“That cream biscuits have cream in them, does not mean that Tiger biscuits have tiger in them,” Santhosh Pandit, the controversial Malayalam filmmaker and internet celebrity, once remarked. India, it seems, has reached the apotheosis of this Pandit moment: “That Indian democracy has India in it, does not mean that it has democracy in it.”A democracy without voting rights for citizens!We have already seen its counterparts in advertisements: “coffee without caffeine”, “beer without alcohol”. Slavoj Žižek has brilliantly exposed the ideological logic underlying such formulations: the appearance remains, while the defining substance is hollowed out. And we are all jolly happy consuming it, because removing the substance also removes the guilt associated with it. We are free, we are healthy! We get to enjoy the thing without its toxic elements. Or, as Žižek puts it: “Everything is permitted, you can enjoy everything, but deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous.”Indian democracy seems to have arrived at a similar arrangement. Its elections, legislatures, constitutional vocabulary and institutional rituals remain, but their continued existence does not necessarily guarantee the democratic substance they are supposed to embody. Indeed, the persistence of these forms may help conceal their progressive hollowing out.In Žižekian terms, ideology operates here not simply by making us believe in something that does not exist, but by allowing us to participate in its ritualised forms even as its substance is eroded. We continue to consume democracy, so to speak, in its decaffeinated form.Just as the market offers coffee without caffeine and beer without alcohol, the shareholders of the democratic marketplace, with Gyanesh Kumar, the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) of India, working overtime as their most trusted broker, seem to have discovered how to rid Indian democracy of its supposedly toxic elements. A report published in Janata Weekly notes that: “Muslim and Christian minorities, Dalits, Adivasis, economically marginalised sections, illiterate people, daily wage workers, and migrant labourers were deleted in large numbers, disproportionate to their percentages in the previous electoral roll. From among these sections, deletion of women voters was even higher.”Removing the dead from electoral rolls is natural; making the living disappear as though they were dead is not. The dead lose their votes because they are dead. The living lose their votes because they are made to “vanish into thin air”, like the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, by the brokers of the democratic marketplace.What better way to exclude ‘inconvenient’ citizens than to declare them politically dead while keeping the democratic architecture intact?Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.Hum bekhudi mein tumko pukare(Unaware of my own self, I kept calling out to you)When the Supreme Court declined to advance the hearing of SIR-related electoral deletion cases in constituencies going to by-elections, reportedly observing, “these are only by-elections,” it exposed a troubling hierarchy of democratic rights. The implication is that the urgency of protecting a citizen’s vote depends on whether the election can alter the government’s composition. But the constitutional significance of the right to vote cannot be measured by the number of seats at stake or by the likelihood of a change in government. A by-election is no less an exercise of the franchise than a general election, and the exclusion of a single eligible voter raises a question of constitutional principle, irrespective of its effect on electoral arithmetic.The court’s apparent calculus reduces the right to vote to an instrument for determining who governs. Yet universal adult franchise is not merely a mechanism of government formation; it is a foundational commitment to the “equal political standing of citizens.” For those marginalised in almost every other sphere of life, the vote is an assertion of personhood: a moment when their judgment must count as much as that of the most privileged citizen. For many who endure humiliation and insult 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, voting offers a rare glimpse of what it means to be treated as human. This is the moment when the big babus bow before them, seeking their vote. The constitutional question is not whether their votes can change the government, but whether the state can deny them the opportunity to exercise an equal voice in choosing their representatives.And the apex court, in all its innocence, still believes it does not inhabit an ivory tower!There are two ways of looking at a polity: from above, from the standpoint of governance; and from below, from the standpoint of the people. The first is the Manusmriti way; the second, the constitutional way. The former prescribes an order for the people without deriving its authority from them. The latter derives its legitimacy from the people themselves. One constitutes the people as subjects of an order; the other recognises them as the authors of their political order.When one looks out of the window and sees neither the crying masses nor the ivory tower, it is perhaps because one is already inside it.The father of the nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, offered an eye-opening constitutional vantage point for moments of doubt: “I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test: Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny?”The system of justice, however, seems preoccupied with a different question: Will its decision disrupt the existing praxis of governance and thereby loosen the government’s grip on power?Why does every vote matter? Not merely because votes decide who comes to power, but because they help us understand how many people voted for a government and how many did not. In the 2024 general election, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance secured approximately 43.6% of the votes polled, while the remaining votes went to other parties and candidates. Given a turnout of 66.10%, the NDA’s share amounted to roughly 29% of the registered electorate. In other words, for every registered elector whose vote went to the NDA, more than two did not cast a vote for it. This does not mean that all those voters opposed the government; it means that the government cannot claim their votes as its mandate. Every eligible voter deleted from the electoral rolls further distorts an already imperfect picture of the people’s political will.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.The state of the mother of democracyThis is also why Indian youth and opposition parties are taking to the streets. Their collective voice, which is numerically louder than that of the ruling coalition, finds no adequate reflection in the institutions of governance. The problem is not simply that the majority did not vote for the ruling coalition. It is that a system which claims to represent the people has no meaningful way of translating the political will of those outside the ruling majority into the exercise of power. When even their right to vote is threatened, the streets become the place where a silenced political voice tries to make itself heard.Already, the Belgian historian and political thinker David Van Reybrouck, in his Against Elections: The Case for Democracy, makes a provocative argument: modern elections were designed not so much to empower the people as to install a new, non-hereditary aristocracy. The extension of the franchise made elections universal, but did not eliminate their aristocratic logic. Elections allow citizens to choose their rulers, but leave the business of ruling to a political class set apart from them. In this sense, popular sovereignty risks being reduced to the periodic act of casting a vote.The aristocratic principle, too, survives within the architecture of representative democracy, particularly in the second chamber. The Rajya Sabha can accommodate nominated members such as Sachin Tendulkar, Ilaiyaraaja and P. T. Usha, even as people take to the streets, clamouring for their voices to be heard. The silence of such members may be less important than the contradiction they embody: those who have a voice in parliament can afford to remain silent, while those whom they claim to represent – the people – must take to the streets to be heard.Aristotle, were he alive today, might not have recognised our faith in elections as the very essence of democracy. For him, election was an oligarchic principle, while selection by lot was democratic. What we celebrate as the triumph of popular sovereignty, he might have regarded as a system that allows the many to choose their rulers without granting them an equal opportunity to rule. For, as Van Reybrouck reminds us, Aristotle understood liberty as central to democracy: “The basis of a democratic state is liberty… One principle of liberty is for all to rule and be ruled in turn”.Who says ordinary people cannot govern?In other words, the most functional democracy would be one built on robust institutions that do not depend on the genius of those who run them, but can function effectively in the hands of ordinary people equipped with the basic skills required for governance. Such a democracy would dispel the myth of the strongman – the belief that governing requires extraordinary individuals rather than institutions designed to make power work for everyone. In such a democracy, sortition would give all those equipped with the requisite abilities an equal chance to govern.The most effective car is not one that only the best driver can operate, but one that anyone who knows how to drive can operate. Why should democracy be any different?Or, better still, consider my own experience. In 1994, when I was learning Telex, WordStar and computer programming in Thrissur, people around us looked at us students with a certain awe. Back then, they imagined that computers were so complex that only the brightest minds could understand them. Today, many of those same people own computers thousands of times more powerful than the machine I used then. The aura that once surrounded our modest expertise has disappeared; I no longer command any special reverence for possessing a smartphone, because almost everyone has one.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.Yet in politics, the aura of the exceptional individual persists. We have democratised access to technology, but we have yet to democratise our imagination of who is capable of governing. People continue to live in the fantasy of the strong leader rather than imagine, and institute, an efficient system in which ordinary people, given the opportunity, can govern competently. In this sense, the technologies of democracy have barely advanced since the 1990s – not because better alternatives are unavailable, but because the machinery of democracy remains in the hands of those incapable of imagining, let alone instituting, a more democratic politics.Instead of building a robust democratic mechanism in which ordinary people can share the power to rule, we have chest-thumping strongmen dispensing hatred, calling people termites and presenting themselves as the only ones capable of governing. The more democracy depends on the myth of the strong leader, the further it moves from the democratic principle that everyone has the right to rule and, in turn, be ruled.When the streets make institutions moveWithin weeks of the street protests, the ECI had begun retreating from several positions it had defended as administratively necessary, technically constrained, or institutionally settled. It eased the burden of personal hearings by directing Booth Level Officers to collect documents at voters’ homes; announced measures to facilitate the re-enrolment of voters left out of completed SIR exercises; and, after years of resistance, agreed to provide political parties with readable PDF copies of electoral rolls. It also announced a Special Summary Revision in 17 states and union territories and measures to improve transparency in the Commission’s own functioning, including the advance circulation of meeting agendas and the issuance of minutes. What had been presented as administratively or technically non-negotiable proved negotiable under public pressure.In any functioning democracy, such bureaucratic high-handedness could have been checked by institutional mechanisms of checks and balances. But a democracy driven by a fifty-six-inch chest has nothing left to check its excesses or correct its course. Our democracy is a 1950-model car, driven by the horsepower of fifty-six inches, on a road riddled with potholes.In the last seven decades, we have had ample time to build robust institutional mechanisms to address the sheer absurdity of an electoral system in which a party can secure power with fewer votes than its rivals, simply because the opposition’s votes are divided among competing parties. Yet no one seems to have found the time to put such safeguards in place. Everyone has been preoccupied with getting into the driver’s seat, each claiming to be the better driver, while the engine of democracy rusts away.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.The constitution cannot save itselfAmbedkar warned us of a danger at the very dawn of our constitutional republic: however good a Constitution may be, it can fail if those entrusted with its implementation prove unworthy of its ideals. We are witnessing that warning come true. The Constitution is not merely being violated in isolated instances; its moral and institutional foundations are crumbling before our very eyes.It is almost inconceivable that the 20th century, scarred by wars, colonialism and racial and caste oppression, also produced figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Ambedkar, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr., Nehru and Nelson Mandela – women and men who enlarged our moral imagination and gave substance to our ethical aspirations. This is not to endorse everything they thought or did, but to recognise their enduring contributions to humanity.Today, we find ourselves governed by petty-minded figures whose principal political skill seems to be the abuse of opponents and whose overriding ambition is to cling to power, whatever the cost.No compassion, no moral restraint, not even the slightest sense of shame.Their only claim to immortality is that they have won election after election – rigged or otherwise – without those victories necessarily reflecting the true will of the people. Like a schoolchild caught red-handed stealing who defends himself by insisting that he could not possibly be a thief because he has passed all his examinations with flying colours, they seem to believe that electoral victories are proof of moral worth and an NOC for immortality. But electoral success is no certificate of virtue, and power confers no claim to permanence. What endures is what one does with power, whose lives one diminishes, and what one leaves behind for humanity.They are Diogenes of Sinope stripped of his philosophical intent: people who perform the most indecent acts in public, not merely without shame, but with the swagger of those who mistake shamelessness for strength.The last resort of democracyThe task before the protesting youngsters is arduous: they have to create something new out of the wreckage of the old, to reimagine democracy from the very filth in which it lies buried. They have to bring karuna and maitri (both translate to versions of kindness) back into public life, in an atmosphere poisoned by a political discourse that reduces human beings to “termites.” They have to restore ahimsa, non-violence, to both the private and public spheres when protests are met with violence, and brave women are subjected to molestation and abuse. They have to reclaim a system of justice whose ethical compass is guided by Gandhi’s talisman: to judge every decision by whether it restores the poorest and weakest person to control over their own life and destiny. Above all, they have to imagine and build a system of governance that genuinely represents the will of the people, remains accountable to them, and can never be allowed to degenerate into authoritarian rule.In short, they have to reclaim democracy for the homeless and the shelterless, for ordinary people whose lives and destinies are at stake – not a decrepit old car whose driver boasts of 56-inch horsepower while the engine rusts and the road crumbles beneath its wheels.The verdict of historyLast week, during our college elections, I reminded my students of a historical irony they must never forget when they contest an election. In 1932, one man led a party that became the largest in the German parliament without winning a majority of the popular vote; another lost most of the elections he contested. The first was Adolf Hitler. The second was B.R. Ambedkar. Their political circumstances were, of course, vastly different. But history has delivered a verdict that no electoral arithmetic could have anticipated.One has been consigned to the ash heap of history; the other is rising from the ashes of electoral defeat like a phoenix.Electoral victories are temporary, and electoral defeats are not the last word. What endures is what one stands for, what one does to human beings, and what one leaves behind for humanity.Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan, who writes under the pen name a/nil, is a Professor of English at Government Arts and Science College, Pathirippala, Kerala. He is the author of the poetry collection The Absent Colour.