My Gujarat peers shamed me so I quit: IAS officer

In a recent article Cry, The Beloved Country: Reflections on the Gujarat Massacre, Mander recalled his walk through the camps of riot survivors in Ahmedabad, noting ‘‘the horrors that they speak of are so macabre that my pen falters in writing…what can you say about a family of 19 being killed by flooding their house with water and then electrocuting them with high-tension electricity.’’

‘‘As one who has served in the IAS for over two decades, I feel great shame at the abdication of duty of my peers in the civil and police administration…the blood of hundreds of innocents are on the hands of the police and civil authorities in Gujarat, and by sharing in a conspiracy of silence on the entire higher bureaucracy of the country…the failure is clearly of the leadership of the police and civil services, not of the subordinate men and women in khaki who are trained to obey their orders,’’ Mander wrote.

From a small band of IAS officers who have struggled to work for the powerless, Mander was also the inspiration for college-mate Shashi Tharoor’s Riot, partly based on a Khargone riot where Mander was DM.

His days at Bunker Roy’s Tilonia school before he joined the IAS saw him help spread the right to information. As a young commissioner in Bilaspur, he held hearings on the public distribution system which got tremendous public support.