Abhishek Mishra was driving from Udaipur to Gurgaon along with his parents in his father’s new Maruti Ciaz, a car the senior Mishra had bought a month ago with his retirement money. It was afternoon and this stretch of National Highway 8 that connects Mumbai to Delhi via Rajasthan, near Alwar, did not have road dividers.
Out of the blue and in broad daylight, Mishra says, a long trailer truck driving on the opposite lane veered across and hit his car head on. The airbags of the new Ciaz that deployed in the nick of time saved the family. By the time Mishra had got back his bearings and started calling friends and family, the trailer-truck had reversed back and driven off.
Mishra’s mother had to be hospitalized later in the day for internal bleeding and his father needed multiple surgeries on his face. The car took a month and half of repair work. Mishra, 37, believes this was no ordinary accident. He thinks this was an attempt on his life-a consequence of him turning a whistleblower against his former employer in Hyderabad back in 2016.
This was also not the first rough experience for Mishra. He recalls how in 2016 in Hyderabad, some toughies had turned up as he went about grocery shopping, and advised him to leave the city. Mishra’s story might be an extreme but aggressive pushback and career-damaging consequences are not uncommon for whistleblowers.
At a time when a parade of corporate scams has besmirched the reputation of India Inc, the experience of those who have blown the whistle paint a gloomy picture. Many scams might not have reached the scale they did had potential whistleblowers felt secure to come out.
The Whistleblower Protection Act 2014, passed by both houses of the Parliament and signed by the President in 2014, is yet to be operationalised and Indian companies operate under the whistleblower norms incorporated in the Companies Act of 2013. Political activists have been protesting the delay in operationalising the Act, but its impact on the corporate world is not adequately debated.
