Hate, Love and Secularism

In 2016, the Indian Institute of Public Administration cancelled a lecture of the former union home secretary, Madhav Godbole, at the Mantralaya in Mumbai. Those in power were allegedly uncomfortable with a lecture titled, “Is India a Secular Nation?” Godbole is a critic of the declining standard of bureaucracy and the rising tide of intolerance. He had earlier said that once the “steel frame” of the bureaucracy had been reduced to a “plastic frame,” the government had stopped caring for the poor.

More recently, on 4 June 2019, while delivering a lecture in the memory of J B D’souza—a former chief secretary of the Maharashtra government, who lent his name to many causes in support of secularism and good urban governance—Justice Gautam Patel of the Bombay High Court, likened the bureaucrats in Mantralaya with Mephistopheles, the agent of the devil mentioned in several works of fictional literature.