The Constitutional Conduct Group, a group of former civil servants, expressed in an open letter on Thursday “deep disquiet” about how the “Indian state was closely associated” with the inauguration of the Ram temple in Uttar Pradesh’s Ayodhya on January 22.

The Ram temple was inaugurated in a ceremony led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The temple, which is still under construction, is being built on the site of the Babri mosque, which was demolished by Hindutva extremists on December 6, 1992, because they believed that it stood on the spot on which the deity Ram had been born. The incident had triggered communal riots across the country.

On Thursday, the group of 65 former civil servants said that while religion is a private matter according to India’s Constitution and all persons, including public officials, are free to follow their religious beliefs, “it is imperative for public officials to be mindful to carefully separate their religious beliefs and practices from their official duties”.

“This is especially important for a person holding the high constitutional office of prime minister, as the leader not just of people of one religious identity but of all people of India of diverse religious beliefs,” the Constitutional Conduct Group said in an open letter.

This separation between personal religious belief and practice and official duties was breached on January 22 with the prime minister’s presence at the temple’s inauguration, the former bureaucrats alleged.

The former civil servants said that the consecration of the idol of Ram happened at a site where the Supreme Court, while granting the right to construct the temple, had observed in its 2019 judgement that the “‘structure of the [Babri] mosque was brought down in a calculated act of destroying a place of public worship’”.

“Given the troubled history of the last three decades, it would have been in the fitness of things if the consecration of the temple had been undertaken by heads of the Hindu religious faith rather than by a constitutional functionary, which goes against the basic credo of secularism enshrined in the Preamble to the Constitution,” they said.

The Constitutional Conduct Group also said that the developments in the month before and since the temple’s inauguration have been of “even greater concern”, pointing that Maharashtra’s Mira Road, among other places, have witnessed “a wholly unnecessary show of triumphalism by certain elements from the Hindu community leading to reactions from elements from the Muslim community”.

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