In theory, democracy is the rule of the people. In practice, it is often the rule of whoever controls the machinery that counts and, crucially, decides who the “people” are. The latest allegations by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi over “massive voter list manipulation” in Bangalore Central in 2024 may be contested, but they highlight a deeper malaise: once corruption becomes systemic, it becomes almost impossible to check, let alone reverse. In such an environment, allegations remain allegations, and truth becomes a casualty of convenience.
When voter rolls can be engineered to favour a particular outcome, the principle of universal suffrage, the very bedrock of democratic legitimacy, is hollowed out. It is not merely about one party winning or losing. It is about whether the mandate being claimed is genuinely the voice of the people or a manufactured echo. The most dangerous feature of systemic corruption is its invisibility in plain sight. Everyone senses it, talks about it in hushed tones, but the paper trail is carefully curated to withstand scrutiny.
Nagaland offers a telling example. Across the state, it is an open secret that electoral rolls, especially in rural constituencies, are inflated far beyond the realistic number of residents. Some village voter lists read like census fiction, with headcounts that defy population trends and migration patterns. Ask any voter, any village elder, and they will nod knowingly. Yet, to “prove” it in a way that survives in court is a different matter altogether. Documentation is often internally consistent, even if it is detached from reality. And when every layer of the process functions under the same silent consensus, the truth becomes not just inconvenient, but structurally inadmissible.
In such a climate, the law becomes a formality and oversight bodies become stage props. As such, independent verification is next to impossible. Even the machinery tasked with the verification may have no appetite for doing it. This is how democracies learn to live with lies, lies so ingrained that challenging them is seen not as a civic duty but as troublemaking.
The irony is sharp. We are told that democracy is our proudest inheritance, our defining difference from authoritarian regimes. Yet, if the foundation of that democracy is an electoral roll bloated with duplicates and fictional citizens, what exactly are we defending? We recite the vocabulary of democracy like freedom, rights, representation, etc but play out its rituals on a stage where the script is already written.
A democracy built on lies is not a democracy. And the longer we pretend otherwise, the deeper we sink into the comfort of the false, until one day we wake up and realise that the system we trusted to safeguard our rights has been protecting only itself all along.
