'By tolerating injustice you are supporting it' Harsh Mander, IAS officer

Harsh Mander is an IAS officer of the 1980 batch who recently shot into fame when he resigned from the services after expressing his disgust with the Gujarat carnage. But since going public about what he felt then, Mander, currently working for a NGO, ActionAid, India, has avoided media glare.

Mander told Deccan Chronicle that what has happened in Gujarat is a trend that has developed over the last 20 years and could erupt anywhere given the facilitating environment.

Excerpts of the interview

Having been part of the bureaucracy not so long ago, can you comment on how the Gujarat bureaucracy and police conducted themselves during the carnage?

The Bureaucracy and the Police have very clearly defined roles, partly in law, partly in practice. But the underlying principle in all these is that the State must use minimum necessary force to control public disorder. But for communal or sectarian violence, the principle has been turned on its head.

Instead of minimum force, maximum possible force, mustered in the shortest amount of time needs to be applied. Because every minute's delay leads to the targeting of largely innocent people. Equally important is that the poison of sectarian hatred spreads very fast both across space and time.

For instance in this case too it did attempt to spread to other states like Rajasthan or Maharashtra. There is also this danger of it travelling across time because the poison of hatred is something we could carry with us for generations.

Therefore it is the utmost duty of all the State authorities to do all that they can to control sectarian violence within the minimum possible time.

What happened was totally contrary. I think 1984 was the turning point when this principle was reversed and the riots that followed in 1989 and 1992 demonstrated further decline in standards set for the bureaucracy.

But this carnage showed complete abdication of responsibility by the bureaucracy. When any citizen engages in sectarian violence, it is a very serious crime.

But when the authority whose raison d'etre is to protect innocent lives, commits a crime, then that becomes a crime of a completely different order.

Besides the less dramatic but equally serious failure has been the total lack of involvement of State authority in the process of relief and rehabilitation which is unprecedented.

Would you say the bureaucrats were in complicity or were they mere mute spectators?

There is a very thin line between fear as a reason and fear as an alibi - that you did not perform because you were really frightened or you did not perform because actually some part of you believed in it. But I would say that there is so little justification to say that you were frightened.

Having served the bureaucracy for nearly two decades I know you are given so much legal protection and statutory protection, that if you stand up, all they can do to you is transfer you out.

But in the face of reports that two ministers sat in the Police Control room on the first day of the carnage, that armed mobs were seen emerging from the houses of some other ministers, could a police constable or even an SP resist such pressures?

I wouldn't say that about a constable, though there are some who have stood up even in this situation. But certainly the leadership of the Police and the civil services had the legal authority and moral duty. If you say that it is natural for one to be frightened of fighting on the front, I would say please choose a different profession , don't be a soldier.

What about reports that a lot of Gujarat bureaucrats are either going on leave or seeking postings outside the State.

I don't belong to the Gujarat cadre so I would not have inside knowledge of it. I can only comment as a distant observer. And I find it sad that officers want to leave. I can understand the pressures are difficult to deal with. But once again I would like to reiterate that this is the real test for which you are given all the power.

We can't partake of the advantages of the posts and abandon them when things get hot. Though I can understand the feeling of alienation and isolation of honest officers, they must also act collectively with mutual support and stand up to it.

If they give in so meekly even on questions of holding their meetings they don't have anyone to blame for that.

Is it some silent complicity or fear that is the cause?

Maybe I am an optimist. But I feel that a large majority of people feel it is enough to be passively good in your own private sphere. 'I am not bigoted, I don't practice casteism. I am not communal in my personal life. I pay my taxes. I stop at the red light. That's enough. But it isn't enough. The whole point I am making is that tolerating injustice around you is actually taking sides with that injustice.

Before you there were others like G R Khairnar, Arun Bhatia who opted out or attempted to opt out. Why do people like you have to opt out?

I think that apart from the people you have described, the real heroes in the services are those who have done really remarkable work, stood up for justice, stood up against corruption but kept a low profile.

Even in the darkness of Gujarat you have had some very fine young officers specially in the Police who have stood up courageously and acted.

For instance Baroda rural SP, Kesho, and Bhavnagar SP, Rahul Sharma. So there is space to stand up and be counted. I served more than 21 years. I don't think that even for a day I did anything my conscience told me not to do.

Over the years unfortunately there has developed some value to some postings and less value to the others. You might be getting the same salary, have the same official level but people want to be in influential positions. They don't want to let go of that.

You are working with ActionAid on the Aman Samudaya project to provide relief to the victims in Gujarat. You have spoken that the chasm between the victims and the rest of the population in Ahmedabad has grown so wide that the plight of these people does not seem to affect the day-to-day functioning in the state.

I think events in Gujarat are actually holding up a mirror to us as a society and as a polity and as human beings. And it has shown that we have such a capacity to indulge in such brutality. Sadly despite ample evidence of this now, there is almost no remorse in the society.

Instead you have the Lawyers Association saying they would not plead for Muslim clients, businessmen saying they will not trade with Muslims and all kinds of outrageous things.

The word that you keep hearing everyday in Ahmedabad is 'boarda' (border), this divide. They keep talking of this border within the city itself and it seems to have fairly wide support in the middle class and even the working classes.

Trade unions, NGOs and most of the leading players did not either try to stop the carnage or even help in terms of relief. I must say these are really, really worrying trends and what I would like to say very strongly is that I am not sure this is not peculiar to Gujarat alone.

I think something has happened to our society over the last 10, 15, 20 years which could happen elsewhere also if a certain facilitating environment is created. In India the large majority still remains humane, tolerant, secular, but passively so.

And the minority of various religions believing in the ideology of hatred are the ones who are active and organised and they are carrying the day and unless we recognise this and wake up, our society is going to be so fundamentally transformed that there will be no going back.