When a Democracy Stops Reacting to Power’s Predation

S. Vikram, Political Commentator

A spectre is haunting Indian democracy — the spectre of its own indifference.

In 2012, the nation stopped. Students left campuses, office workers abandoned desks, candles flickered at every intersection from Delhi to Bengaluru. A young woman dying in a hospital had become the moral mirror of a republic, and for a brief, luminous moment, that republic did not look away. The Nirbhaya movement was raw, leaderless, and cut across every conceivable political line. It was India at its democratic best: outraged, ungovernable, and insistent that some violations could not be absorbed by the system.

Twelve years later, something has fundamentally altered. The same political class that was dragged to accountability then now moves through a landscape of allegations — sexual predation, surveillance, transactional power, institutional cover-up — with an ease that would have been unthinkable in the weeks after December 16, 2012. The question is no longer whether the system can produce outrage. It is whether the system has successfully taught a democracy to forget what outrage feels like.

I. The Evidence That Cannot Be Unseen

The Epstein files, released in early 2024, named no Indian politician among its thousands of pages of depositions and flight logs. That is not the point. The point is what those files revealed about how power operates when accountability evaporates: the construction of bodies as currency, the complicity of institutions, the systematic silencing that precedes any reckoning, and the eventual normalisation of what was once unthinkable. The question those files force upon any democracy is not “who was on the list?” but “what architectures of exploitation are we refusing to see in our own political order?”

Consider what has accumulated in plain sight.

Hardeep Puri, a senior Union minister, has been named in no indictment — the claim circulating in certain circles has no basis in public record. But the very circulation of such an allegation, and the absence of any institutional mechanism to either verify or refute it with credibility, speaks to something deeper: a public sphere where accountability has been replaced by ambient accusation, where serious charges dissolve into noise because no institution retains the authority to distinguish.

More significant, because it comes from inside the ideological family, are the statements of Subramaniam Swamy. A politician with decades of proximity to the ruling formation, Swamy has made specific allegations about women becoming Members of Parliament and even ministers by “extending favours” to the Prime Minister. These are not opposition talking points. They are the testimony of an insider, someone whose ideological credentials are beyond question within the Hindutva ecosystem. The institutional response has been silence — not denial, not engagement, but the quiet that precedes disappearance.

Madhu Kishwar, once a loyalist intellectual within the same ideological universe, broke publicly in a tweet that spoke of things she could no longer ignore. The precise content matters less than the form: a woman of impeccable ideological lineage, someone who spent decades within the fold, reaching a point where silence became impossible. Every such defection is a small seismograph reading of pressures within the structure.

Behind these public figures lies a constellation of allegations that the news cycle has processed into forgetfulness:

• Officers who have spoken about the surveillance of Mansi Soni, describing state power deployed as an instrument of personal control
• A purported letter to LK Advani from the husband of Anandiben Patel, raising questions that were never answered
• Journalistic reports concerning Anandiben Patel’s daughter that were published, read, and buried
• The unexplained midnight removal of the Prime Minister’s security officer in Kathmandu — an event whose lack of explanation is itself a form of information

None of these, taken alone, constitutes a scandal that topples governments. Taken together, they describe something with a shape: a pattern in which women who move within proximity to power — whether as journalists, bureaucrats, political workers, or aspirants — exist within a structure that simultaneously deploys them electorally, surveils them when they become inconvenient, silences them when they speak, and discards them when the political calculus shifts.

II. The Ideological Substrate

This pattern is not random. It emerges from a specific ideological architecture whose foundational texts and organising institutions have a coherent theory of women.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the ruling political formation, was built around a specific masculine ideal. The shakha — the daily gathering of men in shorts, engaged in physical drill and ideological instruction — is not merely an organisational form. It is a masculinity project, designed to produce a Hindu male who is simultaneously celibate in public and virile in defence of the nation. K.B. Hedgewar and M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS’s foundational leaders, were explicit: the Sangh itself was the family. The brahmachari ideal served a precise organisational function — eliminating competing loyalties (wife, children, domestic obligations) to create total availability to the organisation and to the fraternal bond that was the actual cement of the cadre structure.

What happens to women in such a cosmology? They appear in specific, tightly controlled roles:

• As mothers who produce sons for the nation
• As symbols — Bharat Mata, the violated goddess whose honour justifies violence against the other
• As vessels of cultural purity whose bodies must be protected from the outsider
• As possessions whose autonomy is a threat to the patriarchal order on which the entire structure rests

The Rashtra Sevika Samiti was created as a parallel, subordinate structure — women organised for the nation, but not within it as equals. The distinction is crucial. In Hindutva’s foundational texts, women do not exercise civilisational pride; they are instrumental in it. They do not inherit the nation; they reproduce it. Their bodies are the territory on which honour is inscribed and defended — which is why their violation by the “other” (the Muslim, the lower-caste man, the foreigner) is catastrophised as civilisational attack, while violation within the formation is managed as a private matter, a disciplinary issue, or denied entirely.

This is not hypocrisy. It is structural consistency within a moral universe where the wrong of sexual violence is not located in the violation of a woman’s personhood but in the violation of patriarchal property rights. An insider cannot violate what he is entitled to dominate.

III. The Repression-Aggression Loop

What makes this ideological architecture particularly dangerous for a democracy is the psychic economy it produces.

Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927), despite its imperial framing and the furious rejection it received from Indian nationalists, contained an observation that serious Indian thinkers could not entirely dismiss. Mayo argued that the systematic repression of sexuality within the domestic order — enforced through child marriage, enforced widowhood, the subordination of women’s bodies to ritual and patriarchal control — produced a psychologically distorted masculine subject: one simultaneously dominant over women and profoundly stunted in his capacity for mature, autonomous selfhood. The zenana did not merely confine women; it produced men incapable of genuine intimacy, men whose sexuality was organised around power and shame rather than mutuality and recognition.

Mayo’s colonial conclusions were rightly rejected. But her diagnostic insight — that sexual repression and political pathology travel together — has been confirmed by a century of political psychology.

The colonial experience added a second layer of emasculation. The British subject was feminised by imperial discourse: weak, irrational, unfit for self-governance. The Hindu upper-caste male carried a double wound — emasculated within his own domestic order, then re-emasculated by the colonial gaze.

Hindutva germinated precisely in this psychic soil. Savarkar, Golwalkar, Hedgewar were explicitly preoccupied with masculine regeneration — the production of a virile Hindu body politic capable of resisting Muslim “aggression” and British condescension. The RSS was not merely political organisation; it was a masculinity project designed to repair a wound that its own analysis kept perpetually open.

This is where the loop becomes dangerous.

The structure operates as follows:

1. Repression of authentic sexuality and intimacy within the social order creates psychic accumulation — desire, shame, rage, all fused together without legitimate outlet
2. This accumulation cannot be directed inward at the patriarchal system that caused it, because that system is also the source of whatever masculine identity and status the subject possesses
3. It therefore seeks external objects — women who transgress, minorities who “threaten,” the nation’s honour as a displaced erotic object
4. Political formations that understand this — consciously or intuitively — weaponise the loop: they simultaneously enforce the repressive order (cow protection, love jihad panic, dress codes) and offer the release valve of reactive aggression (mob violence, online harassment, the sexualised brutality of communal riots)

This is not a bug. It is the operating system.

The figures allegedly engaged in predation within the ruling formation are not contradicting Hindutva’s moral posture; they are expressing its inner logic. The same ideology that venerates the desexualised, sacrificial mother figure degrades the available woman — the one who moves in public, works, travels, dares to enter male space. Violence against such a woman is, in this moral universe, cosmically appropriate. She asked for it. She deserved it. She was never a person in the first place.

IV. The Predators Who Are Protected

If this were merely ideology, it would be a matter for intellectual history. But ideology has consequences, and the consequences in contemporary India are documented, public, and largely unaddressed.

The Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh case is instructive. The former Wrestling Federation of India president, also a sitting Member of Parliament from the ruling party, faced detailed allegations of sexual harassment from multiple female wrestlers — including minors — over a period of years. The wrestlers protested publicly, sat on streets, were detained, were offered negotiations that went nowhere, and eventually returned to the streets. The institutional response was a masterclass in the politics of absorption: investigations that proceeded at geological speed, chargesheets that arrived after the political moment had passed, and a complete absence of political cost for the accused or his party.

The Prajwal Revanna case followed a similar arc. The MP from Karnataka, son of a former minister and grandson of a former Prime Minister, faced allegations of sexual assault — including recorded videos of multiple women — that emerged during the 2024 election campaign. The party’s initial response was to distance itself; its subsequent response was to allow the institutional machinery to move so slowly that the news cycle moved on.

The Unnao rape case, involving a BJP MLA who allegedly raped a minor and whose family subsequently attempted to kill the victim and murder her lawyer, was only resolved because the Supreme Court intervened and transferred the case to Delhi — an extraordinary admission that the local machinery, under political influence, could not be trusted to deliver justice.

These are not isolated incidents. They are the visible edge of a pattern: the political formation that presents itself as the defender of Hindu women against predatory outsiders has systematically protected its own predators when they are sufficiently powerful.

V. The Social Media Paradox

The digital public sphere has not solved this problem. It has made it more intractable.

Social media in India functions as a paradox generator: maximum noise, minimum accountability. Allegations circulate at light speed; counter-allegations do the same. Positions blur in the algorithmic churn. The citizen who logs on in the morning finds the Mansi Soni story trending, then finds it denounced as opposition propaganda, then finds a different scandal, then finds a celebrity feud, and by evening has no clear sense of what happened, what was alleged, or what was substantiated.

This is not an accident of technology. It is a structural feature of a media ecosystem where the instruments of information have been captured by the same forces they are meant to hold accountable. The fragmentation of the public sphere — into ideological silos, each with its own facts, its own timelines, its own moral grammar — means that outrage can be contained. Those already persuaded are outraged; those who need persuading never encounter the information in a form that demands engagement.

The most effective strategy for suppressing democratic accountability is not censorship. It is noise.

VI. 2012 and Now: The Democratic Thermometer

The comparison with 2012 is the sharpest diagnostic instrument available.

The Nirbhaya movement was possible because the perpetrators were nobody — unknown men in a bus, with no political protection, no ideological shield, no institutional machine to defend them. The fury had a clean target. The streets filled because the outrage was legible across ideological lines, and the political cost of total inaction became too high for a government already weakened by corruption allegations.

What is being described today has no such clean target. The machine is the target. And the machine controls the microphone, the narrative, the investigation, and the consequence.

The contrast reveals something structural. In 2012, the state was shamed into response. It did not want to respond. It was dragged. But it could be dragged because the streets were full, the cameras were rolling, and the political cost of inaction was greater than the cost of action.

Today, that cost does not appear to exist. And the reasons are multiple:

• Media capture has reduced the oxygen such movements need to survive
• Manufactured cynicism — the weaponisation of competitive whataboutery, where every allegation is met with a counter-allegation until the public concludes everyone is equally corrupt — has exhausted the capacity for sustained outrage
• The atomisation of protest — the replacement of street movements with social media campaigns — has deprived accountability movements of the physical presence that governments cannot ignore
• The othering of victims — accomplished through an ideological apparatus that frames women who accuse powerful men as anti-national, politically motivated, or morally compromised — has made sexual predation survivable for the powerful in a way it was not in 2012

The most chilling difference, however, is this: in 2012, the predators were outside the system. Today, the predators are inside it, and the system protects them not reluctantly but efficiently, not clumsily but with the smooth operation of institutional machinery that has been repurposed from accountability to protection.

VII. The Civilisational Stakes

What is at stake is not merely the fate of individual politicians or even individual governments. It is the foundational premise of democratic citizenship.

A republic is, at its most basic, a compact between citizens who recognise each other as equally embodied — equally vulnerable, equally worthy of protection. The sexual contract embedded within democratic citizenship says: your body is yours; the state’s violence does not reach it without due process; private power cannot claim it as its domain.

The repression-aggression loop, when it becomes the organising principle of a political formation that controls the state, hollows this compact from within. The republic’s formal architecture remains — elections, courts, constitution — while its substantive premise (the equally sovereign citizen-body) is quietly voided. The citizen learns that some bodies — those of powerful men — are shielded from accountability that would be routine for the powerless. The citizen learns that some women — those who accuse the wrong people — are not entitled to the protection that the state otherwise claims as its monopoly.

This is why the silence after Nirbhaya is more alarming than Nirbhaya itself. Nirbhaya demonstrated that the republic could feel. The subsequent decade demonstrates that feeling can be captured, redirected, and made to serve the very power that should have been its target.

VIII. The Warning from History

The Weimar parallel is overused and often abused. But it is worth engaging with precision.

Weimar Germany experienced:

• Military defeat reframed as betrayal by internal enemies (the “stab-in-the-back” myth)
• Profound masculine crisis — the returned soldier unmanned by defeat, the collapse of traditional gender roles
• Sexual liberalisation that was experienced by the anxious male subject not as freedom but as further emasculation — women working, visible, desiring
• A political movement that offered masculine restoration through collective violence and the reimposition of sexual hierarchy

India’s structure differs culturally but rhymes structurally:

• Colonial subordination reframed as civilisational humiliation by internal enemies (Muslims, Westernised women, liberals)
• The post-Partition masculine wound — the inability to “protect” during the violence of 1947 — never fully grieved, perpetually reopened
• Women’s increasing economic and social mobility experienced by significant portions of the male population not as national progress but as another form of displacement
• A political movement offering masculine restoration through cultural policing, communal solidarity, and the disciplining of women’s bodies

The endpoint of the Weimar loop was not inevitable — it required specific institutional failures, economic catastrophe, and elite capitulation. India has more resilient counter-forces: a constitutional tradition, a genuinely pluralist civil society, a federal structure, and a population that has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity for democratic assertion. But resilience is not immunity. The question is whether these counter-forces will remain strong enough to resist a pathology that has already captured the commanding heights of the political system.

IX. The Inversion That Indicts

What makes the current moment particularly dangerous — and what distinguishes it from earlier periods of democratic backsliding — is the inversion of accountability.

The allegations you have catalogued are not opposition charges. They are eruptions within the formation itself — loyalists, ideological kin, insiders speaking what the structure normally silences. Subramaniam Swamy is not a Congress operative. Madhu Kishwar is not a leftist academic. The officers who spoke about Mansi Soni are not activists. These are people whose credentials within the ecosystem are beyond question.

In a healthy democratic body, such eruptions trigger an immune response: inquiry, accountability, resolution. The system processes the information, distinguishes between allegation and evidence, and produces outcomes that restore confidence.

In a body captured by the repression-aggression loop, they trigger something else: the accusers become the accused. Madhu Kishwar becomes a traitor. Swamy becomes a crank. The officers become insubordinates. The whistleblowers become the story. The formation’s immune system inverts — it attacks self-recognition and protects the pathology.

This inversion is the most reliable clinical sign that a democratic body has moved from diseased to critically ill.

X. The Silence That Is Not Neutral

The silence you are measuring against 2012 is not the silence of a society that has healed. It is the silence of a society that has been taught to call its wound a strength.

Every institution that looks away, every anchor who changes the subject, every party functionary who says “this is a conspiracy” without engaging the substance, every citizen who concludes that it is too complicated to have a view — each of these is an active vote for the permanence of the architecture being described. The silence is not neutral. It is participation.

2012 told us who we could be at our best. It showed us a democracy capable of rising, across all its divisions, to insist that some things were intolerable. That memory is not lost — it is only suppressed. And suppression, unlike extinction, can be reversed.

But reversal requires naming. Not just naming individuals, though that is necessary. Naming the pattern. Naming the ideology that makes the pattern possible. Naming the silence that protects it. And insisting, in the face of every mechanism designed to dissipate outrage, that a democracy that cannot hold power accountable on the question of how it treats women is not experiencing a temporary failure — it is surrendering the premise on which it was founded.

The question is whether enough people still know how to hear the cry. And whether enough of them still have the courage to answer it.

@The author is a political commentator. The views expressed are personal.