Tucked away in a corner of page 7 of The Indian Express of September 10 is an all-important story. It carries news of an admonition from the honourable President of India – one that has not come a day too soon, given the upheavals in the neighbouring country of Nepal.The President has underlined a truth that ordinary citizens speak of daily without much purchase in the corridors of power. President Murmu said that not “schemes” but “the recognition of people’s rights” constitutes “real empowerment“. Clearly, implicit in this telling observation is a context spanning our everyday experience of the reality of governmental pronouncements and the truth of their substance on the ground.In Nepal, the revolt (which is what it is) ought not to be seen merely as deriving from a juvenile addiction to social media outlets. As is now becoming more and more apparent, the combustion has been fuelled by the blatant arrogance of the haves, most of them scions of the entrenched power-structure.As if in a throw-back to the incremental histories leading up to the French Revolution, the revolt in Nepal has been a bursting of the dam that had held back the rising waters of grievance among the young of the nation.Official corruption, unbearable lack of gainful employment, the flagrant ownership of the country’s top properties/business assets by the spoilt brats of the power-structure, cavalier unresponsiveness to the expression of public deprivation and governmental graft, and the easy recourse to high-handed methods by the state – all these came to boil when the state chose to ban some 26 social media sites which alone afforded some means of mutual cohesion and expression of outrage to the restive and offended Generation Z.Now, who is to say that such state hubris and dissembling has been an exclusive feature of just Nepal, having experienced a similar revolt in Bangladesh in August 2024, which led to the downfall of the then prime minister who was obliged to take refuge in India.For years now, Adivasis in various parts of Bharat have been at the receiving end of corporate greed, abetted by organs of the state. The Ladakhis have been seeking fulfilment of the promise that their forest and other ethnic/cultural rights would be protected by grant of Sixth Schedule status to their territory, but nothing has moved; just as nothing has moved in the matter of the commitment made by the government to restore full statehood to the diminished and humiliated region of Jammu & Kashmir.On the mainland, do we not hear of bounties of the old feudal/monarchical kind being promised so often by the honourable prime minister himself, chiefly just before elections are due here, there, and elsewhere, and of foundation stones being laid to boot? Yet, how often are we taken into confidence about the implementation of these royal decrees, or provided accountability in the event of non or graft-ridden compliance? Should we not be told why bridges built but a year ago fall like ninepins with the slightest load?Nor are the people fooled to believe that the rule of law applies in intent or execution equally in the matter of offences that may have been committed by diverse segments of the citizenry or of the political classAs to inequalities of income, or sectarian biases in the availability of opportunities, or of the stranglehold of crony corporates over media houses, the treatment of journalists who seek to hold up an upright spine, or the topsy-turvydom regarding school and university curricula, the less said the better. Nor is the free reign given to overbearing bluster and vigilante justice any longer a fact much in doubt.Note also that lakhs of destitute farmers are even now gathered 24×7 in state after state in desperate droves to collect what pittance of fertiliser they may be handed out.Thus, the advice so pithily voiced by the honourable President of India that not just “schemes” but the “recognition of people’s rights” comprised “true empowerment” must seem the commandment of the day, one awaited by the common Indian with bated breath.Speaking of the ‘recognition of people’s rights’, imagine that today the path-breaking Right to Information suffers grievous pruning, as enquiring citizens are usually fobbed off with answers that hide more than they reveal. Is it too much to hope then that the government of the republic will deeply chew on the meaning of the president’s remark, and teach itself to make it the true talisman of how to operate a real democracy?Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.