Democracy and the sacred work of making room

I have come to measure a democracy by the person it is easiest to overlook: the one who does not look, worship, love, speak, move or believe as the majority does.

For me, this is not an abstract test. It begins in my mother’s kitchen.

I was the youngest child. My father could be stern, and sometimes I had to wait until everyone else had eaten or received what they wanted. My mother might be in the middle of a feast, conducting a hundred small labours, making sure every plate was filled. Still, she kept coming back to me. Was I all right? Had I lost patience? “Your time is coming, coming, coming,” she would say.

The youngest child learns the geography of waiting. My mother knew that what I needed was not a grand promise, but the knowledge that someone had noticed me. A leader should have that instinct: to look beyond the honoured guests and the loudest voices, and ask who is still waiting to be seen.

Kahlil Gibran wrote that children come through us, but do not belong to us. Their dreams reach toward a tomorrow their parents may never see. My mother seemed to understand this without needing the poem. She was tending to the smallest person in the room while the room made its demands.

The Bhagavad Gita begins in doubt. Arjuna looks across the battlefield and sees teachers, cousins, friends. He cannot make himself move. Krishna does not ask him to stop thinking. He asks him to look harder: What is your duty? What is just? What serves a world larger than your own comfort?

The Gita’s idea of lokasangraha—action that sustains the world and holds it together—offers a civic compass. A leader’s duty is to hold a plural society together without making its differences disappear.

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The Mahabharata knows what happens when those with power stay silent. When Draupadi is humiliated in the assembly, the shame is not hers. It belongs to the men who watch and do nothing. The epic leaves us with a question that has not aged: when the vulnerable call out, what does our duty ask of us?

Faith, love, and compassion

My grandmother gave me another kind of inheritance. She was deeply religious, yet gave up ritual and turned toward dhyan—meditation, reflection, the inward journey. She told me that when she reached her own core, she found oneness with the divine. Religion and science, she believed, went hand in hand: where one could not take us, the other might help us move forward. A woman who would be more than a hundred today had arrived at a thought we still need: faith need not fear inquiry, and inquiry need not mock faith.

My nana, retired in San Francisco, had his own way of staying awake to the world. Well into his eighties, he read The New York Times page to page and followed Apple through crisis, recovery and new possibilities. A man in his eighties keeping up with Apple seemed to me a fine rebuke to anyone who thinks curiosity has a retirement age. New York, too, taught me to think of citizenship as something lived among other people, in the shared space of a city. Democracy asks for that alertness: What is happening? Who is affected? What have I not yet learned?

When Arjuna asks Krishna who is truly dear to him, Krishna describes someone free of hatred, compassionate, humble and patient, steady in joy and sorrow. The passage asks us to look at the person our devotion is making. If worship leaves us more contemptuous of our neighbour, something has gone badly wrong.

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The poets ask this in their own music. Kabir warns that a rosary can turn for a lifetime while the mind remains unchanged: “Mala pherat jug bhaya, phira na man ka pher.” The beads have moved; has the heart? Tulsidas gives us a measure of dharma fit for any republic: “Parhit saris dharm nahin bhai; par peeda sam nahin adhamaai”—no duty is higher than another’s welfare, no wrong deeper than causing another pain.

Rahim asks us not to snap the thread of love. Mirabai refuses to let convention own her conscience. Surdas gives the divine child a mischievous voice. Ras Khan, a Muslim poet, imagines choosing life among the cowherds of Braj: “Manush haun to wahi Raskhani, basun Braj Gokul gaon ke gwaran.” Love crosses borders fear tries to make sacred.

From Maharashtra, Tukaram calls the afflicted his own: “Je ka ranjale ganjale, tyansi mhane jo apule.” Dnyaneshwar’s Pasaydan asks for friendship among all living beings; Narsinh Mehta calls the true devotee the one who feels another’s pain.

From Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore dreams of “the mind without fear,” and a world not broken into fragments by narrow walls. From Karnataka, the twelfth-century poet Basavanna turns the temple inward: “The rich will make temples for Siva. What shall I, a poor man, do? My legs are pillars, the body the shrine.” The sacred, these poets remind us, is not something to possess. It is a way of meeting one another.

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Questioning power, demanding answers

India can be proud of this inheritance without turning it into a weapon or a wall. Our pride need not rest on claiming that every wisdom began here. It can rest in the generosity of a civilisation whose poets and thinkers, across languages and centuries, questioned power and asked us to feel another person’s pain. A civilisation is not a trophy in a cabinet. It is a conversation we must keep worthy of those who come after us.

What would these seekers make of students protesting examination failures and allegations of paper leaks, or citizens who fear that changes to voter rolls may exclude them? In a South Asian democracy, such concerns have brought people into the streets. They deserve transparent investigation, not instant verdicts. The right to ask for answers is one of democracy’s vital signs.

A student who studies for years and then suspects an examination has been compromised is asking whether effort still means anything. A voter who fears their name has disappeared from a roll is asking whether citizenship still recognises them. Protest brings these private injuries into public view.

The Arab Spring carried hope through streets and squares. Tiananmen Square remains a wound: a protest crushed by force, and a reminder of what power fears when people gather to speak. Bangladesh’s uprising in 2024 and Nepal’s youth-led protests in 2025 showed what can happen when a generation decides it has waited long enough.

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But protest must become more than anger. People should demand fair examinations, secure papers, electoral rolls that can be checked and corrected, independent inquiries, public reasons for decisions, and protection for peaceful assembly. Accountability is not revenge. Voters can question, organise, petition and vote. Legislatures can summon officials; courts can review unlawful action; journalists and civil-society groups can uncover what power would rather conceal. Public office makes someone a custodian of trust, not its owner.

Who gets to belong?

Democracy has been enlarged by people first told they did not belong. Women did not receive suffrage as a gift; generations of women marched, wrote, organised and risked arrest to claim the vote. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil-rights movement exposed the lie of a country calling itself free while denying Black citizens full dignity. Disability-rights campaigners carried that struggle into schools, workplaces, streets, transport and polling places. Rights grow because people refuse to accept exclusion as nature’s law.

The same measure applies to gay and transgender people. Their lives are not a punchline or a convenient target for a politician seeking applause. A democracy can debate difficult policies, but it must remember that the people affected are human beings entitled to safety, equal protection and a voice. When a minority is turned into a menace, the injury reaches beyond that minority. It damages our shared idea of who counts.

I know something about wondering whether one belongs. Growing up queer, I knew the hush around a truth I could not yet speak freely. I watched my voice, my walk, the small gestures that might reveal what I had been taught to hide. My memoir, Tell My Mother I Like Boys, carries that journey from silence toward a more honest life. It taught me that visibility is not vanity. Sometimes it is survival. Sometimes one person’s truth lets another stop believing they are alone.

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A president’s words travel farther than anyone else’s. Donald Trump recently spoke of Los Angeles and San Diego as cities Iran could “take out”; he later said he meant that higher fuel prices were a small price to pay to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The clarification matters. So does the chill of hearing millions of people’s homes spoken of as expendable. In 2015, Trump mimicked the movements of The New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has a disability, while attacking his reporting; Trump denied mocking the reporter’s disability. A leader need not agree with every citizen. But mockery from the highest office gives cruelty permission to travel.

Democracy, a practice of making room

Religion will enter the public square because it lives in people before it lives in institutions. Believers should not have to leave faith at the door before speaking of justice, hunger, mercy or the sacredness of life. But no faith owns the republic. Religious leaders can serve democracy when they teach humility and service. They harm it when spiritual authority becomes political command, or when followers are told whom to hate.

My grandmother would not have asked us to reject faith. She would have asked what it was doing to us. The same question belongs before every temple, church, synagogue, mosque and gurdwara. Wealth behind sacred walls is no proof of service if hunger and preventable suffering remain outside. Faith may offer a lamp. It cannot decide who is allowed into the house.

Gandhi understood that the means shape the ends. Nehru knew that reason and scientific temper cannot survive where citizens are frightened into silence. Patel knew that unity must hold people together. Mandela knew dignity is not a reward for agreement. King asked whether a nation’s institutions lived up to the promises they recited. We need not pretend they would have agreed on everything to ask what their courage requires of us now.

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A democracy is a difficult, daily practice of making room: for the woman demanding equal power, the student asking whether an exam was fair, the disabled citizen who needs a polling place they can enter, the gay man, the trans child, the religious minority, the dissenter and the stranger whose name we have not yet learned. We do not have to find every life familiar to defend each person’s right to live it.

Hatred seldom obeys the hand that lights it. Once a society decides that one neighbour may be stripped of dignity, the permission travels—from the mocked reporter to the student behind a barricade, from the voter missing from a list to the person turned into a campaign target. The person who spews hatred may believe power will keep the flames away. History offers no such promise.

My mother was feeding a roomful of people, yet she kept returning to the child who had not eaten. That is where democracy begins for me: notice who is waiting, make sure they know their time matters, and build a country in which no one has to wonder whether anyone will come back for them.