By Geetha V P
We Indians proudly call ourselves the world’s largest democracy, yet a quiet look at how the system actually works today leaves little room for any pride. The voter, who is constitutionally sovereign, has been reduced to a subject who, every five year elects a new master, and then waits obediently until the next coronation. What we witness is no longer an election to choose temporary representatives; it is a high-stakes war fought with black money, muscle power, freebies, and high degree trickery. The only commandment shared by almost every serious contestant is simple: win by any means, stay in power at any cost.
The Price Tag on a Parliamentary Seat
The numbers are no longer shameful secrets; they are flaunted. To win one Lok Sabha seat in 2024, the average successful candidate spent between ₹40 crore and ₹100 crore—roughly 40 to 100 times the legal limit of ₹95 lakh. Assembly seats are cheaper but still explicit: the cap is ₹40 lakh, the reality is many times higher.
The 2024 general election is estimated to have cost ₹1.35 lakh crore in unofficial expenditure, while parties officially declared little more than ₹3,300 crore. The Bihar Assembly election of November 2025 followed the same script: more than 450 helicopter sorties, star campaigners flown in like royals, and pre-poll promises whose price tag touched ₹33,000 crore in freebies alone. Days before the Model Code of Conduct came into force, the outgoing NDA government in Bihar allegedly diverted ₹14,000 crore of World Bank funds meant for development projects. No one was surprised; hardly anyone even protested.
Recovery of Investment First, Public Service Never
The newly elected representative’s first task is to recover the “investment” and, if possible, turn a handsome profit before the next hustle. Governance is an interruption, public service an afterthought. That is why criminality and elected office have become inseparable. In the 2024 Lok Sabha, 43% of MPs declared criminal cases against themselves; 29% face grave charges—murder, attempt to murder, rape, kidnapping. In several state assemblies the figure crosses 60%. Money and muscle, not merit, open the door to Parliament and Vidhan Sabhas.
Voters keep re-electing the same accused because most no longer vote for the person but for party symbol, caste, religion, cash, or a packet of liquor. A party can win an absolute majority of seats with 31–37% of the popular vote (as the BJP did in 2014, 2019, and again in 2024) while 63–69% who voted against it are simply told to shut up for five years. The winners then govern as if they enjoy the consent of every single citizen.
Buying and Selling Legislators in Broad Daylight
When the verdict is fractured, legislators themselves become commodities. Maharashtra 2019, Madhya Pradesh 2020, Karnataka 2019 and 2023, Goa, Manipur, Arunachal—the list is long. MLAs are confined to five-star resorts, flown in private jets, and purchased at market rates that now run into crores per head. The anti-defection law exists on paper; in practice, partisan Speakers have neutered it. Governments that lose their majority on the floor survive by buying a new one.
Loot, Distribute Crumbs, Repeat
The classic model is now perfected: extract money from the public exchequer through inflated contracts, opaque tenders, and crony allotments; return a tiny fraction to voters in the form of “welfare schemes” just before the election; pose as generous benefactors; get re-elected. The voter applauds the leader’s munificence, never realising the money originally belonged to him.
The scams of the past—Coal block allocations (₹1.76 lakh crore), 2G spectrum (₹1.76 lakh crore as per CAG, though courts later diluted it), Commonwealth Games (₹70,000 crore)—have merely changed names and beneficiaries. Under the present dispensation, public-sector bank frauds alone crossed ₹5.35 lakh crore in write-offs, almost all of it owed by a handful of wilful defaulters enjoying political protection. Electoral bonds, sold as a reform, turned into the most sophisticated laundering machine yet devised.
The Bihar polls epitomize this cynicism. Just before the schedule was announced in late October 2025, the Nitish Kumar government rolled out the Mukhyamantri Mahila Samman Yojana, transferring ₹10,000 each to over 1.5 crore women—a direct cash handout costing at least ₹15,000 crore in its first installment alone. Distribution not only began hours ahead of the poll notification but continued unabated even after the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) took effect on October 26, blatantly violating rules against inducements to voters. Opposition leaders like Ashok Gehlot and Sharad Pawar decried it as a “vote-buying spree” in collusion with the Election Commission of India (ECI), which issued no advisories or halts—unlike its swift interventions in Tamil Nadu’s 2021 polls, where it paused similar schemes by the ruling AIADMK. This wasn’t benevolence; it was a textbook bribe, and the ECI’s silence only amplified perceptions of partisan favoritism.
The Hollowing Out of Institutions: The Fall of the ECI
Every institution that could hold power to account has been systematically weakened or captured. But none embodies this decay more starkly than the Election Commission of India (ECI), once hailed as the impartial conductor and protector of the world’s largest democracy. Today, it stands accused in a nationwide campaign—led by opposition figures like Rahul Gandhi under the #VoteChori banner—of orchestrating electoral fraud through manipulated voter rolls, ignored MCC violations, and overt bias toward the ruling BJP. Social media erupts with calls branding it a “puppet of the ruling party,” echoing sentiments from as far back as Indira Gandhi’s era, when the ECI was first lambasted for succumbing to executive pressure during the 1970s Emergency.
The flashpoint is the ECI’s 2025 Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, launched in Bihar and rolled out nationwide, which opposition parties claim deleted millions of legitimate voters (disproportionately from marginalized communities) while padding lists with fake entries favoring the NDA—allegedly adding over 100,000 ghosts in segments like Mahadevapura alone. This isn’t new reluctance; it’s a pattern of biased decisions, from dismissing EVM tampering complaints as “conspiracy theories” to issuing toothless notices on hate speech by ruling party leaders while swiftly targeting opposition voices. In Bihar’s polls, the ECI’s inaction on the ₹10,000 women’s handout—despite clear MCC breaches—has fueled outrage, with Congress alleging “collusion” and NCP demanding a review of how such “pre-poll sops” swayed results.
These grievances have spilled into the Supreme Court, where a slew of 2025 petitions— including the landmark Association for Democratic Reforms v. ECI—challenge the SIR’s legality, the ECI’s appointment process (which excludes the Chief Justice), and demands for full VVPAT verification. On November 11, 2025, a bench led by Justice Surya Kant issued notices to the ECI, halting related High Court proceedings and questioning its authority to probe citizenship during revisions—exchanges that laid bare the erosion of trust in the electoral guardian. Governors sit on Bills or dismiss elected governments at will. Investigating agencies have become hunting dogs for the ruling party. Even the higher judiciary, once the last fortress, is increasingly reluctant to confront the executive head-on.
The Silence of the Lambs
The deepest tragedy is the apathy—or worse, the enthusiasm—of the citizenry. We have become a nation of cheerleaders for whichever side we have chosen to worship. We celebrate when opposition leaders are jailed on flimsy grounds, when dissenting states are starved of funds, when elections are purchased in broad daylight while half our children remain stunted from chronic malnutrition. We have accepted that democracy is a five-yearly ritual of pressing a button and then surrendering all agencies until the next ritual.
A Miracle Being Squandered
India was once a miracle: a vast, poor, illiterate, impossibly diverse nation that kept democracy alive against all odds. Today we are knowingly squandering that inheritance. Unless citizens begin to vote for individual character rather than party symbol, unless we force genuine electoral reforms—state funding of elections, genuine inner-party democracy, proportional representation, and fiercely independent institutions like a truly autonomous ECI—the world’s largest democracy will complete its journey into the world’s most populous elected autocracy.
And the epitaph will read: “We, the people, voted for it—again and again.”
