A combination of anxiety and paranoia seems to have overcome liberals and a vast section of democratic-minded citizens who are always looking for some silver lining in the otherwise omnipresent dark clouds over Indian polity today.Oddly, such anxiety and paranoia is producing a psychology among liberal thought leaders, which makes them even more resigned to accepting the misrule of the current regime at the Centre. The paranoia and frustration caused by the authoritarian misrule is ironically leading to democratic dissenters turning their ire on each other. Human tendency is always to look for someone to blame during adversity. Therefore when the entity causing them deep stress and anxiety seems invincible, they start looking for others to blame for the situation. This is partly what has been happening with the opposition parties. The general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), M.A. Baby, has formally written to the Congress party asking it to explain Rahul Gandhi’s statements during the election campaign in Kerala where he called CPI(M) a “B team of the BJP.” This is causing a strain in the India alliance. It is another matter that in the heat of the elections, both Congress and CPI(M) were accusing each other of having some truck with the BJP which is an also ran in Kerala.The larger point here is that the national opposition instead of finding common ground to protest the Enforcement Directorate raids on an aging CPI(M) leader Pinarayi Vijayan or to raise the issue of violence being perpetrated on the TMC leaders, is allowing the familiar playbook of the BJP to further weaken its foundations.Similarly, even among the dissenting members and leaders of civil society there is this reflex reaction seeking to blame someone for what seems like an insurmountable task of arresting the rapid democratic back sliding in the country. One expression of such anxiety among well meaning public intellectuals is to blame Rahul Gandhi after every election setback for the opposition parties. The standard narrative is that Rahul Gandhi is responsible for the failure to challenge the Modi-Shah regime and its Machiavellian instincts. Bizarrely, Gandhis are also accused of keeping Modi in power as though if Gandhis move out, Modi will lose power! Of course, such irrational anxiety hardly takes into account the fact that Rahul Gandhi’s presence or absence in Congress party has little to do with 27 lakh voters being disenfranchised in an organised manner, or for that matter, the industrial scale manipulation of Form 6 (for voter addition) and Form 7 (for voter deletion) which is now the new normal.The reason for anxiety is understandable as institution after democratic institution is getting brutally captured and the conduct of the Bengal election by a shockingly partisan Election Commission was the boldest experiment yet by a ruling party brazenly deselecting 4.7% of the total votes – the 27 lakh ‘under adjudication’ unable to cast their ballots – unprecedented in the annals of any healthy democracy in the world.Besides democratic institutional capture, the mounting misrule of the “double engine” sarkar in most Indian states is what is causing both anxiety and paranoia among concerned citizens who want to see an end to the blatant corruption and misrule as the regime’s sheer inability to conduct proper CBSE or NEET exams shows.Anxiety among liberals is something one can still deal with. But excessive paranoia among the liberal and democratic-minded citizenry is something this authoritarian regime is most happy to stoke through its calculated actions and psyops.The response to the Cockroach Janata Party is a case in point. The Modi regime has created so much anxiety that many civil society leaders and intellectuals are ever ready to believe the worst about a few hundred students protesting at Jantar Mantar seeking the resignation of the Education Minister over the CBSE paper leak scam.Even before the protest at Jantar Mantar commenced, questions were flying all over about the antecedents of the youth leaders organising the event. Are they BJP’s “B team”? Why did police allow them to protest when it resorted to violence at the student protests against the pollution in Delhi or the workers’ protest at Noida?It is also possible that the Modi government sees this GenZ movement as potentially much more damaging given these students may sway youth voters in 2029 elections. The CBSE and NEET scams may have a much wider pan-India impact than the issue of the Delhi pollution protests. So it is possible that Modi and Shah want to play this cautiously.Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) founder Abhijeet Dipke, left, and Climate activist Sonam Wangchuk during a protest demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over alleged examination-related lapses, at the Jantar Mantar, in New Delhi, Saturday, June 6, 2026. Photo: PTI.There is a need to trust spontaneous protest movements for what they are instead of preemptively dubbing them BJP-inspired. Many sensible politicians and journalists had the conviction that India Against Corruption (IAC) was totally orchestrated by the RSS network to install Modi in power at the Centre while it also helped AAP seize power in Delhi. This is only partially true because the movement had considerable spontaneous impulses too which may have been exploited later by certain organised forces. Well meaning activists like Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav, who founded India Against Corruption along with Kejriwal, moved away from AAP due to serious disagreements. But the key issue is that they trusted the authenticity of the movement when it started. That it lost its original moorings could not have been anticipated.The point being made is just because India Against Corruption produced perverse outcomes, which includes Modi’s ascension to power, should not cause excessive paranoia that every incipient civil society mobilisation would go the same way. Or that their sincerity of purpose should be doubted from the word go.The late Justice V.M. Tarkunde, widely regarded as the father of civil liberties movement in India, once told me that you have to start by trusting people when they join a good public cause or movement. The context was that in the 1970s-1980s political and civil rights movements were replete with the stories of “CIA agents” penetrating the socialist or civil society organisations.Even Mahatma Gandhi at one time, especially in the initial stages of the freedom movement, did trust organisations like Hindu Mahasabha to join the cause of India’s independence. He was even present at the inauguration of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1915 at Haridwar. Gandhi was sincere and trusting in his approach but soon saw through their agenda. This is part of the learning process in politics.In any event, politics can be full of surprises and it is impossible to predict future behaviour. I recall interviewing Nitish Kumar for The Wire during the 2015 assembly election campaign. He said if Ram Manohar Lohia were alive he would have replaced the idea of anti-Congressism of the past with anti-BJPism today as BJP had acquired all the authoritarian characterstics of the Congress. Nitish swept to power in alliance with Lalu Yadav in 2015 and rest, of course, is history. The way the opposition lost Nitish and the BJP endlessly manipulated him will remain the most intriguing chapter of the 12 years of Modi rule. Here again, Rahul Gandhi was blamed for not being able to hold back Nitish within the INDIA alliance. The real story of course is that Mamata Banerjee refused to accept Nitish as a co-convenor of the alliance. This proposal was taken by Rahul Gandhi personally to her, according to a senior RJD leader in the alliance.There is clearly a need for the opposition parties, civil society organisations and other democratically minded citizens to deal with their anxieties, in a manner that they don’t end up strengthening the very forces that are the primary source of such political and social tensions.