the goan I network
PANAJI
Former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Kannan Gopinathan is set to give a lecture at a public meeting at Caritas Holiday Home, in St Inez today from 11 am to 1 pm on the dangers of arbitrary and discretionary powers inherent in the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the National Population Register (NPR).
The lecture is hosted by the Goa Alliance Against CAA-NRC-NPR and will be followed by a question and answer session.
Gopinathan, 34, passed out of the 2012 IAS batch, but quit the IAS as a sign of protest when the Centre abrogated Section 370 in Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019. His posting at the time was in Dadra and Nagar Haveli, in the Union Territory of Daman and Diu. Gopinathan belonged to the Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram-UTs (AGMUT) cadre and hails from Kottayam in Kerala.
Gopinathan quit the service because he felt that “while it was okay for the government to take a decision, the way in which we have curbed the freedom of expression of the people was affecting me.”
Since he quit, he has been extremely vocal against the CAA-NRC-NPR, and joined in at several protests across the country.
Earlier this month, Gopinathan was detained twice at Uttar Pradesh by the police. Once at the Allahabad airport where he was going to participate in an anti-CAA protest, and a second time around 10 days ago when he was headed to join protests alongside students of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU).
Meanwhile, one of the organisers of today’s talk told “The Goan” that Gopinathan is in Goa in transit, and will be headed soon after to an undisclosed location.
Gopinathan has also been very vocal on Twitter in his criticism against the government’s recent decisions.
