A republic occasionally encounters moments that illuminate questions far larger than the events that produce them – moments less about the fortunes of a government than about the character of democracy itself. In the digital age, power rarely announces itself through the blunt instruments of legislation or law enforcement alone; increasingly, it operates through curated performance. Two short Instagram reels, optimised for fleeting attention spans, recently offered a vivid glimpse of this theatrical statecraft.In the first, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl stands before a lens to deliver a public apology. Her offense was angry, unpolished language used during a protest at Jantar Mantar – the historic site in New Delhi where citizens gather to demand redress from an often (unhearing) unsympathetic administration. Her face carries the visible anxiety of a minor thrust into the ruthless glare of public outrage.In the second, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses the nation’s youth in the register of a forgiving patriarch, declaring that he has “forgiven” the children for their indiscretion – framing their anger as a temporary moral lapse best met with grand paternal magnanimity.Taken separately, each video carries a simple message: the first, remorse; the second, forgiveness. But the constitutional significance of the episode lies somewhere else. Between remorse and forgiveness stands a third democratic virtue that neither video acknowledges – accountability. It is this virtue that separates a constitutional republic from a political constitutional autocracy.The aesthetic of state grooming, in which the machinery of power reshapes public discourse into a morality play, substitutes parental indulgence for administrative responsibility. A child’s unfiltered rage is stripped of its political context and reframed as a domestic flaw requiring correction. In that transaction, the state never has to answer why a fifteen-year-old felt compelled to take to the streets in the first place. The grievances of the protest dissolve into the ambient noise of social media, leaving behind only the flattering image of a merciful leader.When institutions recede while personalities advanceThere is a delightful observation attributed to the painter Amrita Sher-Gil, made in a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru: that politicians often prefer to believe the sea is looking at them, rather than admit the simpler truth – that they are merely looking at the sea. Whether the line survives as anecdote or metaphor, it captures a timeless psychology of power, offered, one imagines, as a light and affectionate tease rather than an indictment.But power does subtly alter perspective. It persuades those who hold it that every event revolves around them – criticism becomes personal, praise becomes personal, even silence becomes personal. Gradually, institutions recede while personalities advance; a government comes to be identified with a leader, and the nation is imagined as speaking to one individual rather than through its constitutional institutions. Democracy was designed precisely to resist this temptation.The Constitution creates offices, not idols. When power turns solipsistic, dissent is no longer read as a legitimate democratic grievance but as a personal insult, an act of disrespect toward the sovereign. The sea is no longer permitted to be turbulent on its own terms; its waves are expected to calm themselves in the leader’s presence. When a political culture shifts from observing the public to demanding that the public observe the leader, accountability degrades – the state stops listening to the needs of citizens and begins grading them instead on how well they perform the role of dutiful subjects.The paradox of self-restraint: From Chanakya to unchecked magnanimityThis psychological trap was not unknown to those who built the foundations of the Indian Republic. In 1937, long before he became prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote an extraordinary essay for The Modern Review under the pseudonym “Chanakya” – a scathing, anonymous critique of his own rising popularity and autocratic potential. Writing of himself in the third person, he warned:“Jawaharlal cannot become a fascist… Yet he has all the makings of a dictator in him – vast popularity, a strong will, energy, a crowd-compelling personality… We want no Caesars in India.”That a leader would use a pseudonym to warn the public against his own potential hubris was a rare act of democratic self-scrutiny. It acknowledged that public adoration is a volatile force, capable of corrupting both the leader and the led, and it signalled that the Republic’s health depended on citizens questioning authority rather than surrendering to it.The warning on the floor: Ambedkar and the peril of BhaktiB.R. Ambedkar, quoting John Stuart Mill, cautioned citizens against laying down their liberties “at the feet of even a great man,” or trusting the powers that could subvert their own institutions. He then identified a distinctly Indian vulnerability:“In India, Bhakti, or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country… Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”Bhakti in politics produces an asymmetrical relationship between the governor and the governed: rights are recast as favours, and state duties are reframed as acts of personal benevolence. This is the deflection at work here. When ought to have consider how the state fails to deliver employment or a functioning education system, attention is redirected instead to how a teenager spoke in a moment of anger.Citizens are asked to focus on etiquette rather than on why thousands of young people felt compelled to march – a convenient sleight of hand, and one with a troubling legal dimension. That a zero FIR was filed against a minor, only to be dropped after a staged display of forgiveness, exposes the transactional nature of justice in India. The fifteen-year-old did not need the Prime Minister’s forgiveness; she needed protection under the Juvenile Justice Act, and the plain recognition of her right to dissent.The protest: A cry for justice, not a moral failureTo understand why the government ultimately “faced the heat and yielded,” one has to look at the nature of the July 20 protest itself. Driven by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) and independent activists, the demonstration tapped a deep well of resentment over the state of education – from NEET paper leaks that have driven students to suicide, to a system that puts quality education out of reach for most. The march was historic not only for its scale but for its character. The veteran actor Shabana Azmi captured its emotional resonance, describing the students as “brave and courageous” and telling Neha, the young activist, as she gently held her face, that her own generation had failed them.Satire, humor, and irreverence function as safety valves for a republic, much as a whistle does for a pressure cooker: when political pressure builds and official narratives grow suffocatingly grandiose, satire releases the excess steam before it turns into unrest. If philosophers have defended democracy with ideas, cartoonists have defended it with laughter. For decades, R.K. Laxman’s “Common Man” stood silently in the corner of his frames, bewildered yet enduring, observing the absurdities and hypocrisies of political elites through governments of every persuasion.Prime ministers changed, slogans changed, promises changed – the cartoonist’s pencil did not. His satire was rarely cruel; it was something more valuable. It reminded citizens that no elected office should acquire an aura of infallibility, that leaders are public servants and not divine rulers. Political satire performs an essential constitutional function: it narrows the distance between ruler and citizen and reminds governments that they remain accountable to ordinary people. A democracy that cannot tolerate humor eventually begins to fear criticism, and a democracy that fears criticism gradually loses the confidence and ability necessary for self-correction.Is irreverence a crime? In the ledger of autocratic power, mockery and disrespectful language are often treated as existential threats. Yet when young citizens display open irreverence toward those in power, it is rarely a sudden moral collapse – it is a statement of accumulated frustration and broken faith. When formal avenues of dialogue meet deaf ears, irreverence becomes the only vocabulary left with which to shatter the solemnity of elite indifference.This is a recurring pattern across literary and cultural history. In classical drama, the sovereign is surrounded by sycophants who flatter his ego, and it falls to the Fool – the irreverent outsider – to speak harsh truths to King Lear under the guise of insolence. The literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin argued that medieval folk culture relied on the carnivalesque, a temporary world in which sacred hierarchies were inverted and elites were mocked, stripping power of its terrifying majesty; irreverence there was not criminal but a necessary psychological defence against its crushing weight.When it takes the unfiltered shout of a child to expose a lieIn Hans Christian Andersen’s fable, the entire court pretends to admire the emperor’s invisible garments out of fear and deference, and it takes the unfiltered shout of a child to expose the lie. When a student speaks irreverently to power today, it is often that same instinct at work – a refusal to pretend the emperor is clothed when the state has visibly failed its duties. To punish or publicly lecture a young person for “disrespect” is to mistake the smoke for the fire: the child’s rudeness is merely the smoke; the fire was lit by years of state indifference, broken guarantees, and performative governance. A confident republic does not criminalise irreverence – it asks why its youth have lost their reverence in the first place.It is easy, in moments of political spectacle, to confuse the office with the individual, or the party with the state. Yet the core promise of a constitutional republic is that its institutions are larger than the individuals who occupy them temporarily. Governments rise and fall, parties expand and dissolve, leaders dominate the headlines for a season before retreating into history – but the Constitution is designed to endure.It is a covenant created not to exalt the ruler but to protect the citizen from the arbitrary exercise of authority. The state possesses no moral standing to demand polished politeness from citizens whose lives are disrupted by unfulfilled promises. Civility is a two-way street: a state that treats its citizens with bureaucratic indifference cannot expect rehearsed deference in return.In political theory, this tactic echoes what the sociologist Stanley Cohen termed “states of denial” – a deliberate, strategic refusal by authority to acknowledge uncomfortable realities until the narrative can be controlled. This dynamic of strategic silence and weaponized moral outrage has deep precedent. In the Mahabharata, during the humiliation of Draupadi in the royal court of Hastinapur, the powerful elders – Dhritarashtra, Bhishma, Drona – kept a stone-cold, silence that can be treated as accomplice; their refusal to speak when justice demanded is an example how power uses silence to preserve its own status quo while ignoring moral collapse.Historically, monarchies used silence in much the same way, to signal that the sovereign does not answer to the demands of the mob – and when the ruler finally breaks that silence, it is rarely to address the original grievance, but to seize on some minor breach of decorum, such as a student’s abusive language, and re-anchor the narrative around it.By suddenly shifting the spotlight from a massive public grievance to a single teenager’s outburst, the state executes a classic tactical pivot: it recasts the accused authority as victim, and the aggrieved public as aggressor. The ruler’s sudden outburst of moral sermonizing puts the public on the defensive, forcing citizens to apologize for their tone while the state quietly walks away from its broken promises.The sea remainsWe return, finally, to Amrita Sher-Gil’s warning and the enduring metaphor of the sea. Leaders who fall into the trap of self-regard come to believe that the tide rises and falls in response to their presence, that the public is an expanse of water whose sole purpose is to reflect their image. But this is an illusion born of power’s peculiar solipsism.The republic does not belong to those who govern it for a brief season; it belongs to the ocean of humanity – the millions of citizens whose collective, quiet work sustains the nation. Leaders come and go, regimes rise and fade into history books, but the sea remains.The true test of a democracy lies in whether it allows this human sea to exist on its own terms – turbulent, demanding, loud, imperfect – or whether it insists on reducing it to a passive mirror for the sovereign. A healthy republic does not need paternal forgiveness from its leaders. It needs leaders to understand their place before the vast ocean of the people, who listen to its currents, and who remember that they are merely its temporary custodians.I.V. Ramana Rao is an educationist and Co-Editor, The Wire Telugu.