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Chandigarh: The recent Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) campaign appears to have emboldened the silent majority among the malai – the colloquial term for India’s privileged urban cream of professionals, entrepreneurs, senior executives, academics, retired bureaucrats, military officers and other opinion-makers – to begin voicing their misgivings about Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata party-led (BJP-led) government after years of self-imposed silence. 

Never a particularly confrontational constituency, the malai has traditionally preferred discretion to activism and accommodation to conflict. 

In fact, many among its storied ranks had enthusiastically embraced Modi’s rise in 2014, seeing in him a decisive leader who promised economic growth, corruption-free administrative efficiency, and renewed national confidence. Yet, as doubts accumulated over time and aspirations and hope faded, most of this class followed the path of least resistance: private complaint, public acquiescence and the comforting assumption that little could challenge a leader who appeared politically and electorally unassailable.

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Political scientists describe this as the ‘spiral of silence’ or the tendency of individuals to suppress opinions they believe are unpopular or personally costly to express. For much of the past 12 years, Modi’s immense popularity, reinforced by repeated electoral victories and amplified by a formidable political, media and digital machinery, had forged precisely such an environment.

Many who privately disagreed with the government feared being branded anti-national, anti-Hindu, or otherwise portrayed as standing outside the mainstream. In a political climate where loyalty to the government was often conflated with patriotism, silence frequently emerged as the safer option.

Such caution was particularly visible amongst the malai. 

Unease was never confined to a........

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