Modi government act equated with emergency

Chennai: The present ban on IIT-Madras’ Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle group is an assault on social justice, charged Justice K. Chandru. Speaking at a gathering of eminent Chennaiites, who had come together to express their concern on the Narendra Modi-led government’s “attempts at silencing civil society organisations”, including Greenpeace, he highlighted the IIT-M study circle issue.

Justice Chandru said it was only through the Mandal commission that the demand for reservation for IITs and higher technical centres arose. The Constitution was amended and, accordingly, the 2005 Act came up. “There is a sizeable representation of backward class and SCs in IIT now. Therefore, there is also an ideological debate about concretising social justice ideas. The result was Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle. Now, the government wants to suppress it. They think reservation is only a token representation,” he said.

He added that the demand for such groups arose to strengthen their ideological base and further social justice ideas. Therefore, the present ban is an assault on social justice, he stressed. Former bureaucrat M.G. Devasahayam, who was the district magistrate of Chandigarh when Emergency was declared and was with Jayaprakash Narain, compared the Modi government’s act to the Emergency.

He said we are commemorating the 40th year of Emergency. When the Emergency was declared in 1975, strict censorship was brought in, law was invoked, and censorship offices were appointed. But, in the Modi regime, everything is done in a sinister and informal manner. He further said from the start, the Modi government had not been in favour of NGOs. “As per minimum government and maximum governance and inclusive governance, as propagated by Modi, it should include Modi team, government, civil society, industry and everything taken together. But if there is no freedom of expression, it won’t lead to any kind of development,” he pointed out.

Eminent writer and social activist Gnani Sankaran said people’s issues like methane extraction in the delta region and Kudankulam nuclear issue are taken up by voluntary organisations and social movements. These issues should have been taken up by the government, but political parties only do lip service to the issues, he said.

“We are opposing this because the real hidden agenda of the Modi government is to prevent people from becoming more and more aware, empowered and curb civil society organisations and stifle the mobilisation of such organisations which speak of the inconvenient truth,” he added.