When Politics Mistakes Noise for Strength

When Vilification Becomes a Political Strategy


BY : Jameel Aahmed Milansaar.

Politics in India has long relied on spectacle, but spectacle is not the same as substance. When public figures build their careers on relentless hostility, personal abuse, and the routine stretching of facts, they may win momentary attention, even applause from loyal supporters. What they do not always win is durability. Over time, politics conducted in this register begins to exhaust itself, because voters eventually distinguish between conviction and performance, between criticism and caricature, between leadership and mere noise.

That is the context in which the recent reversals involving several prominent opposition leaders should be read. It is tempting for their critics to frame these moments as a moral reckoning, as if electoral setbacks were proof that the politics of invective has finally been punished. But the deeper point is simpler and more sobering. A style of politics built around permanent antagonism can generate heat for years, but it rarely produces the trust required to sustain power. In democratic life, outrage is not a substitute for organisation, and denunciation is not a substitute for legitimacy.

The habit of reducing politics to a battle of personalities has been especially damaging in an era already marked by institutional strain. It encourages leaders to speak as though their opponents were enemies to be destroyed rather than rivals to be challenged. It rewards theatricality over seriousness and short-term signalling over long-term responsibility. And it creates a public sphere in which even genuine criticism begins to sound interchangeable with abuse. Once that line is crossed, political language loses precision. When everything is described as betrayal, corruption, or catastrophe, none of those words retains its force.

This is why the careers of leaders who have depended too heavily on anti-Modi rhetoric, opportunistic positioning, or state-level identity politics should not be treated simply as isolated stories of personal decline. They are also illustrations of a broader crisis in opposition politics. The challenge for any opposition in a democracy is not merely to dislike the ruling party more loudly. It is to persuade citizens that it has a coherent alternative, a credible temperament, and the institutional discipline to govern. Without that, opposition becomes a performance of resentment, and resentment is a poor foundation for public trust.

There is, of course, nothing illegitimate about opposing Narendra Modi or the BJP. A democracy requires strong, substantive opposition. But opposition that depends overwhelmingly on vilification rather than argument, on provocation rather than persuasion, and on constant moral panic rather than policy clarity, eventually runs into its own limits. It may mobilize a base, but it rarely expands one. It may dominate the cycle for a moment, but it struggles to define the political horizon. And when the moment passes, it often discovers that loudness is not the same as relevance.

That is why the language of “good riddance” says more about the degradation of political culture than about the health of democracy. The object should never be the humiliation of rivals for its own sake. Politics is not improved by public life being turned into a contest of contempt. The stronger standard is harder to maintain: to argue without abusing, to criticize without lying, to oppose without reducing every disagreement to moral theatre. That standard may appear old-fashioned in a media environment built to reward outrage. Yet it remains the only one that can preserve democratic seriousness.

What is striking about the present moment is not simply that some of these leaders have been weakened or displaced. It is that the vocabulary once used to signal confidence has begun to sound hollow. Words like “people’s mandate,” “mass support,” and “public anger” lose credibility when they are deployed too often as cover for factional manoeuvre. Similarly, claims of ideological purity ring thin when accompanied by tactical alliances, convenience-based shifts, and a willingness to say one thing in one state and another elsewhere. The public is not naive. It may forgive inconsistency, but it notices it.

In that sense, political decline is often self-inflicted long before the electorate delivers its verdict. A leader who spends years cultivating hostility eventually finds that hostility comes back to isolate them. A party that normalises opportunism eventually finds that opportunism cannot inspire confidence. And a movement that mistook volume for vision eventually learns that voters are not obliged to remain impressed by repetition. The downfall, when it arrives, can appear sudden. Usually, it has been years in the making.

A serious reading of this moment therefore requires less triumphalism and more scrutiny. Why did certain styles of opposition fail to connect beyond their most committed supporters? Why did personality-driven politics crowd out organisational depth? Why did the language of resistance so often collapse into ad hominem attack? These are not questions for the defeated alone. They are also questions for a political class that increasingly treats theatre as strategy and grievance as ideology.

The answer, in the end, is that democratic politics cannot be sustained by negation alone. It needs a positive account of power, responsibility, and the future. It needs leaders who can persuade without poisoning the well. It needs parties that can critique authority without becoming captive to resentment. And it needs citizens who can tell the difference between forceful argument and empty aggression.

That is the contrast worth drawing today. Not between saints and sinners, or winners and losers, but between politics that enlarges democratic possibility and politics that shrinks it. One kind of politics may be noisy and momentarily triumphant. The other may be steadier, less dramatic, and more demanding. But only the latter has a chance of lasting.