Explained : An Open Letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi: On Kashmir, Medical Education, and the Peril of Communal Politics and Its Impact

An Open Letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi

The decision to revoke the accreditation of the medical college run by the Shri Vaishnodevi Temple Trust in Katra has deeply hurt me and compelled me to write this open letter. I have been working on Kashmir-related issues for the past fifty years. Such wrong decisions are turning the citizens of Kashmir against India. If you truly care about medical education in India, then if all medical institutions in the country were evaluated against this criterion, more than half of our medical colleges would face revocation.

I am writing this based on my own experience. Therefore, the so-called medical education criterion appears to be merely an excuse. The real issue is that the BJP has been protesting in the Jammu region since 2022 against the merit-based admission of Kashmiri Muslim students to this medical college. The celebrations held in Jammu following this decision reveal its true intent. Sunil Kumar Sharma, a BJP leader in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, has welcomed the decision taken by the National Medical Commission, the body responsible for administering medical education. He then went on to accuse Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah of giving the decision a communal spin. Sharma himself added that wealthy donors to this institution want a Vedic Research Centre to be established there to promote Sanatan Dharma. In his statement, Sharma also acknowledged that the ratio of trained doctors in our country is already alarmingly low in relation to public health in the vision of a developed India. This was brutally exposed five years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of people died, though the government continues to withhold accurate statistics. The deaths were disproportionately among Muslims. Can the discontinuation of medical education and the introduction of Vedic education solve our country’s health crisis?

For the past eleven years, you have forced India’s constitutional investigative bodies to function at your whims, serving a politics of communal polarization. In this context, this decision appears far more political than academic. Replacing medical education with Vedic education—does this represent your idea of making India a world leader?

You have openly sought to break the people of Kashmir by revoking Article 370, denying them a fair price for education, healthcare, trade, business, agriculture, and horticulture, and yet you continue to claim that Kashmir is an integral part of India. Which Kashmir is “ours”? Only the mountains and land that you wish to hand over to your favored industrialists? Our people did not elect you as Prime Minister to jeopardize national security by insulting the ten million Muslims living there at every step, alienating ninety per cent of Kashmir’s population, and subjecting them daily to harassment under the shadow of military guns. During your election campaign, you repeatedly told the people, “Give me a chance, I want to develop India,” and that is why the people entrusted you with leadership through a landslide victory—not to undermine the nation’s security, integrity, and unity in this manner.

Narendra Modi ji, after assuming office as Prime Minister for the first time in 2014, you addressed the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort on 15 August, declaring: “I consider all the people of our country’s 140 crore population as Team India. This 140 crore includes Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Parsis, and secular people like us. To take India forward as a world leader, I must take everyone along.” When Muslims form the second-largest population in India, and Sikhs and Christians the third-largest, how can this be “Team India” if they are subjected to discrimination every day?

After winning the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, you took the oath in accordance with the Constitution, bowing before entering Parliament. Was that merely a ritual? If so, then you are acting against the Constitution. I also wish to remind you that after you were sworn in as Chief Minister of Gujarat in October 2001, the then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, publicly stated in a gathering in Ahmedabad that you had failed to follow your raj dharma because of your role during the post-Godhra riots of February–March 2002. Today, Vajpayee ji is no longer here to remind you of this. Nor do I see anyone else who can.

Therefore, as a 72-year-old citizen who has lived his entire life according to the Indian Constitution, who experienced imprisonment during the Emergency, and who has worked for half a century to preserve the unity and integrity of the country, I feel compelled to write this open letter—to warn against the present undeclared Emergency and the politics of communal polarization. I humbly request that you stop this course of action. Otherwise, we may once again be pushed toward the tragedy of another partition.

Bharat Mata ki Jai.

Dr. Suresh Khairnar is the ex-president of Rashtra Seva Dal