After the Cold War, democracies tried engaging with authoritarian states, hoping it would bring mutual benefits and encourage reform. Instead, the authoritarians flipped the script. They used the very openness of globalisation and Western integration against democracies, sabotaging the international institutions that welcomed them.

Countries like China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela twisted the idea of "soft power" – manipulating the internet, creating fake charities and groups, deploying sham election monitors, and running sophisticated state media campaigns. Nowadays, it is known by another term - "Sharp Power."

However, it is not only playing out on a global scale; it is also evident in some of the greatest and largest "democracies" in the world, if they may still be called so. In our beloved country, sharp power has taken root domestically, wielded not by an external enemy but by the ruling right-wing establishment itself.

Rahul Gandhi's recent exposé of voter fraud in Mahadevapura and implicating the Election Commission in shielding such practices offers a piercing glimpse into how this internal sharp power operates. It is not the crude, obvious coercion of past dictatorships. It works sophisticatedly by manipulating electoral rolls, deploying opacity, and leveraging pliant officials. The regime bends procedure to suit power while maintaining the façade of legality. These are "Zombie" election observers - rubber-stamping sham polls for international legitimacy, if you will.

The success of such sharp power depends on two enabling conditions. Firstly, institutional capture: quietly replacing independent oversight with loyal operatives. Secondly, a dull public, too distracted, or divided to interrogate what is happening. The right-wing project thrives on both. Years of nationalist messaging, polarising rhetoric, and relentless media manipulation have left many voters equating party loyalty with patriotism. The ability to think critically, to question the source of information, to connect cause and effect in political life, has been weakened.

This erosion of analytical capacity is not accidental. It is the intended outcome of sustained propaganda and educational neglect. A citizenry capable of independent thought is unpredictable; a citizenry trained to respond emotionally to identity cues is far easier to control. Thus, entertainment media displaces investigative journalism, history is rewritten in the service of ideology, and dissenters are cast as enemies of the nation.

If the electorate just shrugs these accusations off or is convinced either that the fraud is exaggerated or that all politics is equally corrupt, then the right-wing sharp power will have succeeded in hollowing out democracy. The elections will become ceremonial confirmations of predetermined power.

The danger is not just that votes are being stolen. The very idea of the vote as a tool of change is being stolen from the public imagination. A democracy stripped of trust in its mechanisms long enough cannot recognise, let alone fight, the infections that will eventually destroy it.