When Zohran Mamdani stood before a cheering crowd in New York and invoked Jawaharlal Nehru’s “A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history…” speech, a part of me, a part that has long gone numb from watching the slow ruin of India’s democratic imagination, twitched as if some forgotten nerve had been struck.

It was an odd thing to feel, this flicker of recognition. That those words could suddenly sound so fresh, if not in Delhi, at least in New York. To hear Nehru in an American accent was to feel both consolation and rebuke – consolation that someone, somewhere, still remembered what those words meant; rebuke that India itself no longer does.

Of course, the spectacle of Mamdani invoking one of India’s founders was swiftly devoured by networked TV’s insatiable appetite. The Indian media, rarely kind to Mamdani and still less grateful to its own first prime minister, treated the moment with suspicion. After all, this was the same Mamdani who had not too long ago named the current holder of that office as the ringmaster of the Gujarat riots, and India’s pliant press has never fared well with criticism directed at its supreme leader.

Yet, among the dwindling few who still defend the idea of a plural India, there was a brief spark of celebration. That we should feel heartened by a Nehru quotation uttered on foreign soil betrays something deeper about us; it reveals a quiet dependency that has come to be – a hunger that we now have for borrowed affirmations. If nothing else, it reflects back to us the harsh truth of what we once aspired to be and what we have allowed ourselves to become.

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This dissonance matters because, at this moment, the domestic scene is bleak in ways that perhaps should demand more of our attention. The same day that Mamdani won in NYC, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi pointed, in his third such presentation, errors in electoral rolls, from duplicate names to other discrepancies, as evidence of centralised manipulations of the electoral process in Haryana and across the country. Mamdani quoting Nehru was a reminder that for democracy to be meaningful, it depends on trust in the instruments that make voice legible, because a ballot without faith is not a ballot but a piece of paper.

Reading Nehru in 2025

So what does it mean to hear or for that matter read Nehru today? To find Nehru is to look within us and to confront a dichotomy at the center of our political formation: that those most able to seize power are also the ones most in need of being restrained. Nehru knew this in the belly. In an essay published under the pseudonym Chanakya in 1937, he wrote of “Jawaharlal” as “some triumphant Caesar passing by”, and catalogued the very attributes that seduce men toward despotism: energy, pride, organisational capacity, contempt for the weak and an impatience with democratic slowness. It is astonishing and salutary that a leader in the ascendancy would warn his country against the temptations of his own success.

That essay, that mindset matter now because they supply a test. A republic requires not only elections and constitutions but a grammar of restraint, humility and self-suspicion among those who rule. When leaders practice this grammar, institutions have a fighting chance. When they do not, institutions become theatre, and the republic a set piece to be rearranged at will. Nehru’s counsel was not moralising ornament, it was diagnostic. He understood that beloved leaders can become the greatest threat to liberty because popularity itself is a lever for consolidation.

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Today, the culture of governance in India bears the marks of what I will call performative mania, in which rhetoric replaces reasoning, spectacle replaces deliberation and a narrowed public language refuses complexity. The politics of grievance, always a lever for mobilisation, has been weaponised into a civic religion. The effect is not instantaneous seizure so much as systematic flattening: institutions remain, but their spirit – those habits that protect a republic – erodes. The result is a republic that looks intact until you try to use it. The lights are on, no one is home.

It is tempting to dismiss nostalgia for the Nehruvian age as sentimental. After all, the republic he built was hardly flawless; caste was there, poverty persisted too and hypocrisy flourished as well. But what made that era stand apart, even in its contradictions, was the presence of self-doubt. There was, at the heart of that experiment, humility before the task of building a nation from fragments. That humility has evaporated. What remains is hubris, the belief that to question is to betray, that to remember is to offend, that to disagree is to sin.

This is not only an ideological crisis but one of taste and disposition. Nehru’s liberalism was a practice of doubt: he saw democracy as a discipline that taught restraint, and he loved argument enough to distrust passion unmoored from reason. The leaders now proclaim certainty as virtue. Certainty is politically potent because it offers deliverance from anxiety, but it is morally dangerous because it closes the routes to self-correction. Where Nehru prized the slow work of institutions, the new mood prizes immediacy and obedience. The difference is not only rhetorical, but it also produces different citizens: citizens who habituate command and learn to mistake obedience for belonging.

There is also a global irony to this story. A Muslim mayor-elect in New York can recite Nehru without being asked to prove his loyalty to a majoritarian myth. In India, public invocation of a Nehruian ethos can be read as betrayal, nostalgia or, even worse, a blind elevation of an elite project divorced from “real” people. Yet real betrayal is not nostalgia but the impoverishment of civic imagination: the willingness to accept narratives that narrow the nation’s ethical universe.

The claim from those now in charge that India is at the precipice of becoming a Vishwaguru, sounds splendid until you test what is being taught. Pussyfooting between arrogance and pedagogy, this doctrine sometimes reads like imperial aspiration without the humility to study, to fail and to be corrected. It is no feat to lecture if you will not listen. The mark of a nation fit to teach is not the loudness of its boast but the steadiness of its practice.

If the republic is diminishing, its disappearance will not resemble an apocalypse so much as an attrition. Democracy dies not only by coups and bans but by erosion: by the normalising of thuggishness, by the capture of public culture, by the slow replacement of argument with certainty. Moral imagination flattens institutions, courts, media, bureaucracy and all become appendages to power instead of buffers against it. That attrition is slow and this is what makes it so dangerous – people acclimate. They do not notice their liberty lost because they have learned to live in its absence. They perform loyalty, they buy into spectacle, they trade patience for the short relief that certainty brings.

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The immediate facts matter – the accusations of electoral anomalies, the spectacle of media cowed, public life reconfigured to reward loyalty – but the deeper harm is philosophical. What do we owe the future of our political selves? If Nehru’s writings ask us to think about the uses and dangers of power, then our task is to cultivate citizens who insist on that very thinking. There will be a price for failing. A polity that gives itself up to the hunger for celebrity and control becomes brittle. When the next crisis comes, economic, environmental or geopolitical, only those cultures that keep open the channels of critique and dissent will have the ability to survive without surrendering their soul.

Politics that reward spectacle and veneration shrinks the moral imagination of a people, making them less capable of empathy and less willing to account for the worth of minorities, dissenters and the vulnerable. At an international level, a nation that divorces its rhetoric from the practices it recommends to others becomes a teacher with no curriculum, grandiose in speech but barren in example.

What is the remedy?

There are no fast solutions. The project of republican repair is slow, mundane and often unromantic. It requires rebuilding trust in institutions by demanding transparency and accountability, it requires a remoralisation of public life, an insistence that public goods matter more than partisan triumphs, it requires cultural work, books, theaters, newspapers, classrooms, that teach a patience for complexity and a taste for self-critique. Above all, it requires a generation willing to make thinking a civic virtue again; not the thinking that justifies precommitments, but the thinking that humbles them.

Mamdani’s borrowing of Nehru’s sentence was not an act of nostalgia so much as an uninvited mirror. It asks: can a nation whose public life has been reconstituted into a theater of certainty recall the habits of self-doubt and institutional care that once sustained it? The answer is not guaranteed. It will depend on whether people, individually and collectively, remember that freedom is not a possession but a practice, one renewed each day by argument, by restraint, by the ugly work of keeping power in its proper place.

If we fail, the republic will not end with a bang but with a thousand domestications, a shuttering of imagination, a corrosion of law, the quiet acceptance of spectacle over substance. If we succeed, it will be because people began, again, to read and to argue, to refuse the cheap consolation of identity alone, and to build a public life that prizes the slow, painful labor of liberty. Either way, the stakes are not political, they are about what kind of souls we choose to raise in this polity, obedient and small, or skeptical and large.

Raj Shekhar Sen is based out of San Francisco and works in the area of data privacy regulations. He also occasionally contributes as a freelancer writing on politics and runs a podcast on politics called the Bharatiya Junta Podcast.

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