Smear campaign against Government, say former diplomats

A group of 32 former senior diplomats has accused Leftists and Maoist sympathisers, backed by some former civil servants and military figures, of "conducting a sustained smear campaign against the present government on presumed violations of the secular ethos of the country".

In an open letter, the diplomats, including former Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal, said, "The smear campaign has taken an increasingly anti-Hindu tenor under the guise of anti-Hindutva. The latter has become a convenient peg for "secular" posturing, adopting virtue-signaling "constitutional" positions, relying on bloated vocabulary of "Nazism" and "genocide" to gather international attraction and leverage it to bring odium to the Modi government."