“Resistance works. Wherever we resist, it works,” Rahul Gandhi said this at the INDIA bloc’s conclave in Delhi on June 8. His argument was historical as much as political. The Congress, he said, turned from a political formation into a resistance movement on the day Mahatma Gandhi set the goal of freedom from British rule. Unlike many other parties, it was never built on the infrastructure and protection of the Indian state. Its work, therefore, does not depend on the neutrality of that state. The more the institutions of the state are throttled, he declared, the harder the Congress will fight to defend the constitution.That speech is the right place to begin a debate now gathering force. As anger mounts over the conduct of the Election Commission of India (ECI), some voices have begun to suggest that the Congress and other opposition parties should stop contesting elections altogether. If the referee is compromised, they ask, why play the match? Contesting, they argue, only lends legitimacy to a rigged process.The anger is honest. The conclusion is wrong. A boycott is desertion, and desertion is not resistance. Walking away from elections will not defend Indian democracy. It will surrender it, and for a very long time.A democracy earned through resistanceIndian democracy did not arrive overnight, and it did not arrive as a gift. It grew out of a democratic consciousness built over decades of struggle and awakening. Innumerable people paid for it. During the Quit India movement alone, the British government’s own figures admitted 1,028 deaths in police and military firing. Nationalist estimates put the toll as high as 10,000. More than 90,000 people were jailed. The entire Congress leadership was locked up. Gandhi spent nearly two years in the Aga Khan Palace. Nehru, over his lifetime, spent close to nine years in British prisons. From Sardar Patel to Maulana Azad and almost every top leader of Congress spent years in jail.This is the Congress that Rahul Gandhi was describing. It did not win India’s freedom by stepping aside when the odds were stacked against it. It won by resisting, year after year, jail term after jail term.When the Republic came, it did something no Western democracy had done at birth. It gave every adult the vote on the very first day. From the first general election of 1951-52, the poor, the unlettered, women and Dalits stood in the same queue as the rich. That was not a concession from the powerful. It was the dividend of a freedom movement.Today that inheritance is challenged by those in power. Having come to power through democratic means, they now appear to want to hold it permanently by dismantling the very edifice of free and fair elections.Democracy lives in people, not in buildingsHere lies the first thing the boycott argument misunderstands. Democracy is not a product of institutions, or even of the Constitution. They sustain democracy. They do not create it. Democracy is established when people want it, and it survives only as long as people want it to survive.Also read: Questions May Be About Gyanesh, But the Question Mark Is on Modi’s Democratic LegitimacyB.R. Ambedkar understood this. In his last speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, he warned that even a good constitution turns bad if those who work it are a bad lot. No political party or institution alone can guarantee democracy. They can nurture it and help it flourish.So the need of the hour is not to walk away from the people’s arena. It is to raise the consciousness of the people. To tell them their democracy is in peril. To give them proof that someone is stealing their mandate. And to fight for it inch by inch.What desertion hands overHistory is unkind to oppositions that walk out. In Venezuela in 2005 and in Bangladesh in 2014, opposition boycotts handed ruling parties near-total control of parliament, and in Bangladesh a pliant party was even installed as the official opposition while it sat in government.India has already watched rehearsals of this script. The blatant undemocratic measures of ECI in splitting parties and helping Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to usurp not just governments but also opposition, as they did in Bengal and Maharashtra, raises an alarm. Nation is even witnessing a ludicrous scenario of principal opposition party Nationalist Citizens Party of India (NCPI) supporting the government in Bengal. Now imagine the opposition deserts the field. New parties will be created. A new, obedient opposition will be manufactured after the real one is discredited through propaganda. The space for democratic dissent will be filled by placeholders. And the very elections that some want to boycott will be used to legitimise rigged elections. The hold on power will be complete, and it will look lawful.There is a practical cost too. A party that contests has polling agents in every booth. It holds copies of Form 17C. Its candidates have standing to challenge results in court. It sees the machinery up close. Every piece of evidence Rahul Gandhi has placed before the country came from being inside the process. A boycott does not stop the theft. It removes the witnesses.The lesson of the heightsIn the summer of 1999, intruders occupied the heights of Kargil. They had every advantage. They could fire down on Indian soldiers climbing in the open, exposed on bare rock. By any cold calculation, the heights were lost. But the soldiers did not abandon the hills and declare that nothing could be done. They climbed Tololing. They climbed Tiger Hill. They advanced inch by inch, paying in blood, and they took the heights back. 527 of them gave their lives.The fight to save democracy is a similar fight. The other side holds the heights today: the institutions, the money, the media, the machinery. It is firing from the top, unchecked, unrestricted. So desertion is not an option. Resistance is. That is what resistance means, fighting inch by inch, sacrificing, leading by example, setting up motivation for fellow citizens, converting dare and anger into strategy and conquest.Rahul Gandhi and the awakeningResistance begins with awareness. And no one has done more of the patient, unglamorous work of awakening than Rahul Gandhi. In August 2025, he went where no opposition leader had dared to go. He stood before the nation with rigged voter-roll data. He addressed multiple press conferences. He carried out Yatra to save the vote. He gave it a name the whole country understood: vote chori. At first, his claims seemed unbelievable, even ridiculous, to many. Indians have an innate faith in the ballot. Television studios mocked him. Many dismissed him as a sore loser. The chief election commissioner demanded an affidavit. He did not stop.And slowly people began to notice something. The mood they felt in their mohallas and villages was not showing up in the results from the EVMs. They began to find merit in his claims. The anger started building, first in private conversations, in family WhatsApp groups, in the quiet of their own minds.Under Rahul Gandhi, Congress party had deciphered BJP’s design of ‘vote chori (theft)’. So the response had to come. It came in the form of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. What was being done clandestinely and surreptitiously, was redesigned as a legitimate exercise by the ECI.Also read: Delhi Police Manhandle, Detain Protesters Asking for CEC Gyanesh Kumar’s Removal at Jantar MantarThis SIR reached the doors of every citizen. It was sold as a drive against illegal Bangladeshi immigrants and whispered as final act to disenfranchise “undesirable” Muslims. But it came for everyone. For those citizens also, who innocently believed the guile of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), who had never doubted their belonging, who believed their claim to India rested on the pitra-bhumi itself. They too found themselves scrambling for documents. They had been quietly told that such paperwork was a problem only for Muslims under the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA). Now it was their own problem.When the challenge came to every doorstep, and the EVM stopped echoing the voice of the street, people began to doubt the election process itself. Gen Z, often called non-committal or detached, turned out to be deeply invested in India and in its own freedom. It had absorbed the idea of democracy instinctively, the inheritance of a century of labour.Rahul Gandhi’s campaign didn’t go in vain. It helped them to discover the truth. Their own truth. Each individual’s truth. Gradually the propaganda started getting defeated by the individual discovery of reality. By threat to individual’s freedom. That individual sense of self-governance that Mahatma Gandhi called swaraj. Swaraj is the keyWhy does this individual discovery matter so much? Rahul Gandhi answered that question himself on 20 August, at the “Hara Bhara Swaraj” gathering in Delhi marking Rajiv Gandhi’s birth anniversary. Swaraj, he explained, is often wrongly translated as freedom. It is not. Swaraj is swa over raj: rule over oneself. It is a way of thinking. One can give another person freedom, he pointed out, but no one can give another person swaraj. It has to be found within.Drawing on the Mahatma, he described every human being as unique, with their own path to the truth. The job of the government and the country, he said, is to open the doors to each person’s imagination, and to give them the confidence to walk that path. That, he said, is Gandhiji’s vision for India, and that is the path of swaraj.Also read: Rahul Gandhi Demands CEC Gyanesh Kumar’s Resignation, Asks Him to ‘Turn Approver’This reading goes to the heart of Gandhi’s thought. For the Mahatma, rule began in the swa, the self. It began with a person’s mastery over their own mind and fidelity to their own inner life. Only then did it extend outward to institutions. At the centre of this was satya. We translate it as truth-telling, but Gandhi meant something deeper. Satya was refusing to deceive oneself. It was refusing to let one’s thinking be dictated by borrowed convictions one had never tested. The question underneath is simple. Do you know the truth, or does someone else tell you the truth?Propaganda is the modern answer to that question. It is truth interpreted for you by an intermediary: a television anchor, an IT cell, a WhatsApp forward. It asks you to believe that your eyes are wrong and the screen is right. Swaraj is the refusal. It is the moment a citizen trusts what he or she has seen in her own mohalla over what he or she is told on the evening news.That is what has been happening. Propaganda began to lose, not to counter-propaganda, but to the individual discovery of reality. It lost because a threat to each person’s freedom made each person examine the truth for themselves.It follows that the vote is among the most precious conditions of swaraj. It is the institutional form of the self’s rule, the one place where each citizen’s private truth is counted in public. To desert it is to abandon swaraj at the very moment people have begun to reclaim it.Rahul Gandhi’s call for resistance and his reading of swaraj are two halves of one idea. Gandhi joined them in Young India in January 1925: “Real Swaraj will come not by the acquisition of authority by a few but by the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when it is abused.” Resistance is swaraj in action.When the youth began to walkDemocracy survives only when individuals, who carry its idea within them, arise. No leader or party alone can save democracy. They can only pave the path and point the direction. The people have to walk.Rahul Gandhi paved the path. And then, one day, the youth got up and began walking.The protests at Jantar Mantar in June and July this year were not sponsored. They were not planned in any party office. They began with anti-paper leak sentiment.What followed was an amorphous collective of students and young people with an innate sense of swaraj, who came out to protect it. Every leader and every platform was incidental, merely echoing millions who believed in accountability, which is itself the most basic feature of democracy.Rahul Gandhi saw what this meant. Speaking to young people on August 20, he said that their expression had finally come out, and that it could not be stopped.It proved the theory. Democracy is ultimately a product of the people. They decide. They defend.Gandhi believed that fear lies at the root of violence, and of submission too. Jantar Mantar lifted a veil of fear, and the effect has spread. Within weeks, dissent began to surface from inside institutions. Sections of the media have found their voice again.The Gandhian objectionSome will say Gandhi himself boycotted elections. In 1920, as part of Non-Cooperation, the Congress did boycott the councils created under the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms. But those were legislatures of an alien power, elected on a narrow franchise, with no real sovereignty. Even then, the lesson came quickly. By 1923, C.R. Das and Motilal Nehru had formed the Swaraj Party to enter the councils and fight from within. In 1937, the Congress contested the provincial elections and won decisively in most provinces. The ballot was used to prove the people’s will against an empire.Today the ballot is not a colonial concession. It is ours. It was won with the blood of 1942. Boycotting our own constitutional elections is not non-cooperation. It is abdication.The Gandhian path is satyagraha: contest, document, expose, protest, and make every act of theft visible to the people whose mandate is being stolen. Precisely what Rahul Gandhj has been doing recently, and has succeeded in good measure.Courage is infectiousA few stolen elections have given the BJP temporary power. They have also given it hubris. It now believes the moment for a final assault on democracy has come: to dismantle opposition parties themselves, and to become unaccountable in the manner of the RSS, which decides and directs but is never answerable.Desertion would complete that design. It would hand the RSS full control over elections and let it legitimise that control through a puppet opposition.Saving democracy needs a movement of resistance. It needs awakening. It needs sacrifice. And it needs proof, placed before the people of India, that someone is stealing their right.Remember that courage is infectious. Hope is infectious. The spirit of democracy is infectious. Once a threshold is crossed, nothing can stop them from spreading and becoming a force. That force alone will save democracy and swaraj. It will come from every individual who believes in them.Rahul Gandhi is right. Resistance works. But resistance needs ground to stand on, and the election is that ground. The task of the opposition is to hold it until the force of awakened citizens arrives. That force is already on its way.Gurdeep Singh Sappal is Permanent Invitee, Congress Working Committee.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.