Over 100 retired civil servants and diplomats on Saturday urged the Lok Sabha Speaker to refer the hatespeech complaint against Bhopal MP Pragya Singh Thakur to the House ethics committee, saying the FIR against her for inciting hatred “should be ground enough to take action”.
The group, Constitutional Conduct, whose members include former occupants of some of the central government’s senior-most offices, said it believes that stern action should be taken against the BJP member in keeping with the rules of the Lok Sabha.
“By her incendiary hate speech and her repeated acts of propagating hate, she has forfeited the ethical right to be a member of Parliament,” the group said in an open letter.
The letter refers to a petition to the Speaker circulated by several civil society organisations that called for Pragya’s disqualification as MP for her recent communal utterances at Shivamogga, Karnataka.
These organisations include the Campaign Against Hate Speech, Bahutva Karnataka, All India Lawyers Association for Justice and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (Karnataka).
Constitutional Conduct’s open letter refers to a speech Pragya had delivered at a gathering of the Hindu Jagarana Vedike on December 25, urging members of the majority community to keep their vegetable knives sharpened to protect “their women” and to defend themselves.
“Though Sadhvi Pragya Thakur appears to have cleverly chosen her words to avoid criminal charges being made against her, the disguise is only a thin one. She is obviously fomenting hate against non-Hindu communities, and advocating violence against them,” the open letter said.
“As a society, we seem to have become inured to hate speech against minorities…. A compliant media and systematic distortion of history by people in positions of authority feed this frenzy of communal hate. Regulatory institutions are compromised through inducement or intimidation and oversight institutions of democracy have been suborned.”
The signatories to the letter include former national security adviser Shivshankar Menon, Anand Arni (former special secretary, cabinet secretariat), MohinderpalAulakh (former director-general of police, jails, Punjab), Sharad Behar (former Madhya Pradesh chief secretary), Madhu Bhandari (former ambassador to Poland), and Nitin Desai (former chief economic adviser).
Pragya, an accused in the 2008 blast that killed six people in Malegaon, Maharashtra, has in the past made laudatory comments about Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin NathuramGodse.
BJP-ruled Karnataka’s police registered the latest FIR against her on December 28, only after facing criticism for the delay and for summoning those who had questioned the force’s long inaction.
