Chennai: 31 January would have been the last working day for B. Balamurugan, an Indian Revenue Service (IRS) official from Tamil Nadu who was posted as the deputy commissioner of GST and Central Excise, Chennai (North). But just two days before his retirement, he was placed under suspension by the Union Ministry of Finance.
In its order, the finance ministry said disciplinary proceedings were being “contemplated” against the officer. This came after the civil servant wrote to President Droupadi Murmu on 2 January seeking Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s dismissal and accusing her of converting the Enforcement Directorate (ED) into an “extended arm” of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
In its letter, which ThePrint has seen, the finance ministry said Balamurugan was being placed under suspension with “immediate effect”, but did not cite any reason for the action.
But this wasn’t the first time that Balamurugan, a Dalit officer, has been the subject of disciplinary action. Right from sitting on a hunger strike in 2009 over the issue of the genocide of Tamil people in Sri Lanka, to demanding his transfer from Hindi cell citing Hindi imposition, Balamurugan has often gotten into trouble for going against the “Conduct Rules” prescribed for government servants.
“All my fights so far have been for Tamils, Tamil Nadu, and to a small extent, for the people of India,” Balamurugan told ThePrint. “I’m leaving it up to them to decide on my conduct.”
His colleagues, however, call him a principled man who does things without thinking about the consequences. “He is an honest man of integrity. He has foregone his benefits. Had he compromised he would have got his retirement money. He follows his heart,” E. Ramesh, an advocate and former assistant commissioner with the GST service tax department, told ThePrint.
Also Read: Sri Lanka can’t move on from civil war history. Sinhala elite insecure about sharing power
Letter to President Droupadi Murmu
Balamurugan’s letter to the President on 2 January pertained to the money laundering case against two Dalit farmers in Tamil Nadu’s Attur. The two farmers, brothers Kannaiyan, 72, and Krishnan, 67, were summoned by ED under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, in July 2023.
The summons, which surfaced on social media, drew widespread outrage.
According to media reports, the two Dalit farmers jointly owned 6.5 acres of agricultural land, had Rs 450 in their bank account, and were dependent on an old-age pension of Rs 1,000 and government-provided ration.
The ED’s summons, according to these reports, was based on a 2017 FIR, which accused the two brothers of setting up unauthorised electric fencing around their farm, resulting in the electrocution of two Indian bison, and came despite a trial court acquitting them both in the case on 28 December, 2021.
In January 2024, the ED dropped its case against the farmers.
In his letter, Balamurugan — whose wife G. Pravina, also a Dalit, was the lawyer for the two farmers — said that they had been engaged in a land dispute with G. Gunashekar, the BJP’s Salem east district secretary, for the past four years.
The summons, it said, “shows how the Enforcement Directorate has become an extended arm of BJP. In fact the Finance Minister Mrs. Nirmala Sitaraman, after taking over the charge of Finance Minister has successfully converted the Enforcement Directorate into BJP policy Enforcement Directorate”.
When asked about it, Balamurugan said the plight of the farmers was something that he could relate to — for two years after completing his college degree in 1985, he too pursued farming in his village, he told ThePrint.
But he believes there’s also another issue that could have triggered his suspension — his insistence on working on 22 January, the day that the Ram Lalla idol was consecrated in Ayodhya.
There was an order that all central government offices would remain closed until 2.30 pm but the officer wrote to Sitharaman and the Union revenue secretary that he wanted to work. On his request, the GST office in Chennai kept working that day, he said.
“Had they declared a leave it would have been okay, but here they wanted us to be closed for half a day to celebrate the temple consecration. The Ram temple issue is a sensitive matter. There are Muslim officers who are working with us. Why do you expect or pressure or force a Muslim officer to celebrate the function?” he says, adding: “They were more disturbed by my insistence on working during the Ram Mandir consecration ceremony.”
Also Read: 200 yrs of Indian Tamils in Sri Lanka: Sitharaman & Tharoor to attend event marking painful history
From the Sri Lankan issue to demand for PM Modi’s dismissal
In 2009, the Sri Lanka civil war was at its peak, with the country’s Sinhala government sweeping the state’s Tamil-dominated northern areas in an attempt to flush out the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an insurgent group fighting for a separate Tamil country. According to UN estimates, 100,000 civilians, many of them ethnic Tamils, were killed in the war.
Balamurugan, then an assistant commissioner of Customs in Mumbai, began a fast unto death for the Sri Lankan Tamil cause. In his memorandum to Sonia Gandhi, the chairperson of the then-ruling Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), he sought India’s immediate intervention.
Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi — Sonia’s late husband who was assassinated by the LTTE in a suicide bombing in 1991 — had made a mistake when he signed the 1987 Indo-Sri Lankan Accord promising the Indian Peace Keeping Force to Sri Lanka, his memorandum said.
“Rajiv Gandhi also made a public statement that a separate Elam was impossible as such a division would in future pave the way for a separation of Tamil Nadu from India,” the memorandum said, according to a report in the New Indian Express. “As a Tamilian, I feel guilty about the Rajiv Gandhi assassination. Now as an Indian, I feel guilty that we could not do anything to save thousands of lives in Sri Lanka.”
In 2014, the IRS officer demanded a detailed inquiry into the “genocide of Tamils” during the civil war.
“I took a padayatra from 8 April, 2014, to 17 May, 2014 from Chennai to Kanyakumari, demanding a UN-monitored inquiry into the genocide,” he said.
Soon after this ended, he once again hit the streets — this time against the then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, who was being sworn in as prime minister.
He objected to Modi’s ascension on two grounds, he said. First was the invitation given to Mahinda Rajapaksa, the Sri Lankan politician who had been president of the country from 2005 to 2015 and who had overseen the military action during the final — and often considered the most brutal — stage of the civil war in 2009.
The second reason, he says, was the 2002 Gujarat riots in which, according to official estimates, 1,000 people — a majority of them Muslims — were killed. Modi was the chief minister of the state at that time.
“Although the Prime Minister came to power by democratic means, in his regime as CM of Gujarat, thousands of minority people were killed in Godhra riots. He should have taken moral responsibility for that and should have resigned,” Balamurugan said.
Following his protest, Balamurugan was detained and even booked, he said. It’s unclear what happened to this case.
From 2014 to 2016, Balamurugan went through a series of disciplinary actions and punishments that involved him being denied his promotions and increments, he said.
In 2020, he made headlines once again for objecting to “Hindi imposition” when he was posted to the Hindi cell of the GST Chennai Outer Commissionerate despite not knowing the language. In a letter to the Central Board of Indirect Tax and Customs (CBIC), he wrote: “It is my humble opinion that the officer posted in Hindi Cell should know (how) to read and write Hindi and also express his willingness to work in Hindi Cell before posting in Hindi Cell.”
“I am not against any language,” he told ThePrint now, clarifying his position. “My wife knows Hindi, Sanskrit, and other languages, and I ensured my children studied Hindi when I was posted in Mumbai. I only did not want Hindi being imposed on me.”
His letter seeking dismissal of Sitharaman isn’t the only such letter he’s written to President Murmu — in January 2023, following the mysterious death of Russian billionaire Pavel Antov in Odisha’s Rayagada district, he sought the dismissal of PM Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and Minister for External Affairs S. Jaishankar, for having “permitted international terrorist activities” in India and “infringing the sovereignty of the country”.
Entry into civil services and disciplinary proceedings
When asked what makes him the person he is today, Balamurugan, who hails from the Kandampakkam village in Tamil Nadu’s Villupuram district, said he grew up watching his father Balasubramaniam, a close aide of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K. Kamaraj.
“If there was Kamaraj during my time I would have joined him,” said Balamurugan, who completed his BSc in Chemistry before opting for the civil services in the 90s.
In December 1993, Balamurugan joined the civil services and became a customs appraiser — a Group B officer in charge of the assessment and evaluation of imported goods — and was eventually promoted to the IRS in April 2002.
Since 2009, he has tried to resign from the service five times, he told ThePrint.
“The first time in 2009, there was no reply. Then, in 2014, 2017, 2019, and 2023, the request for voluntary retirement was rejected stating that there are pending cases against me. The aim was to keep me in the service, not allow me to go and not to promote me and, at the end of my service, suspend me or dismiss me and deny all the benefits,” Balamurugan claimed.
In 2021, Balamurugan challenged the disciplinary action against him for his hunger strike in the Sri Lanka issue in the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT), which upheld the action against him.
He appealed this in the Madras High Court, which too rejected his petition saying that rules of conduct forbade government servants from openly expressing support or opposing any government policies. “As a government servant, Balamurugan ought to have restrained himself in expressing his personal opinion,” Madras High Court order reportedly said.
Balamurugan — the officer, activist, and author
The disciplinary actions against Balamurugan have not deterred him from his activism. For instance, in June, when some revenue officials sealed Sri Dharmaraja Draupadi Amman Temple in Villupuram after tensions arose between the dominant Vanniyar caste and Dalits over the latter’s entry into the temple, advocate E. Ramesh, quoted earlier, got a call from Balamurugan.
He wanted to broker peace between the two caste groups, Ramesh told ThePrint.
“The issue in the temple was between the Schedule Caste and the Vanniyars. While Balamurugan belongs to the Schedule Caste, I belong to the Vanniyar community. He requested me to join him in Villupuram,” he said. “With both of us representing the two different communities, he thought that we’ll be able to help the villagers reach a middle ground.” Although the two of them reached the village, they were denied entry because of the prevailing tensions.
On 1 February, Balamurugan was part of a protest against the Indian fertilisers company Coromandel International Limited over an ammonia gas leak from its Ennore plant in December.
Meanwhile, he has also been writing books. His first, called Kadavule Kanden (translation: I have seen God) is about his father’s relationship with Kamraj.
His father had written the outline for the book but died before he could finish, he said.
Balamurugan’s second self-published book titled Oru Maranamum Pala Marmangalum (One Death and Several Mysteries) is about the death of former Tamil Nadu CM J. Jayalalithaa in 2016. Balamurugan and his wife Pravina are among those who had filed a petition in Madras HC to investigate Jayalalithaa’s death in 2020. The case is ongoing.
The latest suspension against him would mean that he wouldn’t be given the gratuity that he’s entitled to and that his provisional pension would be slashed. But he isn’t interested in taking this battle to court.
“If I go to court, another 10-20 years of my life will be spent on this. So, I don’t want to do a legal battle. I want to focus on larger social interest issues,” he told ThePrint.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
Also Read: India-Sri Lanka ferry service brings Tamils closer to Tamils. It’s smart economics too