Aesop told the tale of a shepherd boy who, bored of his duties, decided to raise a false alarm. “Wolf!” he cried, and the villagers came running. There was no wolf, only laughter. He tried it again and again until the day the real beast appeared. He shouted for help, but by then, no one believed him.
Indian politics has its own shepherd boy. For more than a decade, he has stood upon his favourite hilltop, waving his arms and warning of monsters that never arrived. Each time, the public gathers, patient and curious. And each time, they discover not the wolf of corruption or collapse, but merely another mirage of melodrama.
The first outcry was over tailored suits and imagined bias—the charge that the government served only the rich. But soon, schemes like Jan Dhan, Ujjwala, and Ayushman Bharat revealed a welfare revolution unfolding beneath the rhetoric. The so-called “suit-boot” government, it turned out, was busy giving shoes to those who had none.
Then came Rafale—a thunderous accusation delivered with moral indignation and political choreography. “Scam!” he shouted, confident the echo would turn into truth. But the highest court of the land and the national auditor both found no trace of wrongdoing. When the people went to the polls, they reaffirmed their faith in the very chowkidar he had accused. The wolf, once again, was nowhere to be seen.
Next came Pegasus, the phantom of surveillance that was said to lurk in every phone. Committees were formed, headlines flared, and conspiracy bloomed like monsoon moss. Yet, when the dust settled, the Supreme Court-appointed panel found no evidence of foul play. The villagers, summoned yet again, trudged back to their lives.
By 2023, the wolf had found a new mask, this time corporate. When the American short-seller Hindenburg released its report attacking India’s home-grown corporate giant, the shepherd boy seized it like scripture. He accused the market regulator of complicity and predicted an economic collapse. The markets steadied, the regulator’s integrity stood firm, and in a twist of poetic justice, Hindenburg itself later wound up, undone by its own distortions.
Defeat, however, needed new villains. When none could be found among men, machines were blamed instead. Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) became the convenient culprit for every loss, despite being the same devices that had delivered earlier victories. The shepherd’s imagination had expanded from wolves to wires.
And now, the latest cry is of “vote theft”. Having exhausted every script, the boy has turned upon democracy itself, insisting that the people’s voice has been stolen. There is no proof, no logic, only the weary sound of disbelief. The villagers do not come anymore. They have learned to tell the difference between danger and drama.
Aesop’s fable ends not with the wolf’s triumph but with the boy’s loss of credibility. The shepherd still shouts from his lonely hill, but his words drift unheard across the valley. Truth, once squandered, cannot be restored by volume. In politics, as in life, trust is the only currency that appreciates with silence and evaporates with noise!
Bansuri Swaraj is the Lok Sabha member from New Delhi.