India needs citizens angry enough to make politicians afraid

More than a VIP culture, India has a politician problem. A few years back the prime minister called himself India's pradhan sevak — chief servant. Today, most Indians feel that VIP culture is only growing. The servants, it turns out, have hired their own servants. And we, the citizens, are footing the bill — in time, in blood, in faith.

The India AI Impact Summit assembled heads of state, technology leaders, and global investors to celebrate the nation's rise as a digital superpower. The reality — for hundreds of thousands of ordinary Delhi residents — was a city held hostage. Traffic authorities admitted to closing dozens of major arteries for staggered ministerial motorcades, repeatedly, in rolling lockdowns that trapped commuters for hours.

One resident left three hours early for his flight, calculated for traffic — and still missed it. A startup founder attending from Bengaluru, at an event his taxes helped fund, told the world he felt like a third-class citizen. Foreign delegates reportedly walked several kilometres between sessions because vehicular access was sealed for official convoys. India was showcasing its future to the world. The world saw the future standing in a traffic jam.

What makes this more than a traffic story is who it happened to: India's professional, urban, technology-connected middle class — the constituency the summit was designed to impress. These are not the politically marginalised. These are the aspirational, the taxpaying, the educated — physically treated as obstacles to power rather than its beneficiaries. That gap between the State's rhetoric and the citizen's lived reality is not poor planning. It is a structural declaration of who, in this republic, holds power over whom.

The AI summit debacle would be merely maddening in isolation — but it does not. In January 2025, over 30 pilgrims were trampled to death at the Maha Kumbh Mela. Survivors said police allegedly refused to open barricaded routes even as the chaos was beyond manageable — those routes were sealed VIP-only access lanes, pontoon bridges carved through the crowd so the politically connected could reach the riverbank unimpeded. Thirty ordinary Indians, who had travelled hundreds of miles in faith, died so that the powerful could walk to the river in peace.

At Odisha’s Puri Ratha Yatra, the same script repeated: devotees crushed outside fences while officials escorted high-profile visitors through barricaded zones — pregnant women and the elderly shoved aside for politically connected donors.

The political class has written one set of laws for India and lives by another. The Constitution does not say ‘We, the Politicians.’ It says, ‘We, the People.’ Every road closed for a ministerial motorcade is an act of constitutional inversion — a daily declaration that the elected servant has become the permanent lord.

They campaign in our lanes, touch our feet at election time, perform jan seva at rallies like actors who know the show ends at the ballot box. Then they retreat to bungalows sealed from traffic, fly in aircraft we paid for, and ensure their children — when they kill someone in a drunk-driving crash — walk out on a personal bond the same night.

There will be more FIRs filed against ‘unidentified drivers’ — because when a powerful and politically connected person’s vehicle runs over a motorcyclist, the official version never changes — no one saw who was driving, the convoy moved on, the file goes cold. More pilgrims will be crushed. More startup founders will stand on pavements watching empty black cars sweep past summits built, supposedly, for them.

In a democracy, the citizen is not a subject — the citizen is the source. All authority flows from us, not towards us. The politician does not own the road. We do. Every VVIP corridor is not a privilege — it is a theft. Every blocked ambulance is not a logistics failure — it is a crime. The system has quietly, systematically placed the elected above the electorate. That is not governance. That is occupation.

This culture will not end because politicians grow a conscience or a committee files a report nobody reads. It will end only when citizens refuse — at every election, in every constituency — to return to power any candidate who has lived above the law they were elected to serve.

India does not need better politicians. It needs citizens angry enough to make them afraid. The road to the AI summit was closed on February 18. The road to the next election is not.

(Sachi Satapathy is a development professional.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.