The recent statement by Rahul Bajaj, one of India’s senior industrialists and chairman of the Bajaj Group, has blown the lid off something that most of the establishment was prepared to talk about only in whispers. At the Economic Times Awards event on 30 November where three Union ministers, including the formidable Home Minister Amit Shah, were present, Bajaj spoke about an atmosphere of fear in India and questioned the willingness of the Narendra Modi government to accept any form of criticism.
“This atmosphere (of fear), this is definitely on our mind, but nobody will say it, none of my industrialist friends,” Rahul Bajaj said. “In UPA-II, we could give gaalis to anyone. (But) if we were to criticise you openly, we don’t have the confidence that you will appreciate that.”
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Sincere voices have raised concerns
Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, too, had voiced similar concerns regarding the “palpable climate of fear in our society today”, the “perilous state of fear, distrust and lack of confidence among citizens” and how it was adversely affecting business optimism and investor confidence.
As Manmohan Singh explained it, “The Modi government seems to view everything and everyone through a tainted prism of suspicion and distrust due to which every policy of previous governments are presumed to be of bad intent, every loan sanctioned considered undeserving and every new industrial project deemed to be crony in nature.”
“Many industrialists tell me that they live in fear of harassment by government authorities. Bankers are reluctant to make new loans, for fear of retribution. Entrepreneurs are hesitant to put up fresh projects, for fear of failure attributed to ulterior motives. Technology start-ups, an important new engine of economic growth and jobs, seem to live under a shadow of constant surveillance and deep suspicion. Policymakers in government and other institutions are scared to speak the truth or engage in intellectually honest policy discussions,” he said.
If this was the analysis of a respected economist and politician, Bajaj’s comments underscored them from within the business community.
Biocon chief Kiran Mazumdar Shaw echoed Bajaj, tweeting that the government was treating the business community as pariahs – what Singh called “the Modi government’s ‘mala fide unless proven otherwise’ doctrine of governance”.
Businessmen tell you in hushed whispers of an atmosphere in which suspicion is rife and criticism is severely punished. The Modi government resorts to filing cases against critics, often involving trumped-up charges, ‘tax terrorism’ backed up by midnight raids by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) or by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and even jailing people without trial.
The media is similarly intimidated. Editors have been removed after a phone call to their proprietors, who often have other business interests that make them vulnerable. Running afoul of the Modi government comes at a very high price financially, in lost jobs, stained reputations, personal stress and wasted time. Most people are cowed into silence.
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Fear is tangible in New India
I have written in my book The Paradoxical Prime Minister of the ugly distortion of the Indian idea that is rising, an India where narrow-minded majoritarianism prevails, an India where incidents of communal violence proliferate, driven by mob-lynching zealots and gau rakshaks (cow vigilantes).
In the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s New India, “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” and “Jai Shri Ram” have become rallying cries of bigotry and hatred rather than beautiful slogans calling Indians to higher ideals. Human beings have been assaulted and killed in the name of cow protection. Muslims and Dalits have been particularly victimised: the father of an Air Force officer (Mohammad Akhlaq), a 15-year-old boy returning from Eid shopping (Junaid Khan), a dairy farmer transporting cows with a permit (Pehlu Khan), Dalits doing their job of skinning a dead cow (Una flogging), have all been casualties of this New India. In fact, as the scholar Pratap Bhanu Mehta fittingly asked: “How did this fantasy of hope, painted in the colours of a nation marching to one tune and one purpose, completely blanket out the actual republic of fear?”
If this ‘republic of fear’ was emerging in the first term of the BJP, it has become a tangible reality in a few months of its second term, as the people of Jammu and Kashmir have experienced for over a hundred days now. How else does one categorise the experience of eight million of our fellow citizens, who overnight found their state under clampdown, their petrol pumps and kirana shops shut, their access to basic utilities like electricity, telecommunications and the Internet blocked, their political leaders incarcerated, and any chance of return to normalcy in the Valley almost certainly eviscerated by a single act of the present ruling dispensation? By doing what it has done, the Modi government has dismembered the historical freedoms that India that was born with on 15 August 1947 – the India that Jammu and Kashmir freely chose to join.
Under the Modi government, dissent is portrayed as seditious, protests are ‘anti-national’, activists are harassed, and free speech is censored through economic pressure on media owners and outright political intimidation — all of which are illustrations of the petty intolerance and chauvinism that passes as the majoritarian ideology in today’s times. The “republic of fear” cannot prosper: as former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh argued, “a toxic combination of deep distrust, pervasive fear and a sense of hopelessness in our society is stifling economic activity, and hence, economic growth”.
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Like most democrats, I want a New India too. It should be a New India where you won’t get lynched for the food you eat, marginalised for the faith you hold dear, criminalised for the person you love, mistrusted for the business you run or prosecuted and imprisoned for making use of fundamental rights guaranteed by your own Constitution. An India in which Rahul Bajaj and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw are free to invest, to succeed or to fail, and to speak fearlessly to the government while they do so. This was the India we had until 2014, and we must work to bring it back – lest Orwell’s 1984 become our new reality, starting thirty years after that date.
The author is a Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram and former MoS for External Affairs and HRD. He served the UN as an administrator and peacekeeper for three decades. He studied History at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University and International Relations at Tufts University. Tharoor has authored 18 books, both fiction and non-fiction; his most recent book is The Paradoxical Prime Minister. Follow him on Twitter @ShashiTharoor. Views are personal.