You Have Only One Identity: Get Fooled and Go Expendable

How artificial leadership and the charades of identity have kept a billion people perpetually expendable

Photo by Sourav Debnath on Unsplash

Somewhere between the slogans and the spectacle, a billion people forgot to ask a single question.

Who wrote the script?

On June 24, 2026, the Ministry of External Affairs stood at a podium on Passport Seva Divas and quietly detonated a constitutional crisis. The passport, the document Indians have carried as proof of who they are, proof of belonging, proof of existence within the republic, does not establish citizenship. The government said so itself.

Not your passport. Not your Aadhaar. Not your voter ID. Not the Constitution.

No document conclusively makes you an Indian citizen in the eyes of your own state.

And yet, not a single artificial leader stood up to explain what does.

The Charade Has a Name

The government is in flutter mode. Stupefied enough that it has surrendered its conscience as well. Power today operates in a condition of panic, disorientation, and moral hollowness.

A government that loses its conscience does not fall. It learns to survive by keeping you too busy, too angry, and too divided to notice it already has.

Our artificial leaders, and the word artificial is deliberate, because nothing about them is organic, earned, or genuine, have successfully managed to engage their people in charades of identities.

Hindu. Muslim. Upper caste. Lower caste. North Indian. South Indian. Urban. Rural.

Not communities. In the hands of power, these are costumes. Worn during election season, discarded after. The leaders do not believe in these identities. They manufacture them, distribute them, and watch the audience tear each other apart over props.

A charade is a performance where something false is presented as real. Identity politics operates on exactly that logic. Theatre. Scripted. Rehearsed. Designed not to unite, not even to divide, but to distract.

While the nation argued over which identity to wear, the state was quietly deciding whether any of those identities even make you a citizen.

A Skit Older Than the Republic

A historical and most classic skit, one that the nation has failed to survive as a viewer since its inception.

Since 1947. Since before 1947.

Never a participant in its own story. Always the audience, passive, manipulated, watching the performance from the cheap seats. And even in that diminished role, as a mere viewer, the nation could not survive. Kept believing the performance was real. Kept choosing sides between characters written by the same hand.

Every generation absorbed the deception and embedded it deeper into the next.

The June 24 announcement did not come out of nowhere. A scene in a play that has been running for decades. First, they told you Aadhaar proves your identity but not your citizenship.

Then the Supreme Court agreed. Then the Election Commission launched special revisions of electoral rolls that left lakhs of Indians scrambling to prove they belong. And now, the passport, the very document the state issued to you as a citizen, means nothing either.

Scene by scene. Generation by generation. The audience keeps watching. The skit keeps running.

Your Identity Belongs to None of This

To every Indian reading these words, your identity lives in none of those tricks. Not in the rhetoric. Not in the slogans. Not in the outrage manufactured every morning by news channels paid to keep you inflamed.

Your identity is not in any document either.

Not your Aadhaar. Not your voter ID. Not your passport. Not the Constitution, as noble as its intent was. No government paper has ever held your true self. No bureaucratic category captures your dignity. No checkbox, Hindu/Muslim/OBC/General, contains your humanity.

The state just confirmed what was always true. Documents were never about protecting you. They were about managing you.

The moment you let a document define you, you have already lost.

The Only Identity the System Assigns You

So what identity does the system actually give you?

Stated without softening:

Get fooled and go expendable.

Be manipulated during elections. Perform your identity on cue. Fight your neighbor over engineered grievances. And once the season is over, once the votes are counted or the narrative shifts, be discarded. Quietly. Without acknowledgment.

Expendable.

Not a citizen. Not a voter. Not a Hindu or a Muslim or a Dalit or a Brahmin. A unit of utility, used and set aside.

Power does not hate you. Far worse than that. Power does not see you at all.

Walk Off the Stage

Decades of building at the ground level, across engineering, entrepreneurship, and social impact, teach you one thing no institution will ever voluntarily admit.

The people who remain expendable are the ones who never claimed their own awakening.

No new label will save you. No movement, no flag, no document. Only one thing was never theirs to give and never theirs to take.

Your Awakened Clarity.

They built two sides so you would never think to look at who built the stage. Stop choosing sides. Start questioning the architecture.

Humanizing power means refusing to let power dehumanize you first.

More performers of identity are not what the nation needs. Citizens who have seen through the performance, and chosen with full clarity to build something real instead, are the only force that has ever changed anything.

The skit has run long enough.

Walk off the stage they built for you. Build your own.

**SunDeep Mehra**

*Pioneer of Awakened Leadership & Governance Humanizing Power, AI & Humanity’s Future*