A group of 637 academics from India and rest of world have come out in solidarity with the 49 retired civil servants who recently expressed their outrage at the two high-profile rape incidents, blaming the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for belatedly speaking up on the issue, reports The Times of India.
The retired officials claimed that Narendra Modi’s government wasn’t doing enough to stop the “pattern of repeated targeted attacks on minority religious communities, Dalits, tribals and women.”
In an open letter to Modi, noted personalities like Noam Chomsky and Amit Chaudhuri, said they were expressing their “deep anger and anguish” over the events in Kathua and Unnao and the aftermath of these events, including the PM’s “own prolonged (and by now familiar) silence that was broken only recently with wholly inadequate, platitudinous, and non-specific assurances of justice for the victims.”
Earlier last week, Modi had condemned the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua in Jammu & Kashmir, and the alleged rape of a teenager by his party’s Uttar Pradesh legislator in Unnao, and said the culprits will be brought to justice. During his recent visit to London, he insisted that rapes should not be politicized.
Citing several examples of mob attacks and lynchings, the letter reads: “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.”
It ends by saying, “We send you this letter because it is our duty, so that we are not guilty of silence, and so that callousness and cowardice might draw the line at the broken body of a little girl and the rape of a young woman.”
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
