When Elections Become Selections: Who Really Owns the State?
How long will you allow your democracy to become a spectator sport?
Imagine a country where citizens vote, but somehow feel that their vote has disappeared.
They stand in queues.
They press a button.
They return home.
And then they watch power being exercised by people they believe they never truly chose.
At that point, democracy begins to acquire a dangerous new meaning:
Elections remain. Choice disappears.
That is the moment a democracy must stop congratulating itself for conducting elections and start asking a much harder question:
Are citizens actually exercising meaningful political choice—or merely participating in a process whose consequences they cannot control?
India's constitutional system is explicitly built around regular, free and fair elections, with the Election Commission entrusted under Article 324 with administering the electoral process.
That principle is not decorative.
It is the foundation.
Because the moment citizens begin believing that elections can be manipulated, captured, distorted or reduced to a contest of money, muscle, misinformation and manufactured identities, the damage is much greater than the loss of one election.
The citizen begins to lose faith in the meaning of citizenship itself.
The uncomfortable question about criminality
There is another uncomfortable fact that cannot simply be shouted away.
According to an Association for Democratic Reforms analysis of the 2024 Lok Sabha election results, 251 of the 543 newly elected MPs—46%—had declared criminal cases against themselves.
Of those, 170 MPs—31% of the entire House—had declared serious criminal cases involving categories such as murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, rape and crimes against women.
Twenty-seven winning candidates had declared previous convictions.
But precision matters.
A criminal case is not the same thing as a conviction.
The presumption of innocence and due process cannot be discarded simply because a political argument needs a stronger headline.
And that distinction actually makes the question more powerful:
Why does a democracy repeatedly produce political systems in which candidates with serious criminal allegations can become enormously powerful?
That is a question worth asking every party.
Not just the party you dislike.
Every party.
When public money becomes political power
Every rupee collected from citizens carries a responsibility.
It comes from someone's salary.
Someone's shop.
Someone's farm.
Someone's factory.
Someone's pension.
Someone's consumption.
Someone's labour.
Public money is not the personal property of the politician who controls the government.
India has constitutional and statutory mechanisms designed to scrutinise public expenditure. The Comptroller and Auditor General is constitutionally mandated to audit government receipts and expenditure and examine whether public spending complies with laws and principles of financial propriety.
So the question should never simply be:
"How much money did the government spend?"
The better questions are:
Where did it go?
Who benefited?
Was the expenditure lawful?
Was it necessary?
Did citizens receive the promised outcome?
Was public money converted into public value—or private and political advantage?
If public money is diverted for personal enrichment, patronage or unlawful benefit, that is not governance.
That is a betrayal of the public trust.
And if there is evidence of such wrongdoing, the answer should not be mob justice.
It should be investigation, prosecution, independent adjudication and punishment according to law.
Because a constitutional democracy does not defeat wrongdoing by abandoning the law.
It defeats wrongdoing by making the law impossible to escape.
What happens when citizens are kept permanently angry?
Here is where the modern political machine becomes particularly sophisticated.
Keep citizens angry.
Keep them frightened.
Keep them fighting.
Keep them occupied with one another.
Keep them arguing about religion.
Caste.
Language.
Region.
Celebrity.
Party.
Community.
Identity.
Every day there is another outrage.
Another viral video.
Another accusation.
Another scandal.
Another enemy.
Another "breaking news" headline.
And somewhere in the background, the ordinary citizen's attention quietly disappears.
The citizen who should be asking:
Where did my tax money go?
is instead asking:
What did that community do?
The citizen who should be asking:
Where are the jobs?
is instead asking:
Which politician insulted whom?
The citizen who should be asking:
Why is my child's education failing to prepare him for the future?
is instead fighting with a stranger on social media.
This is not an argument that every politician deliberately engineers public anxiety.
It is a warning about the incentives of an attention-driven political environment.
A distracted citizen is a less demanding citizen.
And a less demanding citizen is easier for any powerful institution—political, corporate or media—to manage.
The new weapon is not censorship.
It is information overload.
You do not necessarily have to silence people anymore.
Give them 10,000 conflicting versions of reality.
Eventually they become exhausted.
They stop checking.
They stop reading.
They stop investigating.
They stop asking:
"What is actually true?"
And eventually they say:
"Everyone is lying anyway."
That sentence is extremely dangerous.
Because democracy does not collapse only when citizens believe a lie.
It can also weaken when citizens become so overwhelmed by competing claims that they stop believing anything.
Research from India has documented links between social-media use and stress or anxiety among adolescents, while broader research has shown that misinformation can affect psychological well-being. But the evidence does not justify the simplistic claim that a fixed percentage of Indians are depressed or anxious because of social media.
So we need something more valuable than another viral statistic.
We need citizens capable of thinking.
And what about the judiciary?
This is where we must be especially careful.
Citizens have every right to question judgments.
They have every right to disagree with judges.
They have every right to demand transparency, consistency, constitutional reasoning and accountability.
But accusing individual judges of deciding cases according to political ideology or loyalty to particular leaders requires evidence.
Otherwise, criticism of institutions itself becomes misinformation.
The proper question is therefore not:
"Which ideology does this judge support?"
It is:
"Does the judgment transparently explain its reasoning? Does it engage with the Constitution, legislation, precedent and evidence? Can the reasoning withstand independent scrutiny?"
That is the standard that matters.
Because if citizens lose faith in courts without evidence, institutions weaken.
But if courts become genuinely unaccountable, institutions also weaken.
Democracy requires both judicial independence and judicial accountability.
The greatest danger is not the politician.
It is the citizen who stops asking questions.
A politician can manipulate.
A party can propagandise.
A media organisation can sensationalise.
A social-media algorithm can amplify outrage.
A powerful interest group can influence.
But none of them can completely control an informed citizen who insists on evidence.
That citizen asks:
Show me the document.
Show me the expenditure.
Show me the audit.
Show me the judgment.
Show me the law.
Show me the evidence.
Show me the source.
Show me what happened before you tell me what I should think.
That is democratic power.
Stop asking: "Who is my leader?"
Start asking:
"What have you done with my money?"
The citizen's relationship with government should not resemble the relationship between a fan and a celebrity.
A Chief Minister is not a king.
A Prime Minister is not a king.
An MP is not a king.
An MLA is not a king.
A political party is not the nation.
The government exists within the Constitution.
And politicians hold public office temporarily.
The citizen does not work for the politician.
The politician works within a constitutional system created to serve the citizen.
That distinction has to be permanently engraved into the public mind.
Don't "throw them out" through violence.
Throw them out through constitutional power.
If a government fails:
Question it.
If a representative abuses power:
Document it.
If public money is misused:
Demand the audit.
If corruption is alleged:
Demand investigation.
If a law is violated:
Use the legal system.
If a judgment is wrong:
Appeal, scrutinise and debate it.
If a politician fails:
Vote differently.
If an election process is questioned:
Demand evidence, transparency and lawful investigation.
If misinformation spreads:
Stop forwarding it.
That is how a democracy fights back.
Not with mobs.
Not with violence.
Not with political revenge.
With evidence, institutions, civic intelligence and the ballot.
The question for the next generation
Perhaps the greatest failure would be to leave our children a country where they know the names of hundreds of politicians but cannot explain:
How public money is budgeted.
How laws are made.
How elections work.
How courts reach decisions.
How propaganda works.
How misinformation spreads.
How statistics can be manipulated.
How to distinguish an allegation from a conviction.
How to read a government audit.
How to verify a viral claim.
How to question authority without becoming an anarchist.
How to disagree without becoming an enemy.
That is the education a democracy desperately needs.
Because an uneducated citizen can be manipulated.
An uninformed citizen can be frightened.
An angry citizen can be mobilised.
A distracted citizen can be controlled.
But a citizen who can think, verify, question and reason is extraordinarily difficult to deceive.
So how long will you allow this?
That is the real question.
Not:
"Which party do you support?"
Not:
"Which leader do you worship?"
Not:
"Which ideology is yours?"
The question is much more uncomfortable:
Are you willing to surrender your critical thinking to somebody else?
Because democracy does not ultimately depend only on politicians.
It depends on citizens.
Citizens who remember that their vote is not a festival token.
Their taxes are not political donations.
Their Constitution is not a party manifesto.
Their country is not a political family's property.
Their future is not a politician's inheritance.
And their minds are not raw material for somebody else's propaganda machine.
The most dangerous citizen is not the citizen who hates the government.
It is the citizen who has stopped caring.
So wake up.
Read.
Verify.
Question.
Think.
Vote.
Hold power accountable.
And when someone asks you to hate before giving you evidence, ask why.
When someone asks you to believe before showing you proof, ask why.
When someone asks you to surrender your judgment to a leader, ask why.
And when someone tells you that questioning them is equivalent to betraying the nation—
question them even more carefully.
Because democracy was never supposed to create obedient subjects.
It was supposed to create citizens.
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