Dear Mr Praful Khoda Patel,

I have been thinking about the human potential for mischief ever since I heard about your exploits in Lakshadweep as administrator of the Union Territory. Now I know that there is actually no limit for a ruler with evil intentions, particularly when he is like the faithful dog in the His Masters’ Voice (HMV) discs and cassettes.

You may or may not realise but you hold a global distinction as the one who introduced Coronavirus to a whole community of people. Those who committed lesser incidents of crime were tried and punished at Nuremberg in the state of Bavaria in Germany.

The archipelago of Lakshadweep was one bright spot in the whole country, nay world, where the virus could not make a foray when millions of people were falling prey to Covid-19 even in developed countries like the US and Italy. It was not because the poor people of Lakshadweep were endowed with any natural abilities to resist Coronavirus.

Rather, it was because the Lakshadweep administration, led by your predecessor, the late Dineshwar Sharma, a former IB chief, was able to enforce the standard operating procedure (SOP) to keep Coronavirus at bay. 

You also knew about the SOP when you were given additional responsibility of Lakshadweep following Sharma’s death on December 4, 2020, but you saw it as an affront.

How could an administrator and his retinue subject themselves to the quarantine rules applicable to ordinary mortals? You violated the SOP with impunity. Worse, you and your entourage visited five islands, more to satisfy your ego than for administrative purposes when work-from-home is the norm, not the exception. Had President Ram Nath Kovind been more responsible, he would have stopped you in your tracks. Alas, that did not happen!

You saw it as a victory and it emboldened you to unleash your deadly plans. At the time of writing this letter, over two dozen residents of Lakshadweep have died of Covid-19 and the pandemic is as bad on the islands as in a place like Delhi.

Unlike the national Capital, Lakshadweep does not have any health infrastructure worth the name. That makes the situation worse. I listened to the district collector, Lakshadweep, S. Asker Ali, claiming on 27th May that the SOP was liberalised as it was adversely affecting the economic growth of the islands.

Pray, what growth was he talking about? The advent of Coronavirus has brought life to a standstill with lockdown conditions prevailing on all the inhabited islands. It seems you and your district collector were eager to impose a lockdown on the UT.

By the way, what is your qualification to be an administrator? Yes, your father was in the RSS and so were you. I also know that Narendra Modi as Chief Minister made you the home minister of Gujarat when Amit Shah had to resign because of his alleged involvement in a fake encounter case. 

It is also well known that the people of your constituency rejected you outright when they got the first chance to do so in 2012. Please remember that you were one of the few sitting MLAs and a minister to boot, who lost the election. It is a measure of your popularity in Gujarat!

However, it was your personal connections with Modi that helped you to get the job of administrator of Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu, usually reserved for serving Indian Administrative Service officers. If Shah’s arrest helped you to become a minister,

Dineshwar Sharma’s death helped you to get Lakshadweep’s charge.

Please don’t think that you are the first Patel the people of Lakshadweep have dealt with. Soon after India became independent, Pakistan sent a naval ship to Lakshadweep to annex it. They thought that the Muslim-majority islanders would support them. 

Home Minister Sardar Patel got wind of the Pak strategy and asked the Travancore ruler to rush his police to Lakshadweep and hoist the tricolour there.

Days later, when the Pakistani ship from Karachi arrived, they found to their surprise the Indian flag fluttering on the island. Word also reached them that the people were happy that Lakshadweep was part of India. They returned disappointed. 

By the way, the people had nothing in common with Pakistan except their religion, while they had everything in common with the people of Kerala, including language, dress, food and culture. Yet, I find it strange that some BJP leaders and their spokespersons in Kerala were casting aspersions on the people of Lakshadweep by mentioning words like AK-47, Jihadi and, above all, terrorist. 

Not one Lakshadweep dweller has been caught for possessing unaccounted money whereas the accusers have been caught carrying Rs 3.40 crore in a car. Worse, they were also found to be hand in glove with criminal gangs which created an accident to take away the money meant for use in the elections in Kerala.

I am sure you know that 90 per cent of the Lakshadweep people are Sunni Muslims. Even your own party, the BJP, has a presence there but not the Muslim League. Please try to find out why neither Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League nor Mr PK Kunjalikutty’s Muslim League is popular on the islands. It would be quite revelatory for you. 

Yes, they are religious, observing all the religious rules. What is wrong with that? The Constitution grants freedom to every citizen.

I understood your priorities when you sought to introduce liquor to the islanders in the name of tourism. You behaved like the British who sought to control the Chinese by making them addicts of opium. If you think liquor is a must for development and tourism, why do you and Modi keep Gujarat a dry state? Once, on a visit to Daman, I saw how Gujaratis visit the UT only to drink and carry home bottles by bribing the policemen.

Lakshadweep is easily one of the most peaceful areas in the country. Rape, murder, theft, robbery, snatching etc seldom happen there. Yet, you thought it necessary to introduce the Prevention of Anti-social Activities Act (PASA), popularly known as the Goonda Act. It empowers you to keep anyone in jail for one year. 

As a politician, you knew that your reforms, comparable in many ways to the Rowlatt Act, introduced by the British, would evoke widespread protest. That is precisely why you thought of the Goonda Act. Needless to say, it has only exposed your way of thinking.

You were born in a Hindu family in Gujarat. If you were born in a Muslim family in Gujarat, you would have been eating meat. So what right do you have to impose your food habits on the islanders? 

Have you not seen Narendra Modi hugging beef eaters like former US President Donald Trump? Have you not seen him entreating beef eaters from the West and West Asia to invest in India? Then, why do you want to impose your food habits on the people of Lakshadweep?

You have withdrawn meat from the mid-day meal served in schools. It is as crazy as Gujarat’s decision to serve only chicken to carnivorous animals like lions and tigers in the zoos there. The BJP is in power in several states in the Northeast where beef is freely available.

In the name of the cow, you have banned meat from all the bovines. Do you expect the islanders to eat only dhokla? Beef is a cheap source of protein. They can’t afford to have the kind of imported mushroom, your leader allegedly consumes to maintain his wheatish complexion.

You are at the mercy of Modi. He can throw you out the moment he feels that you are a liability. You were named in a suicide note left behind by a former MP in his hotel room in Mumbai. I do not know whether the allegation is right or wrong but you are certainly susceptible to interrogation by the police.

You have some “great ideas” of development. Under the “masterplan” you have allegedly prepared, you promise a metro, six-lane highways and airports. You seem to have copy-pasted your plan. The islands are too small to have airports that can bring tourists. And where is the need for a metro? 

If you build an airport that can accommodate Modi’s custom-made  intercontinental Boeing aircraft on any of the islands, the aerodrome will have to be built on barges that call for human ingenuity.

The attraction of Lakshadweep is its natural beauty — the pristine beaches, breathtaking sunrise and sunset and the flora and fauna. The tourists who go to Lakshadweep are fed up with malls where MacDonald burgers and Kentucky Fried Chicken are served.

They would rather have fish, prepared in coconut milk, served with steamed rice noodles or smash tapioca served with roasted beef and sit under an umbrella on the beach than inside an air-conditioned restaurant. That is the attraction of Lakshadweep.

I have not visited Lakshadweep so far. Let the lockdown be over, I will visit the Union Territory. I have seen the Malayalam movie Anarkali, released five years ago. You should see it. It shows how people live on both sides of the roads. If they are widened, it will render many of the people roofless. Do you call it development?

You may acquire, if you have not acquired already, power to declare any land as essential and ask the legal occupants to vacate it. I understand from media reports that you ordered the indigenous people in Dadra to vacate their land in the name of development.

Now a multi-millionaire businessman of Nepal owns the land where he has built tents where tourists can stay at $80-100 a night. Not very far from the place live the original residents of the area in tent-like accommodation. Do you call this progress?

I mentioned to you about the film Anarkali. It also depicts the challenge of shifting a patient, who needs an urgent bypass surgery, from the island to a hospital at Kochi. A helicopter is available to the needy patients.

You have in your abundant wisdom appointed a four-member committee, which will ultimately decide whether the helicopter should be made available to a patient. How will they decide the condition of the patient?

Does Lakshadweep have an adequate Internet facility to allow the four members to see the medical reports on Zoom, consult the doctor attending to the patient before taking a decision? By the time the decision is reached, the patient would have reached where you and I are ultimately destined to reach.

I would be doing a great disservice to history, if I compare your decisions to those taken by Mohammed bin Tughlak. Yes, he made many foolish decisions like shifting the capital. That apart, he was a polyglot, artist, philosopher and philanthropist. He was good at maths, astronomy, calligraphy, Sanskrit and medicine. 

In Lakshadweep, there are not many job opportunities. A government job is considered the ultimate. I do not claim that all the government employees are efficient and hardworking. There are some lazy among them like there are lazy administrators.

There is no harm in evolving a long-term policy under which the work of all such employees is monitored. The efficient among them need to be promoted and the lethargic removed. But your order to summarily evaluate them has rattled all the employees. Power in the hands of the wicked is dangerous!

If efficiency, tact and ability are the yardsticks, how will you continue even for one minute? There are also many other plans under your consideration. One is to allow only those who have a maximum of two children to contest panchayat elections.

If it is necessary to make local self-governments stronger, why are you not barring people with a larger number of children from contesting Assembly and parliamentary elections? If a person with three or more children cannot be a panchayat member, how can he be an MLA or a MP and even become an administrator like you?

A ruler’s primary job is to meet the needs of the people. For that he must love them like M Ramunny, handpicked by Jawaharlal Nehru to administer Lakshadweep. He was a fighter pilot who took part in the Second World War. When he built a house in Kerala, he gave it a Lakshadweep name. If you can’t love them, at least don’t harass them.

Yours etc

ajphilip@gmail.com