New Delhi: Six years after quitting the civil service as a result of his disillusionment with the abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and the crackdown on civil liberties thereafter, former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Kannan Gopinathan embarked on a new journey: politics.
“I had left the IAS six years ago because I felt that while being in service, I could not speak up against the shrinking of fundamental rights of citizens,” Gopinathan told ThePrint, hours after he joined the Congress party in the capital. “This government was bullying people on basic rights of citizenship, and as an appeal to my conscience, I had left the service.”
“It is very clear to me that there cannot be two kinds of citizenship, there cannot be citizens without freedoms, and the burden of citizenship cannot be on people,” he said, referring to the Citizenship Amendment Act passed by Parliament under the Modi government in December 2019.
The path for Gopinathan in the aftermath of his resignation from the IAS was fraught with troubles, trolling and harassment.
“I had a very conventional idea of life—I did my engineering, had a job, joined the IAS, got married, etc., so I had not really planned for this,” he said. “I spent the first few months after resigning in building a movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) because the journey of Indians from being subjects to citizens has been very close to me.”
“This government began to bully people on something as fundamental as citizenship, and that is not acceptable in a democracy.”
In a democracy, citizens and voters choose the government, and not the other way round. “And what is even the government? At the ground level, it boils down to a patwari or a tehsildar being convinced whether a person is an Indian or not,” the 39-year-old said. “This cannot be allowed in a democracy.”
As he began to increasingly feel that the Congress party stands in defense of these rights, especially with Rahul Gandhi at the helm of affairs, Gopinathan eventually decided to join the party.
“It was a culmination of six years of introspection and deliberation for me to join the Congress,” the Kerala resident said.
“It was a question of one, deciding if joining organised politics would make me lose my voice to save which I had quit the IAS in the first place,” he said. “Two, I had to look closely at the ideals and ideology the Congress has fought for all these decades, and not focus on the exteriority of the party—i.e., whether I like a certain leader, or agree with the party’s stand on one particular issue.”
“Today was a culmination of all that introspection and deliberation,” he asserted.
An AGMUT (Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram and Union Territories) cadre IAS officer of the 2012 Batch, Gopinathan rose to prominence for his relief efforts during the devastating Kerala floods in 2018. However, just a year later, he sprung up a surprise by announcing his resignation when the Union government revoked Article 370, and downgraded the status of J&K from a state to a union territory.
Six years later, the government has still not accepted Gopinathan’s resignation. “The resignations of several officers who resigned after me have been accepted, but the government has still not accepted my resignation,” he said.
This prevented the ex-IAS officer from joining the private sector. “I could not join any company because I never got relieved from the service. So, I could only be a consultant here and there,” he said, adding that this led to financial problems for him and his family.
When Gopinathan quit the service in 2019, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) proposed a departmental inquiry against him two months later on account of “misconduct” and “misbehaviour.”
The allegations included the violation of conduct rules, which prevent an officer from “unauthorisedly communicating with print, electronic and social media on the issues of government policies and such criticism of government policies on his part is capable of embarrassing the relations of the central government with other organisations including foreign state”.
When Covid struck, the government asked him to rejoin the IAS outbreak, failure to do which could invite imprisonment for up to a year or fine.
“The best way to silence an uncomfortable voice is to discredit it, and they did exactly that with me,” he said. “So, they began to cook up stories. It has been six long years, and they have still not accepted my resignation.”
While it was unknown if the government deliberately desired to harass him, the result of their actions amounted to harassment, he said.
Regarding the state of the bureaucracy, Kannan said that officers are used as tools to bully people. “This government has created a binary for civil servants between self-preservation and doing the right thing; so often, people choose the former,” he said. “Especially when they see that the result of doing the right thing is harassment.”
In 2018, Kannan earned accolades for working at relief camps in flood-ravaged Kerala for eight days without identifying himself as an IAS officer.
According to reports, Kannan spent two nights carrying large packages of relief material on his head from trucks in the port city of Kochi. But when he was recognised as an IAS officer, he quietly left the city.
At the time of his resignation, retired IAS officer Anil Swarup took to Twitter to express his disappointment over a young officer’s resignation. “We are all proud of such officers. Kannan won accolades for his work. Why does he choose to resign from a service, the IAS, that offers so much scope to serve the people & derive enormous amount of satisfaction? He himself demonstrated what can be done (sic),” he tweeted.
Days after Kannan’s resignation, Sasikanth Senthil, an officer from the Karnataka cadre, also resigned from the IAS, citing “lack of freedom of expression” under the Modi government. Senthil joined the Congress months later. Last year, he won the Lok Sabha election from Tamil Nadu’s Tiruvallur constituency.
(Edited by Tony Rai)