- By Ambrish Srivastava
India’s democracy—proudly proclaimed the world’s largest—today appears both resilient and fragile, a paradox caught between its constitutional grandeur and its lived contradictions. Nowhere is this paradox more alive than in Bihar, a land where political movements often begin as whispers and swell into storms that shake Delhi. Into this crucible has stepped the Voter Rights Yatra—a journey that is not merely about kilometres walked or slogans raised, but about reclaiming the battered soul of Indian democracy. To dismiss it as symbolic is to miss the depth of its moral intent. To ignore it, as much of the mainstream media has done, is to prove precisely why it matters.
The Yatra is a phoenix moment—a rare rebirth of democratic imagination at a time when disenfranchisement, disinformation, and authoritarian drift threaten to hollow out the Republic. It anchors itself in history, interrogates the ruling dispensation’s reduction of democracy to arithmetic, and makes the case for why Bihar, once again, may hold the mirror India desperately needs.
The Silence that Speaks
The Yatra began from Sasaram, resting place of Sher Shah Suri—the emperor who, in the 16th century, envisioned a road network that bound India in trade, governance, and culture. To start here is to remind the nation that India has always been a land of journeys, where roads are conduits not just of commerce but of ideas.
Yet, strikingly, much of India’s mainstream media greeted the Yatra with silence. No breathless live broadcasts, no primetime debates, no front-page photographs. This silence is not neutral—it is curated. Television in particular, once the roaring voice of dissent, now whispers in compliance. That such silence greeted a march for voting rights is, paradoxically, its greatest gift: it underscores the moral urgency of the cause. What greater indictment of a democracy than that a peaceful, constitutional plea for the sanctity of the ballot be deemed unworthy of airtime?
The absence of coverage is itself a presence—a presence of fear, of complicity, of abdication. As in many struggles of the past, what is not said often reveals the truth more powerfully than what is spoken.
The Sacred Weight of the Vote
At the heart of the Yatra is a profound idea: the vote is not a token but the essence of citizenship. The principle of “One Person, One Vote” was not casually bestowed in 1950—it was a radical declaration in a society fractured by caste, class, and gender. Unlike many Western democracies, which staggered suffrage and excluded women or minorities for decades, India embraced universal franchise from the start.
But that promise is steadily hollowing. Money power, opaque electoral bonds, the misuse of state machinery, and the calculated spread of misinformation have tilted the field. The voter is flattered during campaigns, forgotten in governance, and manipulated through spectacle.
Globally, struggles for the vote have defined epochs—the US civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, the suffragette movement in Britain. Each affirmed that the right to vote is not procedural but existential. When the vote is eroded, democracy itself is diminished.
The Voter Rights Yatra stands in continuity with these struggles. It is India’s reminder that the ballot cannot be reduced to a hollow ritual—it must remain the instrument of destiny.
Bihar: Furnace of Revolt and Renewal
Why Bihar? Because Bihar has long been the Republic’s conscience.
It was here that Jayaprakash Narayan lit the lamp of “Total Revolution” in the 1970s, shaking Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. It was here that students and youth poured into the streets, asserting that democracy could not be caged by authoritarian will. The Mandal agitation, too, was birthed in Bihar, forever altering India’s caste equations and the nature of political representation.
Bihar’s poverty is often caricatured as weakness. In truth, deprivation has sharpened its people’s political instinct. Migrants from Bihar carry not just their labour but also a fierce sense of dignity. The peasantry here, dismissed by elites as backward, has been the backbone of every democratic upsurge.
History shows that marginalised regions often incubate transformative change—Tunisia in the Arab Spring, Poland in the Solidarity movement. Bihar, with its restless youth and resilient poor, has repeatedly offered India the spark of renewal. The Voter Rights Yatra walks in this tradition.
Anatomy of the Yatra – More than Symbolism
India has seen many yatras. The BJP’s Rath Yatras, led by L.K. Advani and echoed by Narendra Modi, mobilised majoritarian passions through theatre and intimidation. They dictated; they did not listen.
The Voter Rights Yatra consciously rejects that template. Its strength lies in intimacy: leaders walking with villagers, pausing in small towns, listening to grievances, eating in modest homes, engaging in dialogue. This is democracy as pedagogy, not propaganda. Walking embodies humility; listening restores trust.
Stories abound along the road: a farmer denied flood compensation, a migrant worker rendered invisible in Delhi, a student despairing at unemployment. These are not mere anecdotes—they are the pulse of the Republic. The Yatra stitches them into a national narrative.
Democracy for a Few vs Democracy for All
The Yatra is not just about voting—it is about competing visions of democracy.
One vision, increasingly dominant, is democracy for a few: captured by corporate money, dominated by caste elites and majoritarian groups, reduced to a plebiscite that rubber-stamps power.
The other is democracy for all: where youth, women, Dalits, minorities, and the poor are not just counted but heard; where political and economic democracy are inseparable; where dignity, not spectacle, defines governance.
The Yatra asserts that freedom without equality is licence for the powerful, and equality without freedom is tyranny for the powerless. Only together can they sustain the Republic.
The Phoenix Moment for Bihar Congress
For the Congress in Bihar, this Yatra is both gamble and opportunity. From dominance in the 1960s to near-extinction today, the party has been reduced to a marginal force. Yet Subodh Kant Sahay, a key proponent, frames it as humility: rebirth begins when arrogance dies.
Rahul Gandhi, too, is being recast. Once dismissed as reluctant, he now projects himself less as a power-seeker and more as a bearer of democratic ideas, his Bharat Jodo Yatra having set the template. In Tejashwi Yadav, the Yatra finds a youthful ally with Mandal roots and generational energy. If sincerity rather than expediency is perceived, Bihar’s electorate could deliver seismic consequences in 2025 and beyond.
The Global Democratic Lens
India’s slide in global democracy indices is no accident. Freedom House downgraded it to “partly free”; V-Dem labelled it an “electoral autocracy.” These are not academic labels—they capture lived realities of shrinking freedoms and captured institutions.
Yet, movements like the Voter Rights Yatra resonate globally. They echo Turkey’s protests against Erdogan, Hungary’s resistance to Orban, the Philippines’ fight against disinformation under Duterte. They recall the Salt March, the Civil Rights marches, Brazil’s workers’ marches.
The lesson is universal: democracy is not self-sustaining. It must be defended, often by those with least material gain but greatest moral stake. When Bihar walks, the world should take note.
Obstacles on the Road to Patna
The Yatra’s challenges are formidable: media blackout, the BJP’s unmatched machinery, the INDIA bloc’s fractured ambitions, and the Congress’s organisational frailty in Bihar.
The greatest risk is symbolism without structure. Movements must institutionalise into strategy. Listening must translate into organisation; moral clarity must blend with political cunning. Otherwise sparks may glow but die quickly.
Why It Matters – Beyond Electoral Math
To reduce the Yatra to seat calculations would be to miss its essence. Its true significance lies in repoliticising the poor, reminding them that democracy is theirs to reclaim. It is about redefining leadership as service, not spectacle. It is about reviving India’s democratic imagination from the ashes of cynicism.
The Voter Rights Yatra is not a shortcut to power but a moral compass. It insists democracy is not inherited—it must be earned anew each generation.
The Phoenix Rises
By the time it reaches Patna, the Yatra will not just have covered kilometres but truths—about disenfranchisement, media abdication, and political neglect of the weakest. Its success will not be measured in seats but in sparks of hope across Bihar’s villages and towns.
India today teeters between democracy and its simulacrum. The difference will be determined not by the powerful but by the powerless, not by what is broadcast in studios but by what is whispered on dusty roads.
Bihar has often offered India a mirror. Today it does so again: despair can yield to courage, silence to song, decline to renewal.
The Voter Rights Yatra is that song—a phoenix rising from the ashes, winged with hope, aflame with the stubborn belief that democracy is worth walking for, worth fighting for, worth saving.
(The author is a senior journalist. Views are personal.)