Wrapped in Saffron, Drenched in Lies: The Business of Indian Democracy

 

Wrapped in Saffron, Drenched in Lies: The Business of Indian Democracy

The Great Indian Lie
How propaganda, poverty, and political cowardice created a democracy only the privileged can afford.

India proudly wears the label of the world’s largest democracy. But beneath the electoral slogans and ceremonial voting lies a hard truth: this democracy was never designed to serve the poor—it was built to control them.

Across villages, cities, and states, a pattern repeats daily: the powerful manipulate the system for profit, the poor are pacified with promises or rations, and anyone seeking truth is labeled a threat. Institutions that were meant to defend the people now defend the privileged. Justice is no longer blind—it’s blindfolded.

Everyday examples across India—from wrongful arrests to manipulated elections—show that the system doesn’t fail accidentally. It functions exactly as intended: to preserve the interests of those in power and keep the majority uneducated, dependent, and silent. The law bends for those with money. Public resources are quietly privatized. And government propaganda replaces accountability.

In India, truth is not protected—it is feared. Officers who try to investigate honestly are obstructed or punished. Journalists who report inconvenient facts face harassment, violence, or death. Judges who rule against the powerful find themselves transferred, framed, or mysteriously silenced. And when truth does manage to surface—say, when a hidden stash of bribe money is accidentally discovered in a fire—there are no prosecutions. Just silence. This is not chaos. It is an organized suppression of accountability.

India is full of individuals—officers, bureaucrats, teachers, even judges—who know the system is wrong. Some try to break the pattern. But even they are often flawed, compromised by fear, trapped by loyalty, or crushed by their own past. Still, when they attempt to do the right thing, the higher authorities step in—not to support the truth, but to bury it. The concern isn’t justice—it’s control.

This happens not in fiction, but in reality, every day in every state. Whether it’s a murder, a land grab, a rape, a financial scam—what matters most to the people in power is managing perception, not delivering justice.

Even when Indian entertainment dares to reflect the truth, the audience barely flinches. A recent example, Kohrra, briefly pulled the curtain back. It showed a police force riddled with pressure, politics, and apathy. A flawed cop—broken himself—tries to do the right thing, only to face a wall of suppression from above. The story centered on a privileged family's refusal to face an uncomfortable truth, and how others—poor, innocent people—became collateral damage. What Kohrra managed to hint at, real India lives every single day. Fiction gives us a glimpse. Reality never turns the camera off.

The real tragedy isn’t just poverty. It’s that the poor are kept too uneducated to recognize their own political value. They don’t understand how policy affects them. They don’t see how their vote could demand change. And so they are easily manipulated—by gods, by caste, by fake news, or by a sack of free grain.

Modi’s expansion of the Right to Food policy to 850 million people is not a solution to poverty—it’s a strategy to institutionalize dependence. The BJP took an idea from the Congress-era welfare scheme and repackaged it as generosity, while quietly selling off public wealth to private allies. The poor get 5 kg rice. The rich get banks, airports, and entire public sectors.

India’s elections are no longer about governance—they are about narratives, noise, and nationalism. The BJP understands this perfectly. Despite glaring failures in education, healthcare, employment, and justice, it wins elections by feeding voters fear, fantasy, and freebies.

In Delhi, even after AAP transformed public services—building world-class schools, clinics, and affordable utilities—many voters still fell for BJP’s narrative of religion and nationalism. This didn’t happen because they’re foolish. It happened because they’ve never been taught how government actually works. A population that doesn’t understand governance is easy to govern—and easier to exploit.

There’s a reason why most political parties talk about education but never reform it. An educated population is dangerous to the status quo. Educated citizens ask questions. They demand evidence. They stop worshipping leaders and start evaluating them.

Only one political party—AAP—has made education central to its governance. It’s no coincidence that AAP faces the most aggressive opposition from mainstream media, central agencies, and political adversaries. The BJP doesn’t just attack their model—it jails AAP leaders for daring to think differently. It then steals AAP’s policies, promising voters it will do five times better—only to abandon them later with no accountability. Even other opposition parties, long comfortable with the old corrupt system, refuse to stand with AAP—not out of disagreement, but out of fear. They know the invisible class of India is too neglected, too uneducated, and too tired to recognize who’s truly working for them.

And perhaps the most bitter irony? For centuries, Indians have been conditioned to place their faith in men wearing saffron. Sadhus, gurus, monks—the symbol of the robe was always trust. That faith has now been hijacked. The same saffron that once stood for renunciation has been turned into a uniform of political exploitation. If AAP had worn saffron, maybe more people would have listened. But AAP came dressed as ordinary people—with honesty, ideas, and policy. And in a country trained to worship robes, maybe that wasn’t dramatic enough.

Free food maintains silence. Free thought ignites resistance.

The problem isn’t that India’s democracy has failed. The problem is that it was built to look successful while systematically silencing the poor. The judiciary is compromised. The police are politicized. The media is purchased. The election process is rigged not just with machines, but with misinformation. And while saffron-clad ideological enforcers march the streets shouting slogans, the truth is being lynched quietly in the backroom.

India doesn't need another temple or another statue. It doesn’t need another batch of slogans. It needs a population that understands power—and how it's used against them. Only education can deliver that understanding. Only education can make the invisible visible.

Until that happens, democracy in India will remain a spectacle for the privileged, and a trap for the rest.