After 49 ex-IAS, over 600 academicians write open letter to PM Modi on rapes

NEW DELHI: Expressing solidarity with the 49 former civil servants, more than 600 academics including 200 teachers and scholars from India and across the globe have written an open letter on Kathua, Unnao rape cases.

The letter has been signed by 637 academics at universities in India, United States, United Kingdom, Switzerland, UAE, Ireland, Canada and Australia and a few other nations.

“We send you this letter… so that we are not guilty of silence; and so that callousness and cowardice might finally draw the line at the broken body of a little girl and the rape of a young woman”, said the strongly-worded letter.

“Over the efforts of those administering the relevant states to protect the alleged perpetrators of these monstrous crimes; over the subsequent profoundly distasteful efforts of rationalization and the deflection and diversion that have been so much in evidence in the reactions of your party’s spokespersons in the media,” the letter read.

The academicians also said the PM broke his ‘prolonged silence’ with “wholly inadequate, platitudinous, and non-specific assurances of justice for the victims.”

The academicians further said, “Kathua and Unnao are not isolated incidents. They are part of a pattern of repeated targeted attacks on minority religious communities, Dalits, tribals and women, in which rape and lynching have been employed as instruments of violence by gau rakshaks and others, in a sequence of events spread across Dadri in Uttar Pradesh (2015), Udhampur in Jammu and Kashmir (2015), Bijapur and Sukma in Chhattisgarh (2015-16), Harda in Madhya Pradesh (2016), Latehar in Jharkand (2016), Una in Gujarat (2016), Rohtak in Haryana (2017), Delhi (2017), Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh (2017), and now Jammu and Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh (2018).

The letter noted that, “Many of these events have occurred in States with BJP Governments, and all of them after the BJP assumed power at the Centre. This is not to associate violence exclusively with your party and with State governments presided over by your party. But there is an undeniable association with the ruling dispensation.

“We send you this letter because it is our duty to do so; so that we are not guilty of silence; and so that callousness and cowardice might finally draw the line at the broken body of a little girl and the rape of a young woman,” the letter concluded.