The Real Problem With Indian Politics Isn’t the Politician. It’s the Voter.

We got handed an extraction economy by not one but two empires, didn’t bother to kill it, and now we just run the damn thing on ourselves.

Photo by Kishore V on Unsplash

Every election season, India does its little dance. We pick a politician, build a shrine, wait four years, smash the shrine, and build a new one. Op-eds get churned out, hashtags trend, uncles start World War III at weddings. And then, like clockwork, we vote exactly the same way again. Genius.

Here’s the line that’ll get this piece flagged by WhatsApp University alumni and blue-tick outrage addicts alike: the politician isn’t the disease. The politician is just the rash. The real disease is sitting in the voting booth, and it’s been festering there longer than most of us are willing to admit.

To get why, you’ve got to look way further back than the last election. You have to go all the way to the empires that taught us how to squeeze the juice out of a country. We didn’t invent the playbook. We just never bothered to give it back.

The British Didn’t Just Rule India. They Ran It Like a Quarterly Earnings Call

We’ve all heard the line “the British built our railways,” usually delivered by someone who has never had to use Indian Railways during a festival rush. What gets left out of that sentence is why the railways existed: to move raw cotton out and finished cloth in, as efficiently as possible, for the benefit of mills in Manchester.

The numbers on what that extraction actually cost India are still being argued over by economists, which is itself revealing. Economist Utsa Patnaik, in research published by Columbia University Press, calculated that Britain drained nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938, using India’s export surplus earnings as the base and compounding them forward at a conservative interest rate. That’s not a typo, and it’s not a small claim either: it’s larger than the entire annual GDP of the world today. Other economic historians dispute the methodology and the scale, and that argument isn’t settled. But strip away the specific number and the underlying mechanism is not in dispute: India’s foreign exchange earnings were systematically routed to London rather than reinvested at home, year after year, for the better part of two centuries.

This wasn’t passive neglect. It was policy. India’s handloom weavers, once supplying some of the finest textiles in the world, watched their industry get systematically dismantled through a one-two punch of punishing tariffs on Indian cloth entering Britain and zero tariffs on British machine-made cloth flooding into India. An entire artisanal economy, one that had clothed empires for centuries, was deliberately starved out so that Lancashire’s mills could have a captive market. You don’t need an exaggerated atrocity to understand the violence in that. Watching your livelihood be legislated out of existence, on purpose, by the people governing you, is violent enough on its own.

And when the money wasn’t flowing fast enough through trade, the Crown simply taxed it out. The cost of all of Britain’s wars of conquest outside Indian borders was charged wholly or mainly to Indian revenues, according to Patnaik’s research, including campaigns that had nothing to do with India at all. Indian taxpayers funded the invasion of China. Indian taxpayers funded the suppression of their own 1857 rebellion. Britain used this flow of tribute from India to finance the expansion of capitalism in Europe and in regions of European settlement, such as Canada and Australia. We weren’t just a colony. We were the seed capital for the modern Western economy, and we never got a cap table.

Before the British, the Portuguese Ran a Different Kind of Extraction. Spiritual, Not Just Financial.

Photo by Digjot Singh on Unsplash

I live in Goa now, which means I get a front-row seat to a colonial history nobody really wants to talk about — probably because it’s awkward for a whole different set of people.

The Portuguese arrived in 1510 and didn’t just want India’s trade. They wanted India’s soul, specifically the Hindu one, replaced with a Catholic one. The instrument for this was the Goa Inquisition, which lasted from 1560 to 1812, with a brief suspension between 1774 and 1778, and was an extension of the Portuguese Inquisition. Its stated mission was to root out heresy among converts. Its actual function was to suppress Hinduism and Islam at the root.

The methods weren’t subtle. Decrees in the 1550s ordered that Hindu children under 14 whose fathers had died be baptised and converted to Catholicism, and later records show that some of these “orphans” had living mothers, with children and family property seized regardless, no legal recourse offered to the families. In 1560, the Portuguese viceroy ordered all Hindus in Portuguese territory to convert or leave. Hindu marriages were banned. Cremation was outlawed, forcing Hindus to send their dead floating down the river on rafts instead. Between 1560 and 1575, in the district of Salcete alone, almost 300 temples were destroyed.

The cultural suppression went deeper than religion. By the late 17th century, decrees made it illegal to speak Konkani in public, mandating Portuguese for administration and Latin for the Church, an attempt to sever an entire population from its own oral traditions and scripture. Traditional clothing was targeted too: dhotis, saris, and kurtas were banned, with European dress made compulsory. This wasn’t governance. It was an attempt at total cultural replacement, executed with the same bureaucratic patience the British would later bring to extracting wealth instead of souls.

Two empires. Two different hungers. One sucked our economy dry. The other tried to rip out our identity. Both eventually packed up and left. Neither bothered to leave a manual on how to stop screwing ourselves over the same way.

Divide and Conquer Didn’t Retire. It Just Got a Local Franchise.

Here’s the part that should bother you more than the trillion-dollar number. The British didn’t conquer a unified subcontinent with superior firepower alone. They conquered a fragmented one by playing princely states against each other, arming one faction to police another, and formalising religious identity into administrative categories through the census, so that “Hindu” and “Muslim” became boxes to tick rather than fluid, overlapping ways of living. Divide and rule wasn’t a slogan. It was the actual operating manual. Keep the population fractured along caste, region, and religion, and you never have to fight a unified opposition, because there isn’t one.

The Portuguese ran a tighter, more localised version of the same playbook in Goa: convert one group, privilege them with land and office, leave the rest to either convert or live as second-class subjects in their own villages. Fracture the population internally, and the empire doesn’t need a large garrison. The locals do the dividing for you.

Look at the modern Indian political playbook and try, just try, to tell me with a straight face that this strategy retired with the Raj. It’s the same old dish, just with new garnish. Communal polarization before an election isn’t some tragic accident of democracy. It’s a feature, not a bug. A voter busy with ‘us versus them’ isn’t asking what either side has actually done. Caste vote banks? Not some magical community spirit. They’re built and maintained on purpose, because a divided electorate is easy to herd, and herded voters don’t ask awkward questions about roads, hospitals, or where the hell the budget disappeared.

The British needed Indians to see each other as separate categories so they wouldn’t unite against a common ruler. Today’s politicians need the same thing, for the same reason, just with the ruler now wearing a domestic flag. The coloniser changed. The strategy got a fresh coat of paint and a campaign jingle. The fracture lines are still the ones the empire drew, and we’ve spent decades helpfully deepening them ourselves, one election cycle at a time.

Here’s Where I Lose Everyone, Left and Right, Simultaneously

The bedtime story version of Indian history ends here: foreigners screwed us, we kicked them out, now we’re free, roll credits. It’s neat, it’s tidy, and it’s exactly where accountability packs its bags and leaves. No wonder both sides of the political circus love it.

The right wing loves this story because it means every screw-up today can be blamed on something that happened five hundred years ago. Corruption, riots, government falling apart — just squint hard enough and it all traces back to 1947 or 1510. Never, god forbid, to an Indian making a bad call for another Indian in the last ten years.

The left wing eats this story up too, just with a different villain list. Colonialism explains inequality, sure, to a point. But now it’s the go-to excuse for never looking at anything we’ve done to ourselves since independence. Apparently, admitting we shot ourselves in the foot feels like letting the empire win again.

Both of you are still right that colonialism did real, measurable damage. Both of you are also using that real damage as a screen door to avoid looking at the room behind it.

Democracy’s Open Secret: You Can Inherit Freedom and Still Run an Extraction Economy on Yourself

Here’s what you won’t see on the ‘world’s largest democracy’ tourism brochure: a democracy is only as good as what people actually demand from it. And right now, across constituencies that would make any economist want to drown themselves in chai, the demand isn’t for governance. It’s for a sack of rice, a bottle of booze, five hundred bucks, and a promise that ‘your community’ finally gets to shove its face in the trough someone else has been hogging.

Is that democracy in action, or just a citizen getting bought for less than a clearance sale? The British took our textiles. The Portuguese took our temples. Now we’re auctioning off our own future, one election at a time, and selling it for peanuts.

The communal vote, the caste vote, the freebie vote, the ‘humara neta galat nahi ho sakta’ vote — they’re not different beasts from different enemy camps. It’s the same disease, just swapping out ideological Halloween costumes, and everyone at the party is convinced they’re the only one not wearing a mask.

The Politicians Built the Casino. We Keep Walking In.

Of course politicians want voters just smart enough to show up and just dumb enough to keep voting the same way forever. That’s not a bug, that’s the business model. The British got this too: a divided, clueless population is way easier to milk than one that actually knows what’s going on. We just swapped out who’s holding the ledger.

But when the electorate actually wants to stay clueless — because being informed is a pain in the ass, and asking tough questions might mean admitting your own guy is also robbing the till — that’s not just being a victim. That’s being a paying subscriber. Auto-renewal on. No unsubscribe button anywhere.

You cannot run an informed democracy on an electorate that treats information like a buffet: taking only what confirms what it already believed, leaving the inconvenient facts untouched on the table.

What the Outsider Sees That the Insider Can’t Afford To

I grew up everywhere and belonged nowhere. Dubai, Singapore, the US, Tokyo, Seoul, you name it. I came back to a country I mostly knew from stories and short trips. It gives you weird vision. You see the play and the audience at the same time, because you never really belonged to either.

From that seat, here’s what I see: a civilization with enough brains and history to run circles around most of the planet, but still picking the guy who promises to fix a temple fight over the one who’ll fix the damn drains. Both might matter, sure. Only one floods your house every monsoon.

We spent centuries getting squeezed by people who didn’t speak our language, didn’t care about our gods, and couldn’t give a damn about us beyond what we could produce. Now we’ve got self-rule, and the extraction just keeps rolling — only now it’s got slicker PR and the guy doing the squeezing looks like us.

The Mirror We Keep Smashing

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

If you’re pissed off by now, good. Let it simmer before you rush to the comments to tell me I don’t get ‘ground realities’ because I lived abroad. I live in Goa now. I’m about as grounded as it gets, thanks.

Here’s the uncomfortable bit: blaming politicians is easy because it costs you nothing. Blaming empires is even easier — they’re dead, they can’t clap back. Blaming the voter? That means looking at your own ballot, your own bullshit, and whether you voted along the same fracture lines the empire drew, just with new branding and fresh paint.

The British left in 1947. The Portuguese bailed on Goa in 1961. Democracy was never going to save us from ourselves. It was always just a mirror — showing us exactly who we are, warts and all.

We just keep smashing the mirror before we vote.

This is the fifth piece in a series about the uncomfortable questions nobody wants to say out loud about India, democracy, and the long, ugly shadow of empire. If you’re pissed off, congrats — you actually read it.