The Indian business community is once again facing a crisis of confidence – in itself and the government. The spate of raids and arrests have shaken the tallest in it as similar actions by the state had shaken them during the emergency. As they see the situation, it is emergency without the declaration of emergency.
There is, of course, an element of exaggeration in this description. For one thing, the whole country is not gripped by fear. For another, the courts function. But for the business community, the scene is not all that different. Official agencies now function in the same way as they did during that period of lawlessness by the state. Hundreds of their functionaries descend on an industrialist in his house, business offices, seize documents, interrogate him and his executives for hours, if not days, and brief the press on the details of charges without giving the victim a chance to say a word in self-defence.
Regardless of whether or not the charges are valid and can stand scrutiny in a court of law, this behaviour is brutal; it is unworthy of a state which regards itself as being civilized and democratic. The intention is not just to detect and punish economic offences; it is to terrorise, and terrorise not only that particular individual, but a whole community.
The Union government, of course, consists of honourable men. There cannot, of course, be the slightest doubt that it is possessed by the noblest of motives – to rid the country of the parallel black-money economy which has for years been threatening to overwhelm the republic. But civilized and democratic states do not resort to terrorism which is precisely what the Indian authorities have been doing under the present dispensation for some months.
They claim that they are acting within the parameters of the laws of the land. The claim is obviously justified. Or else their actions would by now have been challenged in law courts by some daring spirits who might have survived the atmosphere in which they have operated for years. But terror is terror with or without the guise of legality.
Spirit of Law
The so-called laws can be wholly unlawful if they violate the spirit of the concept of rule of law. The Indian laws, which allow scores of men to descend on you at any time of the day or night without a prima facie case being established against you and without your being duly notified, belong to that category of lawless laws.
Terrorists too are often guided, especially in this age of ideology and search for, and assertion of, identity, by the highest of motives. We ourselves have had an experience of them in our own country. We cannot deny that the Sikh extremists have been inspired and continue to be inspired by impersonal considerations of what they regard as good for their community. So intentions should not be quoted in defence of lawless acts.
A civilized state is not a helpless state. It does not sit idly by as its laws are violated on an ever increasing scale. It responds to the challenge in two ways. It strengthens its law enforcement agencies and it modifies, amends and scraps the laws which no longer conform to the spirit and needs of the times. The Indian state has done neither. It has gone piling impractical laws on a heap of impractical laws and its enforcement agencies bear comparison more with the butcher’s hatchet than with the surgeon’s knife. They can kill; they cannot cure. And they have been let loose on an essentially helpless community.
In this age of degraded tastes and mass culture, trial by the press has to an extent become unavoidable. Indira Gandhi bemoaned it when she became a victim of it during the Janata rule, though her own and her son Sanjay’s hatchet men had practiced it during the emergency when charges against individuals were freely advertised on the government-controlled All India Radio and Doordarshan and in the press. On her return to office in 1980 she tried her best to devise a law which could cope with this problem. She did not succeed. She could not succeed. Freedom of the press must involve the risk of trial by the press.
Sober journalists are also helpless. In situations of mass hysteria like the one generated in the so-called spy cases last year, they cannot exercise the necessary restraint even if they know, as we knew last year, that they are being wilfully manipulated by intelligence agencies anxious to wipe out the shame of their own criminal negligence and total failure. For newspaper business in this country of relatively low circulations has also become unhealthily competitive. But government agencies are not normally expected to join this ugly business. When they do, as they are doing now, the inference is obvious. They have an axe to grind. Nothing can be more repugnant to the spirit of the rule of law than such behaviour the part of those who exist to protect and enforce the law.
Corruption issue
Terrorism is a form of primitiveness. As such it cannot be the monopoly of the state. Those who have argued for close to two decades that corruption is the most important issue in the country too have suffered from primitiveness. They too have been guilty of a gross oversimplification of complex issues. Indeed, it can be said that they have created the atmosphere in which the current terrorism by the state has become possible. One kind of self-righteousness promotes and feeds another. In that sense we are all guilty.
A kind of destructive sprit has been abroad in the land at least since the so-called Navnirman agitation exploded in Gujarat in the winter of 1973-74. Since then no one in the land has been tall enough to escape the wildest allegation. Jayaprakash Narayan was accused to being a CIA agent and Indira Gandhi of being privy to the assassination of Lalit Narain Mishra, one of her cabinet colleagues, in the seventies. Things have not changed in the past one year, though gradually the government has managed to seize the offensive. It is conducting a war on its own bureaucracy and the business community in the name of honesty. But India suffers regardless of whether the opposition is on the rampage or the government is on the rampage, as it was during the emergency and as it is now.
JP had to disown his own socialist and Gandhian past when he took up the fight against corruption in public life. For, socialism and Gandhianism were the sources of much of the mischief, socialism because it spawned and legitimized a byzantine regime of controls and regulations which could be negotiated only with a generous supply of grease, and Gandhianism because it laid down standards of public life which, especially in conditions of inflation and rising expectations, could only make hypocrisy a way of life. The present rulers also have had to repudiate their own past to be able to declare war on the bureaucracy and the business community. They do not think they are accountable either for the byzantine controls, or the demand for black money, or for the creation of an atmosphere in which the suppliant civil servant willing to disregard the law alone could prosper. Self-righteousness induced amnesia in the first case and it is doing so in the present case.
Some of this is familiar ground which has been covered in these columns by others. Implicit in what has been written is the assumption that the business community has been a helpless victim of circumstances, that it would have loved to go about its activities in an honest manner if it was not so harassed and constrained, and that the responsibility for the menace of the parallel economy rests essentially with those who have been in command of the state machinery.
Partisan Assumption
This is a partisan assumption. It is the old hen and egg story. It is impossible to say which came first. It is, therefore, futile to engage in such sterile controversies. We have to content ourselves with the known fact of a symbiotic relationship between politics and business and acknowledge the need to break it. So the relevant question is: how best to do so. While some steps have been taken towards that end – liberalisation of controls, reduction in taxation rates and legalisation of company contributions to political parties – some more need to be taken such as amnesty in respect of past offences in return for honest disclosures and repatriation of funds held abroad.
The Indian business community has suffered on yet another count which in a sense is the most fundamental cause of the problems we face. Those in control of the state have at best suffered it because it has performed certain useful tasks which their own bureaucratic apparatus could not have. They have not regarded it as a partner in the common enterprise of building an industrialized, vibrant and prosperous India. This has been true of the men and women in the professions as well. They too have looked down upon businessmen as if the latter belonged to a lesser breed. This has been a perverted expression of the ancient Brahminism which placed businessmen just above the menial class of Sudras. Apparent modernism can be very antediluvian and reactionary. Ours has been aware of it. And the irony of it all is that this perverted Brahmanism has prospered even as money has become more or less the sole criterion for determining a person’s social status. Moral self-righteousness is a variant of the same pull of the past. We must not succumb to it as we try to overcome its other forms.
The Times of India, 16 December 1985