Constitutional neutrality, or forced invisibility?
On September 13, an Indian Police Service officer posted a video for a set of nervous, hopeful strangers’ young men and women across the country preparing for the Union Public Service Commission examination, the narrowest filter in Indian public life. She told them, briefly, how she had gotten there herself: a life in Saudi Arabia, a doctorate in management studies, two children, a decision to come home and try. She opened with “Assalamualaikum.” She used “Inshallah” once, in passing, the way people do. She closed with “Jazakallah.”
Within a day, that video had acquired a name that had nothing to do with her career: “UPSC Jihad.” Within two days, an account and self-described group calling itself Hindu Legal Fund said it had written to the West Bengal home secretary, arguing that an officer representing the Indian state ought to speak in the vocabulary of the nation Jai Hind, Vande Mataram rather than that of her own faith. Within three days, Dr Bushra Bano, until then Additional Superintendent of Police in Kharagpur, had been posted out as Deputy Commandant of the State Armed Police’s 4th Battalion.
Something in that sequence should make us pause, whatever we eventually conclude about it. Not because a transfer order is unusual IPS officers are moved constantly, sometimes for reasons no more dramatic than a vacancy elsewhere but because of what it takes for a greeting to become the subject of correspondence with a home secretary in the first place. What has to be true of a country for “Assalamualaikum,” spoken by a police officer describing her own life, to register as a governance problem?
Let’s be careful here, because the facts deserve more care than the headlines have given them. The government’s own order did not name the video or the complaint. Two other officers were moved in the same order, and the state described the exercise as a routine, public-interest reshuffle. It remains entirely possible that Bano’s posting had nothing to do with either. A single day’s proximity between a complaint and an order is suggestive. It is not proof. Anyone writing about this honestly has to hold both facts at once: the timing is hard to look past, and the timing alone does not tell us why. What we do know is that it was enough for a Congress MP and Telangana’s minority welfare minister, among others, to publicly ask the state government to explain itself. That, at least, is not speculation.
But something else here does not need a government order to be troubling. The word “jihad” was attached to a woman narrating how a coaching programme at Aligarh Muslim University helped her clear one of India’s hardest examinations, twice. That is not a new coinage. It is the same phrase a television channel used in 2020 for a series the Supreme Court stopped mid-broadcast, after finding that its purpose was to suggest a conspiracy behind the rising number of Muslims in the civil services an “insidious” attempt, the bench said then, to vilify a community. When that language resurfaces around one officer’s video about her own UPSC preparation, it is fair to ask what conversation is actually being continued, six years on.
The complaint itself deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved away. There is a real constitutional instinct buried in the idea that an officer of the state, especially one who carries the coercive power of the police, should not sound like she belongs to one community’s God while exercising it. Articles 15 and 16 exist precisely so a citizen facing a police officer, or applying to become one, never has to wonder whether faith will change how they are treated. If neutrality meant only that conduct visibly free of religious favour the demand would sit comfortably inside the Constitution’s own architecture.
But was that what was actually being asked of her? Or was something else being asked not impartiality in the exercise of power, but the disappearance of an ordinary vocabulary from a personal story? Would this be a story at all if she had wished her viewers a happy Diwali, the way countless officers do in their year-end messages, without anyone writing to a home secretary about it? Critics of the complaint have pointed, online, to officers of other faiths who have worn religious marks or used their own greetings on duty without a home secretary ever hearing about it. I cannot verify each such comparison independently. But the question underneath them is fair: is the standard being applied to everyone, or only to the vocabulary that sounds unfamiliar to the person complaining?
It helps, too, to look at what actually governs an officer’s conduct, rather than what a complaint assumes it says. The All India Services (Conduct) Rules, amended in 2014, do bind every IAS and IPS officer to “political neutrality” a specific and narrower discipline than the word suggests in ordinary speech. It concerns staying out of party politics and campaigning, not the words an officer uses to describe her own upbringing. Nothing in that rule asks an officer to sound like she has no religion. It asks her not to sound like she has a party.
This, in the end, is the real fork in the road, and it is worth naming plainly. Neutrality can mean that the state acts without bias toward or against any faith. Or it can quietly come to mean that anyone visibly marked by a minority faith must scrub that mark from her own speech merely to be allowed to represent the state at all. The first is a discipline the Constitution genuinely asks of government. The second is not neutrality. It is invisibility, unevenly enforced, and mistaken for a virtue.
The Constitution’s own answer, if we look for it, is not that citizens must become indistinguishable from one another to be equal before the state. Secularism, as the Supreme Court has described it across decades of basic-structure jurisprudence, was always meant to describe the state’s posture equal distance from every religion not a demand that citizens, or the people who serve the state, quietly retire theirs. Article 25 protects the freedom to profess a faith. Nobody has ever read that to mean only in rooms the state cannot see.
None of this happens in a vacuum, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. West Bengal, this year, got its first Bharatiya Janata Party government, sworn in only months before this episode. That fact does not tell us why Bano was transferred. It tells us why so many people, watching the timing, reached for an explanation before the government offered one of its own and why an unexplained order, even a procedurally ordinary one, lands differently now than it would have a year ago.
Somewhere, a young woman preparing for her own UPSC interview is watching this unfold. She may be wondering, for the first time, whether the words she has used her whole life the ones her grandmother used, the ones her mosque uses, the ones that have cost her nothing among people who already know her could one day be read by a stranger as a loyalty test. That is the real stake sitting underneath the transfer order and the trending hashtag. Not whether one officer keeps her posting in Kharagpur. Whether a democracy that promises equal citizenship regardless of faith can still tell the difference between asking its officers to be impartial, and asking some of them, quietly, to disappear.
The Full Name of the Author is Zahid Reza
