At a meeting last week, the council of ministers, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, deliberated on the recommendations of a high-level committee led by a member of the NITI-Aayog. The focus, perhaps given the prevailing tardy pace, was on expediting deregulation. Reforms, there was general consensus, should be framed such that they would not only lighten the burden of compliance but also remove impediments from the lives of citizens. It has been reported that the prime minister emphasised that the government should not interfere in the lives of
the people. This is in keeping with Mr Modi’s premise of minimum government-maximum governance, a pledge that the regime is yet to fulfil in its truest sense.
Deregulation is usually discussed in the contexts of reform, growth and economic potential. There is perhaps a need to expand the scope of this principle — minimal government intrusion — to include the social and the private spheres. This is because this nation has had a history of governments of all ideological stripes weaponising massive popular mandates to unleash repression. The era of the Congress, especially during the Emergency, or the long rule of the Left Front, during which the dreaded nagarik committee would serve as the proverbial judge, jury and, often, executioner in local life, immediately comes to mind. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s record in terms of ‘deregulation’ from India’s social life is as poor as its peers. The electoral ascendancy of the BJP has corresponded with not just pressure on some of the key features of democracy — dissent being one casualty — but also increased intervention in the private sphere. Strictures on food, clothes, even intimacy have become the norm rather than the exception. The institutionalisation of violence in the name of protecting the cow and the campaign against love-jihad, evidence of which is slim with the government, are cases in point. This template of surveillance and intervention is often executed through vigilante groups that seem to enjoy impunity: is this because these are the foot soldiers being used to push through certain ideological prerogatives? A disproportionate share of the victims of the government’s meddling are the minorities — religious, social, sexual. The consequent erosion of rights and liberties is a blot on Indian democracy. Whether the government should refrain from interfering in the economic life of the nation is often debated. But that it has no business interfering in the private lives of the people is indisputable.