Tavleen Singh writes: Turning democracy into a farce

If the Congress Party’s leaders have so little faith in Indian elections, would it not be best for them to stop contesting them? It is not possible in any contest to be both a player and a protester at the same time. If you participate, you must accept victory and defeat.

This newspaper’s excellent investigation into the functioning of the Election Commission is what gave everyone good reason to demand answers. (File)

5 min readNov 1, 2026 06:16 AM IST First published on: Nov 1, 2026 at 06:16 AM IST

For me, the defining image from last week was of the Prime Minister gently fondling and feeding calves in a Gujarati dairy. He smiled benignly down at the calves and they, in their fashion, smiled benignly back at him. He was so happy with these pictures that he posted them on Instagram, saying that these were special moments from his visit to Gujarat. Did he do this to increase his popularity on the social media platform that the Cockroach Janta Party today understands better than any mainstream Indian political party? Perhaps.

What can be said for sure is that Narendra Modi seemed to want to get as far away from the political events in Delhi as possible. Personally, I understand and sympathise with his need to flee the polluted air of our capital city at a time when it is about to get a lot more polluted because we Indians find it hard to celebrate Diwali without firecrackers. Modi may also have wanted to distance himself from the clampdown his government has ordered, in which thousands of posts on social media have been censored. For the first time, one of my posts was reduced to a black frame the size of a postage stamp, and I was told that it would not be visible in India. I have no idea what was in this censored post.