Bribery takes money. Corruption takes institutions

Under what rules can this happen?

Will those new rules mean that we have two tiers of voters — those who cleared SIR and those who came through another route?

This is a problem that is not going away.

Remember that it all began without a proximate trigger. Nobody had proved, or even claimed, that India’s voter rolls were damaged beyond repair and needed to be fixed with this blunt and disruptive instrument, requiring voters to prove their authenticity through ancestry.

This is a gratuitous exercise in which a hammer has been taken to our voter lists just as casually as it was taken to our currency a decade ago.

There is a saying in America: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ This earthy line tells us that if something is functioning, it does not need to be meddled with.

But that does not accommodate the idea of malice. ‘If it ain’t broke, break it’ is the version we are living under.

Though it was imperfect — and we have looked at some of the ways in which it was — Indian democracy was our crown jewel when we engaged with the world. It was messy and chaotic, but it was real, honest and true.

We could confidently tell ourselves that we were a democratic state. One person, one vote, and so on. Can we now?

The decades of institution-building before the BJP secured a majority in 2014 constituted a giant crumple zone. The assault on institutions — courts, universities, the electoral system, pluralism, political culture and the media — took a whole decade because those institutions, some weak and others flawed, existed and worked.

They have been rotted, decayed and made putrid for the sake of making them so.

This is the essence of corruption.

Views are personal. More of Aakar Patel’s writing here