Democracy is built not on faith alone, but also on trust. Faith is blind; trust is earned. Faith allows you to believe in gods. Trust allows you to believe in institutions. When leaders mistake democracy for theology, when they assume the divine right to declare, accuse, and pronounce guilt without trial, they are not playing politicians. They are playing gods and jurors in the same breath. Standing not in court, not even in Parliament, but in the unmediated court of public opinion, Rahul Gandhi declared that “2,000 sq kms of Indian land is under Chinese occupation,” that “Chinese soldiers are beating up Indian Army personnel.” An angry Justice Dipankar Datta asked him the only question that matters, “Were you there? Do you have credible proof?”
Rahul’s bombastic blitzkrieg was loud on grandiloquence but poor on evidence—“India’s election system is already dead.” He claimed, “1.5 lakh voters out of 6.5 lakh were fake,” and had “100 per cent proof.” But he offered none. A sustained offensive is not the same as a sustainable one. If Rahul seeks a transition from the politics of provocation to the politics of power, then he must understand a crucial principle of democratic responsibility: Proof precedes Power. Volume cannot replace verification. This isn’t about Rahul alone. Indian politics has long been populated by leaders who believe that volume can replace verification. Indira Gandhi claimed foreign agents were trying to sabotage her government; an accusation that helped justify the Emergency. Narendra Modi’s detractors accuse him of promising `15 lakh in every Indian’s account when he had said if all the black money abroad is brought back, it would be so much that every person will get `15 lakh. Arvind Kejriwal declared that “every big leader is corrupt,” only to retract when lawsuits followed. Mamata Banerjee once claimed that the Election Commission was colluding with the BJP, yet could provide no proof beyond her own sense of betrayal. If the bipartisan tradition of accusation without adjudication are left unchallenged, they become precedents. Precedents corrode institutions.
Philosophically speaking, this is not a political problem, it is an epistemic one. In democracies, truth is not declared; it is demonstrated. You may feel a truth in your bones, but unless you prove it with facts, it remains opinion, not evidence. And governance cannot be built on opinion. Democracy is a courtroom. The people are the judges; but judges bewildered by noise. The elections are trials; but trials where every losing lawyer accuses the jury of fraud. And the politicians are lawyers, turned performance artistes, turned prophets. And just like in any courtroom, a lawyer who walks in without evidence, shouting accusations, is not seen as courageous, but as desperate. Rahul Gandhi’s accusations violates this courtroom’s most sacred rule that the burden of proof lies on the accuser. When politicians abandon this rule, they drag the people into a dangerous space of fear and fury.
The consequences are deeper than immediate discredit; they touch the very heart of democratic participation. If voters come to believe that the Indian Army is defeated, the EC is biased, and the voter rolls are fake, then why should they vote at all? When politicians treat elections as fixed matches, they don’t just protest defeat. They destroy faith. They tell citizens, “your vote doesn’t matter, the game is already rigged.” This is not dissent. This is nihilism. What Rahul is doing, in many ways, is taking up a mantle India has been waiting for him to wear: that of a serious challenger to the dominant political order. But with that mantle comes responsibility. To claim the Army is being beaten up, or the Election Commission has collapsed, or the voter roll is corrupted, is not opposition—it is destabilisation, unless backed by solid proof. His new aggression may well energise his supporters. It may even unsettle the ruling party. But it will not survive the test of time unless it is matched with a commitment to evidence, transparency, and detail. The Greek philosopher Protagoras claimed that “man is the measure of all things.” In modern democracies, that man is the voter. But when every election loss is blamed on rigging, every border skirmish turned into surrender, every adversary framed as a traitor or cheat then the voter becomes not the measure, but the manipulated. We create, in essence, a metaphysical farce where nothing is knowable, everything is claimable, and facts are rendered obsolete.
The philosopher Karl Popper warned that when a system can no longer distinguish between falsifiable claims and unfalsifiable beliefs, it dies not with a bang, but in confusion. Is that where we are headed? Democracy is not made of flags or anthems or even elections. It is made of trust. And trust, like glass, once broken, is never quite the same again.