India's democracy is staggering under narcissistic politics

 Lead Article published in oHeraldo on June 22, 2026

The personal image increasingly overshadows institutions, policies, and collective governance.

In recent years, a familiar pattern has come to dominate India’s politics. Democracy is now about personalisation of power, conflation of leader and nation, narrative management, loyalty-centred politics, and the elevation of spectacle over institutional accountability. This is a style of politics centred less on institutions, policies, and collective problem-solving than on identity, attention, spectacle, and emotional gratification. Such politics thrives on the cultivation of leaders who present themselves as singular saviours, victims, or embodiments of the people's will. The features of contemporary Indian governance resemble patterns that political psychologists associate with ‘narcissistic politics’.

A political atmosphere now prevails wherein disagreement ceases to be democratic participation and becomes evidence of disloyalty. Criticism of the government is equated to criticism of the nation itself. Every question posed to the ruling establishment, criticism of policies, protest movement, uncomfortable international report, and dissenting voice is quickly framed as sedition and part of a larger foreign conspiracy to destabilise the nation. It instantly gets framed as externally manipulated, while supportive narratives are treated as expressions of authentic nationalism.

Political theorists sometimes describe this as “securitising dissent”, whereby ordinary democratic disagreement is twisted into a matter of national security. Once criticism is moved into that category, governments gain moral justification for surveillance, crackdowns, censorship, or public vilification. The danger of such a “foreign conspiracy” framework lies in how easily it absolves governments of accountability. It merely has to discredit the critic under the guise of protecting national interests. When power continuously frames criticism as sabotage, democracy slowly ceases to function as a system of accountability. It begins functioning as a system in loyalty testing. Patriotism becomes conditional upon political conformity.

Narcissistic political authority thrives on spectacle. It encourages people to view politics not as a collective effort to solve shared problems but as a stage upon which identities are performed and affirmed. From a political and sociological perspective, the relentless display of leaders' faces on government banners and publicity materials reflects a deeper problem. This phenomenon may get ignored as a harmless feature of modern politics. It is anything but harmless. Supporters of such displays may argue that leaders deserve recognition for their work. However, there is a difference between recognition and glorification. Recognition informs citizens about who is responsible for decisions. Glorification places the leader at the centre of every public activity, regardless of relevance.

When governance is marketed through carefully curated images, public debate can become more concerned with optics than performance. Leaders are rewarded for visibility rather than effectiveness. Constant visual glorification of political leaders sends the opposite message that institutions matter less than the individuals who temporarily occupy positions of power. The personal image increasingly overshadows institutions, policies, and collective governance. Citizens come to view governance through personalities rather than institutions, making the constant projection of political faces seem inevitable rather than problematic. In that sense, public acceptance of such practices may itself be a symptom of a narcissistic political order. The warning sign is the emergence of a political culture in which one individual becomes the centre of reality, criticism becomes heresy, and loyalty matters more than truth.

The rise of narcissistic politics with leaders cultivating exaggerated self-images, demanding personal loyalty, and dominating public discourse through spectacle, poses a profound challenge to the quality of electoral choice. Instead of evaluating candidates based on policy competence, administrative record, or constitutional values, voters are encouraged to focus on personal narratives. Elections become emotional contests. When politics becomes personality-centric, supporters may overlook policy failures because criticism of the leader is perceived as a personal attack. Narcissistic politics, by contrast, often encourages the replacement of facts with narratives tailored to preserve the leader's image. Voters may find themselves making decisions based less on verifiable performance and more on emotional identification, fear, or admiration.

Such political phenomena may be better understood through a different framework, the psychology of abuse. The deeper impact of such narcissistic politics is not merely restricted to leadership. When politics begins to mirror the logic of abusive relationships, the greatest danger is not that citizens become convinced, they become conditioned. The consistent practice of such politics gradually drives citizens into adopting similar patterns of political engagement. It reshapes citizenship itself. Individuals are encouraged to interpret compromise as humiliation, criticism as persecution, and political loss as an existential threat. Under such conditions, democratic institutions remain formally intact while the psychological foundations of democratic citizenship erode. This can weaken critical thinking, encourage tribalism, and reduce accountability.

In healthy democracies, participation is grounded in deliberation, compromise, and a recognition that political life is necessarily plural. Higher engagement, louder public voices, and greater activism are generally taken as signs of democratic health. A nation of 1.4 billion people cannot remain intellectually secure if every contrary opinion is treated as evidence of betrayal. In fact, democracies are enriched by citizens who are willing to question power, regardless of which party governs. The strength of a democracy lies not in unanimous applause, but in its ability to withstand disagreement without seeing ghosts behind every voice. Governments change, the republic endures.

In an age increasingly shaped by such personality-driven politics, not all participation strengthens democracy. Public discourse in a narcissistic political environment may become centred on personalities, symbolic victories, emotional gratification, and group loyalty. As a result, the political solutions that emerge may address symptoms, identities, or immediate emotional needs rather than underlying structural causes. Citizens can be drawn into forms of engagement that feel like movements for change while actually reinforcing unhealthy political cultures. People become more politically active while becoming less politically empowered. When narcissistic politics dominates the electoral landscape, democracy risks becoming a mirror reflecting the ambitions of its leaders rather than the aspirations of its people.