In democracies around the world, the manipulation of public perception has become an art form, one often wielded by politicians and governments to obscure reality and serve their own ends. Rather than confronting issues with transparency and accountability, many opt instead to engineer narratives, distract with symbolism, and exploit public emotion. As George Orwell once observed, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
Today, at the heart of this manipulation lies the strategic use of mass media, staged events, and selective information. Governments may highlight minor successes with grand fanfare while quietly burying failures under layers of bureaucracy or blame-shifting. Issues such as unemployment, corruption, or civil unrest are repackaged, reframed, or outright denied, depending on what best suits the political moment.
One of the oldest and most sinister tools in this playbook is division. When governments or politicians pit one community, religion, or ethnic group against another, they create convenient distractions from their own failures. As Julius Caesar long ago understood, divide et impera -divide and rule – is a tactic as effective as it is destructive. In a divided society, real accountability becomes nearly impossible.
The ‘oppositionless government’ in Nagaland, for instance, is a deception. It is like North Korea’s audacious branding of itself as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a name that masks the reality of a dictatorial regime. Similarly, calling a government “oppositionless” in a democracy not only insults the principle of checks and balances but also reduces political accountability to a farce.
This deception isn’t always malicious in appearance; sometimes, it’s cloaked in patriotism or regionalism or development jargon. As Abraham Lincoln warned, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Unfortunately, in today’s attention-fractured world, fooling enough people for long enough often suffices to secure perpetual power.
When citizens stop questioning narratives or fail to demand accountability, deception thrives. Democracy does not wither overnight; it erodes slowly, through silence, slogans, division, and selective memory.