Undermining the independence of democratic and regulatory institutions is one method of attacking the constitutional vision of India. A group of retired bureaucrats, who call themselves the Constitutional Collective, wrote to the president asking her to convey the collective’s concerns regarding the Narendra Modi-led government’s attempts to change the character of the civil services. The collective has protested each time it became obvious that the civil services were being sought to be undermined. This letter described the attempts to change the non-partisan civil services into a force loyal to the Union government only — which is the Bharatiya Janata Party too — instead of to the state governments under which officers were posted. The all-India administrative system is supposed to protect the Constitution; hence civil servants should remain unaffected by political parties and changes. The letter referred to the pressures on officers to show ‘exclusive loyalty’ to the Union government, including penalties for those who refused to comply, together with attempts to change the services’ rules so that Central deputations could override state governments’ wishes. What emerged was the Centre’s efforts to hijack the states’ authority, destroy the civil services’ independence and demolish federalism.

None of this is surprising. It seems only logical that Mr Modi and his party should try to sabotage any institution that protects constitutional principles and federal norms. In 2021, the prime minister directed the services to investigate whether political parties — obviously not his — were misusing public money. Turning the services against other parties as though they were arms of the ruling party was not enough. The national security adviser would like to turn them against citizens — ‘civil society’ — as the site of the ‘fourth generation of warfare’ for they can be ‘manipulated’ to hurt national interest. This shocking statement represented perfectly the BJP’s characteristic of fanning divisions, suspicion and violence. It also recalled police actions in certain states. More alarmingly, the director of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration said that Mr Modi had defined the civil services’ ethos for the first time in 75 years. By writing an open letter to the president, the collective was actually appealing to the people: citizens must protect and strengthen the institutions that can check the dangerous tilt towards a ‘centralised, authoritarian, national security state’. The letter called this ‘frightening’; are citizens frightened enough?