The Demeaning
Culture of Silence
Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha,
while presenting the Priyadharshini Literary Award to a veteran writer,
educationist and literary critic of Kerala M Leelavathy on January 19, 2026 in
Kochi, recalled her expressing concern about the culture of silence pervading
across the country. He calls the culture
of silence, a culture of cowardice.
What she said was very powerful that made him to
deliver an apt powerful speech at the Maha Panchayat of elected local body representatives:
“The
ideological attack of the BJP and the RSS is designed to create the culture of
silence. They want compliance from the
people of India. They want India where
all the assets and the assets of the people belong to a select few people. And they
know the only way this is possible is if the democratic voice of the Indian
people is silenced. All over the country we see people who think something and
believe something, but have no courage to say it. Great nations are not built in silence. Great
nations, great people are built when they express their views, their opinions,
and fight for their views and opinions. Embedded in the culture of silence is
the idea of greed, that it doesn’t matter as long as I am getting what I need.
I don’t need to say anything, I can watch people being humiliated, people being
murdered, people being killed. As long as I am OK, everything is OK.”
This is the demeaning culture of silence - an
environment where fear, intimidation suppress open communication, forcing
individuals to stay silent about issues, mistakes and misconduct. It is a toxic
atmosphere that involves condescending behaviour, such as talking down to others,
and sarcasm designed to belittle individuals. Fear of consequences makes people
to stay silent avoiding questioning authorities. Leaders who promote sycophancy
create an environment where only ‘yes men’ thrive.
It is important to remind ourselves that if our great
leaders of the freedom movement were cowards and observed the demeaning culture
of silene, India would never have got the independence and we would have continued
to live enslaved lives as the subjects of the imperial British Empire. The Non-Co-operation
Movement, the Poorna Swaraj and the Independence Pledge Resolutions, the Civil
Disobedience Movement and the Quit India Movement of the freedom struggle were
the acts of very brave and courageous leaders, who sacrificed comfort, and
everything, to liberate India.
Narendra Modi is silent on the issues affecting the
world order, interested more in domestic politics, singularly obsessed with how
to win elections to secure and retain power by hook or crook. The Godi media presented
him as ‘Vishwa guru’ before the advent of Donal Trump. Now with Trump bullying
India and the world, the Godi media is silent. Modi is silent on the
developments in Iran. In a shocking development, India has now withdrawn from the
Chabahar Port Project, about which Modi boasted, under the US pressure. India
invested nearly Rs.1100 crore in the Project, which has gone into the drain
overnight.
Singapore’s ex-foreign minister George Yong-Bon Yeo, a
distinguished scholar on diplomacy, says, “Trump is a bully. If you show
weakness, he‘ll be all over you. India cannot afford to look weak. If India
just rolls over, it would lose its prestige and its reputation in the world.” This
is what is happening to Modi’s India, loss of face and credibility in the
community of nations.
Trump wants to annex Greenland at any cost. He
announced imposing tariff on countries trading with Greenland. He announced imposing 10% tariff on eight
European countries – Denmark, Norway, Sweeden, France, Germany, the UK,
Netherlands, and Finland, ‘until total purchase of Greenland’. The European countries reacted to the
blackmailing by Trump. He says since the Noble Prize for Peace was not awarded
to him last year, according to him, in spite of solving some eight
international conflicts, including the Indo-Pak conflict of May 2025, he is now
under no obligation to work for international peace. Yet, in a disgraceful
manner, he accepted the Noble Prize presented to him by Maria Machado, which
she won.
On January 20,
Trump shared a post showing an old photo of himself with European leaders with
an altered US flag depicting Canada, Greenland and Venezuela as part of the US.
In the post, Trump is seen seated inside the Oval Office with Frech President
Marcon, Italian PM Meloni, UK PM Starmer among others. Macron said, Europe
would not give into Trump’s bullying and ‘will not accept the law of the
strongest’. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, he said ‘doing otherwise
would lead to their vassalisation. And we do prefer rule of law to brutality.”
The European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen
pushed back against Trump’s 10% tariff announcement saying, “The EU and the US
have agreed to a trade deal last July. Plunging us into a downward spiral would
only aid the very adversaries we are both so committed to keeping out of the
strategic landscape.” And she vowed EU’s
response “will be unflinching united and proportional.” Flames from Trump’s
inflammatory approach to Europe over Greenland is now spreading to the island
of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, having serious security implications for
India.
In a speech to the World Economic Forum (WEF) on January
21, after prompting days of transatlantic tensions over his plans to annex Greenland,
Trump said he wants immediate talks on Greenland. Give up Greenland or else...Trump tells Europe and NATO: “You
can say yes, and we will be very appreciative, or you can say no, and we will
remember.” The UN chief Antonio Guterres
warned: “When leaders run roughshod over international law, choosing which rules
to follow…they are undermining global order, setting a perilous precedent.“ And
Norway, Germany, Sweden, France and Italy have refused to join Trump’s Board of
Pece for Gaza. The world is heading toward a new flash point. When the top leaders
of some 110 countries were present at the WEF, Narendra Modi chose to skip the Forum meeting.
He is silent on the Greenland issue.
Just as America, under Trump, is unsettled both domestically
and internationally, India too, under Modi, is unsettled at home and abroad. On
the eve of the 76th anniversary of the Republic, India is confronted
with a serious constitutional crisis. The integrity of the very custodian of
democracy, the Election Commission, is questioned. The independence of the EC is
compromised, people losing faith in the electoral process of free and fair
elections, due to its partisan and arbitrary and unilateral functioning.
The SIR exercise is made very complex, leading to
millions of voters disfranchised in every state. Claiming that the SIR has resulted in nearly
30 million people disfranchised in Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Yogi
Adityanath asked his people to enroll 200 new voters in every constituency to
compensate the loss; a bizarre development. The Judiciary is not able to
address the problem satisfactorily. There is no answer to the charge of vote
theft. This is a new scary development in independent India, raising doubt about
the survival of democracy.
And yet, in the face of backlash against the role of
the Election Commission of India (ECI) and its failure to ensure free and fair
elections and safeguard democracy, here comes the news that the ECI is
organizing a three-day international conference on ‘Democracy and Election
Management’ between 21 and 23 January in New Delhi, at a time when the credibility
of the ECI is all-time low. Around 100 delegated from over 70 countries are expected
to participate in the conference. Ironically,
the conference is being organised by the India International Institute of
Democracy and Election Management, a body under the ECI. The ECI is better
advised to set its house right first and reflect on the erosion of its
credibility.
The central agencies such as ED, CBI, IT are abused
and misused to target the opposition parties and their leaders’ months before
the elections to intimidate and silence them. The agencies have been weaponized
to subserve the political interest of the ruling regime at the Centre.
The communal politics has taken the toll. Both
Narendra Modi and Amita Shah – the top two leaders running the government - constantly
invoke the question of infiltrators, particularly during election campaigns and
rallies. They accuse the opposition parties mainly the Congress and the TMC of
shielding the infiltrates for vote bank politics, without any evidence, to polarise
the people. If there are infiltrators
from across the borders, the Union Home Ministry should be held responsible for
not detecting and deporting them. The religious sentiments and the divisive
politics tear apart the fragile social fabric. There is growing fear,
intolerance and violence. Any criticism of the government is quickly equated to
anti-national activity and dubbed as anti-patriotic.
The music Mastro AR Rahman, who brought laurels to
India by winning an Oscar award as music composer, in a recent interview to the
BBC Asian Network, said that he was getting less work these days: “I want work
to come to me; the sincerity of my work to earn things. I feel it’s a jinx when I go on in search of
things…Pepple who are not creative have the power now to decide things and this
might have been a communal thing.“ He was trolled for this. And Kangana Ranaut,
BJP MP, was quick to react: “I desperately wanted to narrate my directorial
Emergency to you…I was told you don’t want to be a part of a propaganda film.”
The criminals committing atrocities on the weaker and
the marginalised, women and children go scot-free and roam freely. The critics of the government are
arrested on false charges by invoking the stringent draconian laws - PMLA and
UAPA - and languish in jails without bail and trial for years, the process
itself becoming the punishment, depriving them life and liberty. This will put
even the dictatorial and autocratic regimes to shame.
The governors in non-BJP ruled states are a law unto themselves and run parallel governments. Take for
instance the role of governors in the non-BJP southern states. The Assembly sessions in Kerala and Tamil
Nadu got off to a dramatic start on January 20. In Kerala, the Governor
Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar omitted parts of the speech, and CM Pinarayi Vijayan
read out the skipped portions after the Governor left the Huse. And in Chennai,
Governor R.N. Ravi walked out of the Assembly for the fourth year in a row,
without delivering the inaugural speech.
While the Kerala Governor said the speech given to him
by the government contained “half-truths’, his Tamil Nadu counterpart claimed
the speech given to him was ‘laced with unsubstantiated claims and misleading
statements.” After Tamil Nadu and Kerala, it is the turn of Karnataka Governor Thaawarchad Gehlot, who refused to address the joint legislature session which began on January 21, demanding deletion of some 11 paragraphs from the speech. How will the state governments function if the governors appointed
by the BJP government at the Centre behave like this? Someone should ask these
Governors: what would happen if President of India Draupadi Murmu chooses to
skip the inaugural speech, prepared by the Modi government, and leaves the
Parliament abruptly!
The Higher Education in India is at a crossroads. The
quality education is becoming increasingly inaccessible and unaffordable to a
vast majority of the people. The No. of universities had doubled during the
past decade, rose from 7600 universities in 2014-15 to 1,338 as of June 2025.
And No. of colleges increased from 38,498 to 52,081 during the same period. The
indiscriminate privatisation has resulted in corporatisation and commercialisation
of education and mushrooming of coaching centers across the breadth and length
of the country. The teaching and the learning
are outsourced. There is acute shortage of teachers, contract and clock-hour
appointments replacing regular appointments. The present education system
demands compliance, rather than encourage independent and critical thinking.
And the academic community is silent.
The Modi government is against dialogue, discussion and debate that strengthen
democracy.
Nobody wants to question the government. It is imperative that the media,
intellectuals,
teachers and students, writers and opinion makers, organisations of
civil society and the
people at large stand up and speak against the wrong doings, and
contribute to informed
public opinion and make the government responsible and accountable, instead
of allowing
to be intimidated and silenced. The
demeaning culture of silence is doing immense damage
to the nation.
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