We have too much politics and too little politics in India. On the one hand, politics seems omnipresent, permeating our daily interactions, discussions, culture and entertainment. Multiple times a day, we are pulled, willingly or unwillingly, into political affiliations, often when they are entirely irrelevant. Yet paradoxically, in actual governance — where political leadership is crucial to coalesce and exercise power in service of desired outcomes — politics is notably absent. What we encounter instead is a landscape dominated by bureaucracy and technocracy.
The first phenomenon — the hyper-visibility of politics — is actually a politics of depoliticisation. Here, political engagement has become disconnected from actual power structures, transforming instead into empty performance and signaling. This performative politics may create an illusion of participation but lacks real political agency — the ability to meaningfully harness or redistribute power.
True politics is not about performative conflict but about deliberation, compromise, and collective problem-solving. Yet in India, politics has been systematically hollowed out from governance through two distinct waves.
The first wave was bureaucratisation and NGOisation. We took critical areas of state responsibility for welfare and development and systematically excluded political functionaries by converting them into bureaucratic schemes. This well-intentioned approach aimed to reduce political discretion and corruption. However, it ultimately severed the accountability link between elected representatives and their constituents. The desire to do good for one’s country was transformed not into democratic political action but a NGO project.
The Rights-based framework attempted to convert schemes into rights, but democratic rights were conceptualised bureaucratically, not politically. The Right to Food, Right to Education, and MGNREGA are remarkable achievements, yet their administrative architecture excluded the elected representative and paradoxically depoliticised the very domains they were meant to democratise.
Building on the bureaucratic wave, the rise of technology has further centralised governance, sidelining local political agency. The first wave bureaucratised governance by removing local political discretion from implementation. Governance in elite circles and increasingly popular imagination became framed as a top-down process designed to maximise efficiency. In this framework, instead of strengthening political accountability by improving the capacity of citizens to mobilise and demand responsiveness from elected representatives, governance transformed into a technocratic project to bypass intermediaries, spanning education, welfare, employment and all manner of service delivery, even infrastructure.
Where the issue is too complex for centralised top-down delivery, state responsibilities are now being replaced by direct cash transfers. The route to fixing youth unemployment is a cash transfer; women empowerment is a cash transfer; unremunerative farming is a cash transfer; inequality is a cash transfer.
The justification is efficiency, but the result is profound depoliticisation. Elected representatives are meant to be critical interpreters of community needs. Their understanding of the local is supposed to feed into the state and national discourse on policy and the overall development paradigm. The elected representative is thus a conduit in the national dialectic and an essential aspect of their role is to create spaces where citizens can coalesce, deliberate, understand their collective power and articulate shared demands. However, we have systematically divested elected representatives of their larger political role, reducing them to act as mediators of individual petitions, negotiating discrete requests for ration, police intervention, and other specific individual services.
By dismantling their discretionary power, we have not only diminished their stature within parties thus centralising power but have made local political accountability irrelevant. The anti-defection bill further undermined political accountability by removing individual political agency within legislative structures. This has significantly eroded our democratic education and culture.
The mode of technological governance represents too the risk of soft authoritarianism — centralising power under the guise of efficiency while removing the messy local political negotiations that actually builds democratic resilience.
The hollowing out of politics from governance would be problematic in any democracy but it is particularly problematic given India’s extraordinary size, diversity and complexity. Moreover, in India, informal power sources rival formal institutions, and the state remains only partially institutionalised. In this bewildering landscape, elected representatives — regardless of their personal integrity — have remained highly accessible, often serving as crucial arbiters between state and citizenry. However, their systematic exclusion from governance has transformed their interventions into informal, ad-hoc and often illegitimate actions.
The impulse to institutionalise power is fundamentally correct in a democracy. Yet the approach should be focused on finding ways to institutionalise representation, enhance political judgment, instead of shackling discretion in procedural minutiae. In a democratic framework, political accountability would not be about removing discretion, but about collective action based on community needs, understanding and democratic deliberation.
It is true that this approach is not geared for efficiency. However, the lifeblood of democracy is not efficiency but representation. If we care about democracy then, we must restore the rightful role of political representation — not as a technocratic intermediary for top-down imperatives but as a dynamic conduit for the essential dialectic of collective democratic imagination.
The writer is executive director, the Future of India Foundation, and is working on an initiative to harness political capital of elected representatives to improve skilling and employment outcomes of local youth.
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