Amid slowdown, centre should be open to fresh ideas
Bajaj Group chairman Rahul Bajaj has raised a storm that refuses to die down. Speaking at the awards night event of a media group, Bajaj said despite the government’s good work, “we don’t have the confidence that you will appreciate it if we criticise you openly”. He alluded to a climate of fear that had silenced his ‘industrialist friends’ and spoke up against lynchings and BJP MP Pragya Thakur endorsing the Mahatma’s assassin Nathuram Godse. The fusillade caught the country’s attention since senior ministers of the government—Amit Shah, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal—were on stage to receive the blast. To Shah’s credit, he was conciliatory and said there was no need to fear. If there was a certain kind of atmosphere prevailing, then “we will have to make an effort to improve the atmosphere”, the home minister said.
However, by then the genie was out of the bottle, and Biocon chief Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, too, waded in. “So far we are all pariahs n govt does not want to hear any criticism of our economy,” she tweeted. While initially the home minister tried to soothe frayed nerves, in recent days other ministers have unfortunately hauled Bajaj over the coals. Hardeep Singh Puri reminded Bajaj that democracy was alive and kicking since he had been allowed to protest, and Finance Minister Sitharaman tweeted that such concerns could “hurt national interest”.
These reactions show the concerns expressed by Bajaj have not been well received. This is not the first time captains of industry have voiced their concern about the government turning a deaf ear. Adi Godrej and HDFC chairman Deepak Parikh have also been blunt in the past, and they were not received well. Industrialists are not known to be strident in their concerns, and if these issues are being raised, it shows something is going wrong. In these days when the economy is in the doldrums, it is all the more necessary that the government welcomes fresh ideas to put things back on track.