defenders of Constitutional values and human rights that is  regularly purveyed by the high and mighty in the establishment.  

The defining traits of the current dispensation are hubris and an utter disregard of  democratic norms. These were manifest in the steamrolling of a discriminatory Citizenship (Amendment) Act through Parliament, its linkage with the National Register of Citizens, and  the ruthless suppression of the spontaneous protests that erupted in various parts of the country.

The same traits were in evidence in the enactment of a set of three farm laws without  public debate, stakeholder consultations or endorsement by alliance partners, and the high handed treatment accorded to the agitated farmers encamped at the gates of Delhi. Their heroic  resistance over fourteen months elicited the choicest of epithets from the establishment.  Dubbed variously as “Andolanjeevis” (professional agitators), “Left-wing extremists” and  “Khalistanis”, they were accused of working at the behest of “Foreign Destructive Ideology”,  in a bizarre word-play with the acronym FDI referring to Foreign Direct Investment. Electoral  compulsions might have led the Prime Minister to announce the decision to repeal the hated  laws, but the damage done to the nation’s polity and social fabric will be hard to repair. 

Let us hope that the government will realize the pitfalls of demonising dissent and  trying to suppress civil resistance by brute force. It is also hoped that the alumni of the National  Police Academy, or indeed our security forces in general, will not be swayed by the NSA’s  rhetoric and remember that their primary duty is to uphold Constitutional values, which  override the will of the political executive. Even the laws framed by the legislatures have to be  tested on the touchstone of constitutionality and accepted by the people. If this fundamental  principle is not accepted, we may turn to the well-known satirical poem “The Solution”, written  in a different context by the famous German playwright Bertolt Brecht, which concludes with the following words: 

Would it not in that case be simpler 

for the government 

To dissolve the people 

And elect another? 

SATYAMEVA JAYATE 

(102 signatories, at pages 4-8 below)

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