Are We Trading Democracy for Distraction?

Every democracy runs on attention. What citizens choose to notice, what they choose to ignore, and what they allow themselves to be distracted by ultimately determines the health of the system. In India, this truth is especially disappointing. We live in a country buzzing with constant political churn: every day brings new controversies, new allegations, and new crises. But more often than not, our collective attention gravitates toward what is sensational, entertaining, and unfortunately unimportant.

The recent overlap between the “vote chori” allegations and the Apoorva Mukhija scandal is only the latest chapter in this recurring pattern. Just when questions about electoral fraud—arguably one of the gravest threats to a democracy—should have commanded national focus, our headlines, feeds, and conversations were overtaken by the private drama of an internet influencer. What does it say about us, as Indians, that we let this happen? Are we so naturally drawn to entertainment that we abandon vigilance? Or is this distraction engineered by those who stand to gain from our inattention?

This is not a trivial question. In a fragile democracy, distraction is not harmless. It is the very mechanism by which accountability is eroded. To understand why we allowed “vote chori” to be eclipsed by scandal, we need to look beyond the headlines and interrogate ourselves, our media, and our political culture.

Human beings are wired for narrative. We are drawn to stories with clear protagonists and villains, dramatic conflicts, and emotional highs and lows. Systemic issues like electoral fraud, by contrast, resist such packaging. They involve complex data, legal jargon, and slow, incremental revelations. Even when the implications are enormous, the storytelling is too dry to sustain outrage for long. The Apoorva Mukhija scandal, on the other hand, provided precisely what our attention economy thrives on: moral judgments, gossip, and instant gratification. One could participate in it without prior knowledge or context; it was accessible outrage, low effort but high reward.

Psychologists often distinguish between “fast thinking” and “slow thinking.” Scandals thrive on fast thinking—instinctive judgments and emotional reactions. Systemic issues require slow thinking: analysis, patience, and a willingness to confront ambiguity. It is not surprising, then, that as a collective we gravitated toward the scandal. The question, however, is not only about psychology but about how this psychology is exploited.

Media theory offers a powerful lens to understand what happened. Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw’s agenda-setting theory reminds us that the media may not tell us what to think, but it tells us what to think about. When primetime debates and social media algorithms amplify a scandal, they displace other issues from public consciousness.

In India’s hyper-competitive media ecosystem, the incentives to prioritise scandal over substance are overwhelming. Serious investigative journalism about electoral fraud demands time, expertise, and editorial courage. A viral influencer scandal, by contrast, can be turned into dozens of clickable headlines and hour-long debates with instant ratings.

The Apoorva Mukhija episode fits neatly into this logic. It is not that the media conspired to hide “vote chori”; rather, it knew the public would reward it more for scandal coverage and, in so doing, performed a function that ultimately benefited political actors eager to avoid scrutiny. We often assume outrage is a sign of democratic health—citizens speaking up, demanding accountability. But outrage today is also a commodity. It is generated, circulated, and monetised. Platforms like Instagram and YouTube are structured to reward outrage because it drives engagement.

A scandal like Apoorva Mukhija’s fits perfectly into this cycle. It generates memes, reaction videos, live-stream debates, and endless user participation. Electoral fraud, by contrast, does not. One cannot easily meme an affidavit or a court hearing. The result is structural: our outrage is harvested where it is profitable, not where it is politically necessary.

This commodification of outrage has profound implications. Citizens may feel they are participating in public life by commenting on scandals, but in reality, they are engaged in what scholars call “performative politics”—expressions of moral stance that change nothing about structures of power. Outrage becomes entertainment, a cultural currency rather than a civic responsibility.

To dismiss this as a one-off would be a mistake. India’s modern political history is littered with moments when scandal eclipsed substance.

• 2011 Anna Hazare Movement vs. Bollywood Gossip: During the height of the anti-corruption protests, newspapers that should have been focusing on systemic reform devoted front pages to celebrity divorces and film releases. The trivial often outpaced the transformative.

• 2014–2015 “Suit Boot Ki Sarkar” vs. Beef Ban Debates: Allegations of crony capitalism in policy decisions were quickly overshadowed by cultural flashpoints designed to polarise and distract.

• 2020 COVID Crisis vs. Sushant Singh Rajput Case: At the height of the pandemic, when questions of public health infrastructure and government responsibility should have dominated, much of the nation was consumed by conspiracy theories surrounding a film star’s death.

These are not coincidences. They reveal a pattern: whenever systemic scrutiny threatens to intensify, a scandal—whether organic or amplified—steps in to redirect attention.

Beyond media and politics lies a deeper cultural truth. Indians live in a landscape of contradictions: staggering inequality beside spectacular wealth, systemic corruption beside ritual celebrations of democracy. To confront these contradictions directly is exhausting. Escapism becomes a coping mechanism. Scandals, then, function as safe spaces for outrage. They allow citizens to vent moral anger without challenging power structures. They provide the illusion of participation while shielding us from the despair of confronting systemic dysfunction.

But coping has consequences. If escapism becomes habitual, citizens lose the very capacity to engage with democracy’s hardest questions. Outrage becomes a release valve rather than a political force. This cultural preference for the sensational over the systemic is precisely what allows our democracy to weaken quietly.

The costs of this distraction are immense. Electoral fraud is not merely another issue in the political marketplace; it is an existential challenge. If “vote chori” is real and left unexamined, it delegitimises the entire democratic process. It undermines trust, suppresses accountability, and entrenches authoritarian tendencies.

This is how democracies collapse: not through dramatic coups, but through the slow corrosion of vigilance, the steady triumph of spectacle over substance. In the end, the Apoorva Mukhija scandal was not the scandal. Nor, by itself, was “vote chori.” The true scandal is what we prioritise—our attention, our complicity.

The media can only sell what we are willing to buy. Politicians can only distract us if we choose distraction. Outrage can only be commodified if we keep producing and consuming it. The hard truth is that Indian democracy is not simply weakened by corrupt elites or manipulative media; it is weakened by citizens who allow themselves to be entertained while their rights are eroded.

The choice between Apoorva Mukhija and “vote chori” was never really about one influencer versus one allegation. It was about whether we, as Indians, are capable of focusing on systemic threats even when they are less entertaining than scandal. If we do not learn to resist this cycle, we will wake up one day to realise that democracy was stolen not in one night, but in a thousand distractions.