Every republic must eventually confront a question more fundamental than who wins the next election: What kind of opposition does power permit—and what kind does it provoke?
Last week at the India AI Impact Summit, a global showcase staged to advertise India’s technological ambitions, a small group of youth activists disrupted the choreography. They stripped off shirts to reveal slogans denouncing the prime minister and a trade pact with Washington.
Arrests followed, headlines flared, and the prime minister dismissed it as “dirty and naked politics.” Even opposition leaders distanced themselves. A summit meant to project seriousness briefly became spectacle.
But democracies should be wary of mistaking spectacle for cause. When dissent appears in undignified forms, it often signals that dignified forms are failing. When protest sheds its suit and tie, it may be because the door to the chamber has quietly been locked.
India’s constitutional order was not designed for monologue. Its framers had lived under concentrated power and built institutions to resist it: Parliament as a chamber of argument, the judiciary as ballast, the Election Commission as referee, the press as interrogator.
For all his faults, Jawaharlal Nehru understood that opposition was not inconvenience but ingredient. He sparred with critics assuming parity of mind, calling dissent democracy’s “safety valve.”
That instinct has thinned. Electoral landslides tempt governments to equate mandate with moral certainty. Regulators soften, broadcasters grow courteous, courts hesitate, commissions lean. None of these shifts announces itself as rupture. They accumulate, subtle as sediment, until the river’s course has changed.
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When formal arenas narrow, politics relocates. It spills from parliamentary benches into hashtags, from committee rooms into streets. The AI summit protest was crude, but symptomatic. The more a system discourages sustained interrogation in official spaces, the more dissent seeks oxygen elsewhere—even in ways that discredit it.
Responsibility in a democracy is not evenly distributed. Power is asymmetrical. The executive commands the machinery of the state, sets the tone of public speech, and shapes institutional incentives.
A government secure in its achievements does not fear scrutiny; it invites it. It appoints guardians whose stature transcends party loyalty. It tolerates uncomfortable questions in Parliament rather than outsourcing debate to television panels. It understands that adversarial journalism is not hostility but hygiene.
The opposition, too, must shoulder responsibility. Citizens expect more than slogans. They expect alternatives. When opposition leaders reduce themselves to hashtags or theatrics, they abdicate seriousness. A republic deserves critics who persuade, not merely provoke.
Other democracies offer lessons. In Britain, Prime Minister’s Questions ritualizes confrontation, guaranteeing opposition time before the nation. In the United States, Watergate was absorbed by hearings and courts, not by street uprisings. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission institutionalized dissent into testimony. In Brazil, courts and Congress have repeatedly asserted independence against executive excess. Institutions absorbed the shock because referees stood upright.
India’s own freedom struggle offers richer precedents. Mahatma Gandhi turned dissent into disciplined moral theater. B. R. Ambedkar warned that constitutional morality requires not only well-drafted provisions but citizens who practice restraint. The Constitution, he insisted, is not self-executing. It depends on habits—listening, arguing without annihilating, respecting offices even when one dislikes their occupants.
The danger in any republic is not loud opposition; it is enfeebled opposition. A weak opposition invites arrogance. An arrogant government corrodes institutions. Corroded institutions breed desperate tactics. Democracies decay less from coups than from incremental accommodations—small compromises that accumulate until independence becomes ornamental.
India today seeks global stature—in technology, economics, diplomacy. Summits proclaim ambition. But credibility abroad rests on confidence at home. Investors, allies, and adversaries notice whether courts command respect, whether elections are unquestioned, whether journalists ask without fear. They measure the republic not by its stagecraft but by its self-correction.
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The AI summit episode will fade. The slogans will be forgotten. What should not fade is the underlying question: Is India widening the space for legitimate contestation or narrowing it? Is it cultivating opposition capable of governing, or caricaturing it into irrelevance?
A mature democracy does not demand silence from critics. It demands seriousness. It does not suppress confrontation; it channels it. It does not staff constitutional bodies with the compliant; it seeks the courageous. And it understands that the highest form of strength is restraint.
In the end, a republic is a mirror. It reflects rulers and challengers alike. If the reflection appears coarse or brittle, the remedy is not to shatter the glass but to refine what stands before it. The health of opposition is not generosity by those in office. It is self-preservation. When voices feel unheard in the chamber, they will find other stages.
Better, then, to keep the chamber open—and to speak within it in a language worthy of the republic it is meant to serve.