Indian Politics Is Not The Problem, Indian Society Is

There is something unsettling about staring into a mirror for too long. Eventually, the image begins to change. You start noticing things you’d rather ignore, the tired eyes, the scars, the lines of stress or shame. Indian politics, if you ask me, is exactly that mirror. Cracked, dusty, crooked in the corners, but undeniably real. We glance at it, flinch, then quickly look away.

Because it doesn’t show us the India of glossy ad campaigns or Republic Day parades. Not the India that sends satellites into orbit or breaks startup funding records. It shows us the other India, the one we live in, day to day. The one of broken traffic lights, corrupt clerks, loud neighbours, and rules bent for convenience. One of the jugaad, not justice. The one we’ve all helped build.

The Indian Problem: Why the Rot Is Everywhere

We often point fingers at politicians. They’re an easy target, after all. They lie, they switch parties mid-speech, they decorate ration bags with their own faces. And it’s all true. But what if, just what if, they’re not aberrations, but symptoms? What if most of them are doing exactly what we’d do in their place, just with better suits and louder microphones?

If a man bribes a traffic cop today, would he really behave differently if he were in a minister’s chair tomorrow? We don’t hate corruption, we just hate being excluded from the deal. Power isn’t the problem. It’s the silent admiration we have for those who wield it without accountability.

Indian society celebrates smart shortcuts. We valorise the one who jumps the queue, not the one who waits. Paying taxes is seen as naive. Ethics are optional; efficiency is everything. In such a setup, it’s no surprise that the people who rise to political power often embody the same values, just scaled up. They aren’t foreign to us, they are familiar. They’re not disappointing because they’ve changed. They’re disappointing because they haven’t.

Civility Has Left the Room & the Parliament

Turn on the television any evening and try to distinguish between a news debate and a session in Parliament. Both are filled with shouting matches, performative outrage, personal insults, and walkouts. In theory, these should be spaces of serious dialogue, one informing the public, the other shaping public policy. But more often, they resemble competitive shouting contests.

And we, the audience, reward that behaviour. We cheer when someone “destroys” the opposition, even if it means sidestepping every important issue. We don’t reward civility, we label it as weak. In that sense, Parliament is not dysfunctional; it is highly functional in a country where performance trumps purpose.

This isn’t just a matter of decorum. It’s a reflection of what society finds entertaining, valuable, and “strong.” When our MPs brawl or disrupt proceedings, they aren’t acting outside our norms, they’re performing within them.

When Cruelty Becomes Content and Strategy

A darker reality lurks behind the drama. We’ve become a society that’s disturbingly comfortable with witnessing pain. A man gets lynched, and someone records it instead of intervening. A woman is harassed online, and trolls use her trauma as sport. Political leaders hand out biscuits to starving children for a photo-op, and we react with irony, not outrage. We don’t flinch anymore, we scroll past.

Politics reflects this loss of empathy. It has turned cruelty into a strategy. Hate speech, caste slurs, religious provocation, these aren’t fringe outbursts anymore. They are mobilisation tools. Campaigns are now calibrated to inflame, not inspire. And the crueller the message, the more viral the reach.

Empathy doesn’t poll well. Anger does.

The Circus Still Rolls On

And yet, somehow, the system lumbers on. Elections in India are at once a celebration and a con job. Campaign promises are often dead on arrival. Loudspeakers blare while roads crack. Liquor is distributed in the name of democracy. Bribes are dressed up as “incentives.” And still, people vote.

That act of showing up to vote, speaks of a stubborn kind of hope. Not necessarily in politicians, but in the idea of choice itself. For all the cynicism, voter turnout remains robust. This isn’t blind faith, it’s a survival instinct.

The machine is rusted, and the noise is deafening. But it keeps moving. It shouldn’t work. But it does. Barely.

India as a Perfectly Functional Anarchy

Maybe we need to reconsider what “failure” looks like. India isn’t a failed state. It’s a functioning anarchy. Roads are cratered, but traffic flows. Government offices are chaotic, but passports still arrive. Schools are underfunded, yet millions graduate every year. Nothing works properly, yet everything works somehow.

We’ve internalised this friction. We thrive in chaos, not order. We expect things to be late, broken, and inefficient. And when they aren’t, we’re surprised. This adaptability is both our strength and our weakness. We make dysfunction livable and thus, we accept it.

So when Parliament descends into chaos, it isn’t an anomaly. It’s continuity. It’s the logic of the street carried into the well of the House.

Indian Parliament as Our Collective Mirror

We treat Parliament like it should be above the mess, as if it ought to rescue us from ourselves. But that’s magical thinking. MPs don’t come from Mars. They come from our towns, our schools, our colleges. They are not separate from society, they are its product.

Parliament doesn’t betray Indian values. It expresses them. In amplified, televised form. Every time we justify a bribe, ignore a rule, abuse someone online, or laugh at someone else’s pain, we cast a vote for the kind of politics we claim to hate.

The line between the governed and the governors has always been blurry. Politics, in India, is not a sideshow. It is the main event. And we are all actors.

What Happens Now?

It’s comforting to say, “India needs better leaders.” It’s more honest to say, “India needs better people.” Because the truth is uncomfortable: the politics we curse every evening is just the society we live in, turned up to eleven. Every shortcut taken, every abuse is ignored.

Every time we keep silent when it’s easier to do so, all of it accumulates. And politics simply carries that weight forward, with more lights and bigger stakes.

Blaming Parliament for its incivility is like blaming a mirror for showing your reflection. It’s not the institution that needs cleansing, it’s the ecosystem around it. If we want civility in Parliament, we need to practice it in our daily lives. Empathy in policy, must first be nurtured in culture. If we want dignity in leadership, we must restore it at home, in classrooms, on WhatsApp, in traffic.

Until Then, the Indian Mirror Remains Unbroken

Until we change what’s being reflected, the image will remain the same. The House will echo the street. The shouting will drown out the substance. The outrage will outperform reason.

And the mirror, crooked, cracked, unforgiving—will keep showing us the same face. Ours.