KOLKATA: Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram on Saturday claimed that the entire country was in a grip of fear, and that the situation is the antithesis of democracy.

He said that for more than a year, he had not come across a single person in the country who was not free from fear.

"In the last 18 months, wherever I go, whoever I talk to, I find fear dominates their thinking, fear dominates their entire existence and I tell them Tagore's 'Where the mind is without fear'.

"But show me one person who can stand up and say that 'my mind is without fear, I can say anything, I can write anything, I can do anything which does not violate the law'," the veteran politician said.

He was speaking at the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival 2024 during a discussion of his new book 'The Watershed Year-Which Way Will India Go?' at Kolkata's Allen Park on Saturday evening.

"Not one businessperson, one lawyer, medical people, small scale industry nobody has told me I can speak anything I like, I can produce any film," the Congress Rajya Sabha MP elaborated.

"Fear dominates India and that is the antithesis of democracy. Where the mind is without fear there alone there is democracy," the former Union finance minister added.