On the morning of December 4, 2024, Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare was killed by Luigi Mangione firing multiple shots point-blank. While predictable responses on this premeditated murder poured in — headlines, corporate statements, a nation apparently in grief — what followed was not predictable. Millions of ordinary, law-abiding citizens — people with no personal grievance against Thompson, no connection to UnitedHealthcare — went online not to mourn, but to celebrate. That moment of rage, not the shooting, is the event that every government on earth should be reading with the urgency it deserves.Thompson’s murder was not spontaneous. It was the final, concentrated expression of angst accumulated across years — towards an extractive business model in which opaque systems denied medical claims at scale, profits grew while patients appealed, and the institution that held life-and-death power over millions of customers operated with impunity beyond any accountability. UnitedHealthcare did not lose its moral authority when Thompson was killed. It had been haemorrhaging it slowly with denied requests and rejected appeals.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.Julius Caesar, when asked why he had divorced his wife Pompeia – despite believing her innocent of wrongdoing – reportedly replied that Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion. The principle — that an institution holding power over citizens’ lives must be seen to operate with integrity, not merely claim to — has not changed.Closer home, the NEET-UG paper leaks did not merely cheat hundreds of thousands of students. It told an entire generation of aspirants — many of them the first in their families to pursue medicine, many from states where a government examination result is the only available ladder — that merit was the advertised criterion, not the actual one. By the morning of the examination, photographs of the question paper had already been forwarded to co-conspirators. Students had paid lakhs to brokers for papers the system was supposed to protect. The anger that erupted was not really about examinations. It was about the betrayal of institutional promise: the belief that if a citizen works within the rules, the rules will work in return.In counterinsurgency doctrine, the loss of moral authority is the point of no return. The moment a population stops seeing an institution as its protector and starts seeing it as an occupying force, that institution has already lost — regardless of its firepower, regardless of its legal mandate. Armies that forgot this — in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan — discovered that no tactical competence, no weight of numbers, no intelligence advantage can substitute for the moral compact that makes a population willing to be governed. Firepower and force might enforce temporal subjugation but legitimacy is needed for sustained governance.Every institution that holds consequential power over ordinary lives is in a continuous, invisible negotiation with the population it governs. As long as people believe the institution operates with integrity, the covenant holds. When that belief breaks, no policy, no public relations campaign, no court verdict restores it. The legal system cannot reclaim what the social contract has already breached.This is the fatal miscalculation embedded in Mangione’s prosecution. His conviction will not diminish the anger that celebrated Thompson’s death, instead it will compound. Mangione will become a martyr: the man who acted on what millions felt but could not articulate. For the common people, every year of his sentence is proof that the system protects itself, not the people. The institution wins in court and loses in the public imagination simultaneously. That is precisely the path to delegitimisation, operating exactly as history predicts.There is a reality that governing classes consistently underestimate: large populations cannot be governed directly. India, even with the fourth largest security forces in the world, has just 5 million troops to uphold its order. No army is large enough, no bureaucracy is comprehensive enough and no surveillance apparatus is fearsome enough to substitute for what institutions actually provide — the distributed, ambient, daily belief among hundreds of millions of people that the system is, by and large, fair. That belief is the governance infrastructure. Taken for granted until it is gone but catastrophic when it is.India has 1.4 billion people. The state cannot reach each of them personally. What the state can do — what it has always done — is operate through institutions that carry its authority into lives it can never directly touch. Bodies that administer justice without fear or favour. Processes that evaluate merit without leakage or compromise. Regulatory functions whose independence from the governments that appoint them is constitutionally assumed. Mechanisms that convert popular will into democratic outcomes with credible neutrality. These are not bureaucratic overheads. They are the only mechanism through which a democracy at India’s scale has ever been governable.When any of these mechanisms is systematically compromised — through politicised appointments, eroded neutrality, or the failure to uphold meritocracy — the government not only loses control, it also destroys the only infrastructure through which control was ever possible. The result is a population that is withdrawing its belief from the system, and waiting for a moment, a symbol, a Mangione, to discover that it is not alone.Governing classes that dismiss the Mangione case as an American aberration aren’t connecting the dots.On the morning of May 15, 2026, a routine Supreme Court of India hearing produced an offhand remark from the bench — that unemployed young Indians were like cockroaches, parasites attacking the system. The words were spoken, not by a politician at a rally, but by the occupant of the highest judicial office in the Republic. A clarification followed but petered out in an ecosystem that had already made up its mind. Within six days, 22 million citizens had signed up for a satirical party named after the insult and reeking of innuendo — more than double the Instagram following of the world’s largest political party, built without a rupee, or even an office. The movement’s website was taken down. Its accounts went dark. The system’s instinct, when millions discovered that they are not alone, should be to acknowledge the angst and fix it – not to try and switch off the light. Because darkness is where cockroaches, and conspiracies, breed best.The author is the former CEO of NATGRID and group president of Reliance Industries.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.