“When Democracy Turns Deadly for the Common Man”

By Ravishankar Kalyanasundaram

A Rally and a Mirror

The terrible mishap at Vijay’s rally was not an isolated accident. It was a mirror. A mirror held up to the face of our society, showing us the distance between the dream of development and the lived reality of our politics.

Here were men, mothers, and children pressed into a suffocating mass under the blazing sun, risking heatstroke, dehydration, and the crush of a stampede. They came not for food, shelter, or jobs. They came for a glimpse—yards away—of their chosen hero. What does development mean, what is all the growth about, if lives are so casually staked for political theatre?

Are people simply gullible? Or is it that society, media, and political leaders together manufacture this gullibility, feeding and fattening the cult of the leader until it overshadows everything else?

Manufactured Faith

History is littered with such spectacles of belief. In March 1997, the world was stunned by the news that Heaven’s Gate, a small cult in California led by Marshall Applewhite, had carried out a mass suicide. Thirty-nine followers ingested poison because their leader told them salvation awaited in the tail of a passing comet. They died not for money or power, but because they surrendered reason to narrative.

Popular culture has captured this horror too. Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now remains unforgettable. Kurtz presides over a jungle kingdom where horror is not avoided but embraced. His followers obey him blindly, even to their death. It is fiction, yes—but fiction that resonates because it reveals the terrible seduction of authority when wrapped in charisma.

Cults thrive when the boundary between faith and manipulation is erased. They thrive when institutions abdicate responsibility, when the voices of reason are mocked as dull, when spectacle substitutes for substance.

The Nonsense of Narratives

Look closely at our times and you see the same machinery at work—narratives spun to exploit anxieties, fears, and prejudices.

Take Brexit. Nigel Farage and his allies in the British press sold a simple slogan: Take Back Control. Sovereignty, they said, was the prize. What followed was years of political chaos: four prime ministers in as many years, bitter division, and an economy struggling with uncertainty. The promise was simplicity; the reality was ruin. Yet millions queued to vote, persuaded by the nonsense of a narrative that sounded brave but was empty of truth.

Cross the Atlantic, and the story is familiar. Donald Trump knew the crowd’s appetite. He mocked London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, not by policy but by race and religion, sneering in public to harvest applause. Prejudice became performance; cruelty became campaign. The crowd roared approval because the narrative told them to.

India is no exception. Here, too, cults of personality grow. Crowds throng to see leaders, braving deadly risks, believing that presence is participation, that suffering is sacrifice. A century ago, we banned Sati, the cruel practice of burning widows alive on their husband’s pyre. Yet today, we enact a larger Sati: sacrificing thousands of lives at the altar of political idolatry.

The Crowd and the Camera

The crowd is not just a physical gathering. It is a manufactured stage. Media plays its role—cameras panning across sweating bodies, aerial shots of “sea of humanity,” anchors breathless with adjectives. Social media completes the loop, spreading images faster than the truth of what those images conceal.

In the crowd, individuality is erased. A mother carrying her child ceases to be a person; she becomes part of the number, the spectacle. Her danger is invisible because the leader’s presence fills the screen. In that erasure lies the most insidious danger: when lives become props in a narrative, their value collapses.

Where Are the Wise?

The world once had its sages, reformers, thinkers—those who slowed us down, asked questions, resisted frenzy. In India, voices like Gandhi and Ambedkar, Tagore and Nehru, insisted on reasoning even when the crowd preferred rhetoric. Globally, Martin Luther King or Mandela did the same, building movements on moral clarity, not manipulation.

But today? The microphone belongs not to the wise but to the loud. Social media rewards shouting, not reflection. Television screens amplify confrontation, not conversation. The wise do not sell; outrage does. And so the wise retreat home, their audience stolen by the circus.

The result is a world where polarisation is profit. Leaders know it, parties know it, media knows it. To soothe is to lose; to agitate is to win. A politics of reassurance is too dull for the times; a politics of outrage keeps the cameras whirring.

Are We Really Reformed?

We are proud of our reforms. We abolished Sati. We legislated against caste discrimination. We expanded education, healthcare, and rights. These are triumphs not to be dismissed. But reform is not a one-time act. Reform is not only law. Reform is a mindset.

When thousands willingly endanger themselves for a leader’s glimpse, when suffering is accepted as proof of loyalty, when lives are expendable for political spectacle—can we say we are truly reformed? Or have we only replaced old rituals with new ones?

A society that once sacrificed widows on pyres now sacrifices its people in rallies. The forms differ; the impulse is frighteningly familiar.

Development Without Dignity

We speak of GDP growth, of highways, of digital India, of factories rising. These are necessary, yes. But development without dignity is no development at all. Prosperity without prudence is no prosperity at all. Politics without restraint is no politics at all.

What good are skyscrapers if people trample each other in fields for a leader’s wave? What good are smartphones if they only amplify outrage? What good is growth if human lives are the smallest coin in its marketplace?

The Global Disease

This is not an Indian disease. It is global. The rise of cult leaders is seen everywhere—from Latin America to Europe, from Asia to America. Each promises purity, control, pride. Each weaponizes difference, turning neighbour against neighbour.

Everywhere, crowds gather in adoration. Everywhere, dissenters are silenced as “anti-national,” “traitor,” “elite.” Everywhere, the wise find no place.

It is a global disease, bred by global conditions: inequality, alienation, distrust of institutions, hunger for certainty in uncertain times.

Towards a Cure

Is there a cure? There is no easy pill. But there is a direction. It begins with truth-telling—refusing the nonsense of easy slogans. It requires media that measures success not in decibels but in accuracy. It demands politics that risks patience rather than panders to frenzy.

It also needs us, citizens, to reclaim our dignity. To say no to being props. To refuse to risk our lives for a glimpse. To insist that leaders earn respect not by rallies but by results.

Reform is never finished. It must be renewed each generation. The banning of Sati was one reform. Resisting the cult of narratives must be another.

A Final Reflection

As I watched the images of Vijay’s rally mishap, I could not help but think of Gandhi’s test: “Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man you have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him.”

If the answer is no, then the rally, the crowd, the slogan, the cult—none of it is reform. It is regression, dressed in modern slogans but ancient in its appetite for sacrifice.

We must ask ourselves: are we citizens of a democracy or subjects of a cult? The answer will decide whether development becomes destiny—or delusion.