Lead article published in oHeraldo on August 24, 2026

The true measure of democracy is found in the safety of the dissenter

We want a clean, just, and democratic nation, but our social thinking and behaviour often appears to be deeply undemocratic. The lack of civic literacy creates a dangerous void, allowing majoritarian narratives to replace constitutional values. The lack of civic discipline, which puts self-interest over community well-being, enables manipulative political leadership. We seem to have developed a split political consciousness. For many, the Constitution is reduced to a historical relic rather than a living shield that protects their daily liberties. We castigate authoritarianism in public spaces while enforcing rigid caste, class, and religious hierarchies within our own domestic and corporate spheres.

The current political crisis in the country is not occurring in a vacuum. It is blooming on a deeply fertile ground of widespread public ignorance of political systems and a pervasive culture of citizen apathy. A fundamentalist pattern offers easy scapegoats for complex societal anxieties. They do not require everyone to be an active extremist. They merely require the masses to be passive spectators. If this toxic political climate is to be dismantled, the people’s movements must also transition from highlighting complaints about rampant corruption and attacks on public dissent to radical civic self-examination.

A critical diagnosis of the modern framework of protests reveals an immense structural and philosophical departure from the foundational lineage of Indian resistance. A movement that plays to the tunes of a polarised public thinking, without challenging how that public acts, builds its house on shifting sands. It treats political action as an occasional event with a viral video or a weekend demonstration rather than an enduring and daily ethical practice. Modern movements ignore the moral health of society and accept the citizenry exactly as it is, even when that citizenry has been thoroughly compromised by years of hyper-nationalist media, deep-seated communal biases, and everyday civic apathy.

The recent surge in youth protests across the country proves that the desire for democratic renewal is alive. We see an abundance of passion, anger, and desire for change in the younger generations. But anger is said to be a highly volatile fuel which, as much as it burns bright, tends to burn out quickly. To understand why peaceful modern campaigns so often dissolve into cynicism, or get co-opted by the very regimes they oppose, we must contrast them with Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of Satyagraha.

For Gandhi, a freedom struggle was never merely about replacing a tyrant or exposing State failure; it was about “Satyagraha” (insistence on truth or truth force) by cultivating the “Atma Shakti” (soul force) of the Satyagrahi. This process involved a radical, introspective transformation of the self that turned ordinary individuals into unshakeable agents of non-violent defiance. We need to recognise that Gandhi’s method of Satyagraha was never a passive political tactic; it was an active and spiritual science. Gandhi understood that an oppressive empire does not exist in a vacuum. It survives because the populace, out of fear, greed, or moral laziness, chooses to cooperate with its structures. Therefore, the primary battlefield of Satyagraha was never the British Viceroy’s chambers. It was targeted at forming the conscience of the individual citizen.

Gandhiji’s ‘soul force’ demanded a rigorous, often uncomfortable introspection. It was focused on ‘kya karti Public’, which differs from the emphasis on understanding ‘kya bolti Public’ by some recent movements. Before a volunteer could march against the oppressive colonial laws or face the batons of the colonial police, they had to commit to absolute self-discipline. This involved a deliberate dismantling of internal prejudices, a commitment to communal harmony, and the practice of radical empathy even toward the oppressor.

Non-violence was not a weapon of the weak; it was the ultimate demonstration of an internal strength so profound that it rendered the state’s physical weapons obsolete. By anchoring resistance in self-purification, Gandhi created an asymmetric moral battlefield. When an empire confronted a Satyagrahi, it was not fighting a political competitor. It was fighting its own conscience reflected in the unyielding moral clarity of a self-governed individual.

The true measure of a democracy is not found in the comfort of its conformists, but in the safety of its critics. The Indian Constitution was explicitly engineered to protect the dissenter. A former Justice of the Apex Court, in the course of a hearing in a petition challenging a draconian anti-terrorism law invoked by the State against some protestors in 2020, was reported to have expressed his anguish with a remark that, “Dissent is the safety valve of democracy. If pressure valves are shut, the machinery will burst.”

The framers of our republic, having spent decades resisting colonial suppression, understood that a state unchecked by public criticism inevitably lapses into tyranny. In a healthy democracy, political parties are expected to host a clash of ideas, represent diverse regional interests, and allow open debate before arriving at a consensus. In contrast, a party obsessed with the optics of absolute unity views internal debate not as a strength, but as a dangerous vulnerability.

The unmistakable signal that the democracy showcased on the exterior is actually hollow within has been amply demonstrated by the government through its recent response to the student protests against governance failures. Force, intimidation and legal retaliation have replaced dialogue with aggrieved citizens. By treating disagreement as disloyalty and protests as a national security threat, fundamentalist impulses within the State apparatus are actively rewriting our constitutional realities without ever changing the letter of the document. The nation stares at a possible slide into a majoritarian autocracy disguised as a democracy, where laws are tools of oppression and citizenship is conditional. The governance pattern reveals that the State’s economic welfare schemes are not designed as rights-based entitlements to empower citizens, but as patron-client handouts meant to manufacture political docility among the impoverished masses while stripping them of their fundamental rights.