India does not lack power.
It suffers from amnesia.
Again and again, a familiar pattern repeats itself. Decisions are made in air-conditioned rooms, sealed with official signatures and wrapped in the language of “national interest.” The consequences, however, are lived elsewhere: in queues, at counters, on railway platforms, in hospital corridors, and now, even in airport terminals.
The architects of chaos remain untouched. The executors and the everyday citizen absorb the shock.
Demonetisation was the starkest reminder. Overnight, currency turned to paper. What followed was less a financial reform and more a nationwide endurance test. Policy-makers called it “necessary pain.” But the pain was not theirs to carry. It was borne by daily-wage workers who lost their work, seniors who stood in endless lines, small businesses that never reopened, and bank clerks blamed for decisions they never made.
Years later, only the location has changed. The airport has replaced the bank queue. Cancellations, technical failures and corporate inefficiency now create new scenes of despair. But when tempers flare, it is the ground staff who face it the young woman at the counter, the exhausted man with a walkie-talkie, the security guard trying to manufacture order out of human frustration. They are not the planners. They are merely the surface on which public anger is written.
This is the quiet tragedy of our democracy.
In theory, the people are sovereign. In practice, they behave like subjects. They bow before brand names, corporate power and political authority, and then turn on the very workers who share their social and economic reality. The servant is crowned king, while the real king the citizen willingly kneels.
Centralised power functions this way by design. Authority moves upward; blame moves downward. The top remains insulated and untouchable. The bottom is exposed to anger, to pressure, to exhaustion. A true democracy is meant to do the opposite: distribute power and concentrate accountability. But when citizens forget their strength, democracy becomes only a performance.
The danger is no longer just political. It is psychological.
People slowly unlearn protest and relearn obedience. They begin to normalise disorder, excuse mismanagement, and glorify suffering as sacrifice. In such a climate, power does not even need to oppress. It only needs to wait.
And yet, hope remains as it always has in awareness. In the moment a citizen realises that dignity is not granted from above but demanded from within. In the recognition that the person behind the counter is not the enemy, but a mirror. In the understanding that power without public memory cannot survive. And that a king who does not act like a king ceases to be one.
India does not need fewer servants.
It needs more citizens.
A democracy does not survive on slogans.
It survives on citizens who remember who they are.
You are not a subject.
You are not a servant.
You are the king.
Now act like one.
- ROHITH D S
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