The Ballot Box Is a Machine for Manufacturing Narratives

For years, India was served a magnificent national-security thriller. There were foreign spies, stolen cryogenic secrets, a senior ISRO scientist, beautiful foreign women, honeytraps, political corruption and, naturally, television studios full of people who had apparently solved the case before the investigators had finished inventing it.

Every faction received its preferred conspiracy.

The nationalists were told that a senior scientist had sold India’s cryogenic rocket secrets to enemy nations. The politicians were told that K. Karunakaran, then Kerala’s Chief Minister, was protecting an international spy ring through his police confidant Raman Srivastava, an allegation the rival A. K. Antony faction weaponised to bring down his government. The press combined the two, added glamorous foreign women, romance, rockets and treason, and served the resulting soup to a population already trained to confuse a headline with evidence.

The actual story was considerably less cinematic. The investigation began with immigration violations involving Maldivian women and then expanded into an alleged international espionage conspiracy. ISRO contacts were discovered, suspicions multiplied, and the machinery began constructing the magnificent story it would subsequently attempt to prove. Nambi Narayanan, the scientist at the centre of it, was arrested and subjected to coercive interrogation in pursuit of evidence and confessions that could sustain the narrative.

The espionage allegations eventually collapsed, though not before the state tried to keep them alive. The Central Bureau of Investigation reported to the court in April 1996 that the allegations were false and unproved, and that the police had proceeded on suspicion by questionable methods. In June the Kerala government withdrew its consent for that investigation and ordered its own police to look again. In April 1998 the Supreme Court quashed the withdrawal as patently invalid in law and a malafide exercise of power, holding that the state’s object had been to establish guilt in spite of its investigators’ conclusion, and awarded each of the six accused ₹1 lakh in costs. Twenty years after that, the Court ordered Kerala to pay Narayanan ₹50 lakh; in 2019 the Republic gave him the Padma Bhushan, honouring the man whom its own machinery had helped present as a traitor.

First destroy the man. A few decades later, give him a medal. The medal is cheaper than admitting how the machinery works.

A machine for manufacturing narratives

The ballot box does not discover truth. It manufactures narratives. The probability that one of the dominant political narratives happens to coincide with truth is roughly comparable to finding a vegetarian tiger: theoretically possible, perhaps, but not something upon which one should construct an entire political philosophy.

The voter is offered two or three professionally packaged stories. He selects one; his neighbour selects another; and both immediately conclude that they have participated in a profound intellectual exercise. Truth, meanwhile, lies somewhere at the bottom of the ocean while voters remain on the surface arguing about whether the red life raft is morally superior to the blue one.

This is why serious analysis should not begin with left and right. Left and right relative to what? The more fundamental centre is the ballot box itself: the institutional mechanism that compresses millions of different preferences into a handful of political coalitions. The machine does not really ask what you believe. It asks which of the available packages you are prepared to purchase.

Choose your warden

Once political competition is organised around winning elections, dominant coalitions emerge. Eventually, the citizen is presented with one of the great achievements of political civilisation: you may choose your ruler, provided you select from the rulers already available.

Do you oppose taxation? Fine. Team A or Team B? Do you oppose war? Excellent. Which flag would you like on your protest poster? Do you simply want to be left alone? Unfortunately, that option is not on the ballot.

Thus emerges the doctrine of the “lesser of two evils.” A prisoner also has choices. He may prefer one guard to another. Democracy has merely elevated this principle into constitutional philosophy and added a parade, an anthem and several thousand political commentators.

The lesser evil, moreover, has a remarkable tendency not to remain lesser. Yesterday’s emergency becomes today’s institution. Today’s temporary subsidy becomes tomorrow’s entitlement. Tomorrow’s entitlement becomes a sacred national achievement. Then, at the next election, you are offered a choice between preserving it and expanding it slightly faster. This is called progress.

Path locking

Political voting permits individuals to participate in decisions over resources that do not belong exclusively to them. If a majority votes to take your money, regulate your property or subsidise someone else’s preferred activity, it is called popular sovereignty. If I do precisely the same thing without first organising an election, it is called theft. Apparently, the ballot box performs a miraculous moral transformation.

The system also creates its own dependents. Once enough people depend upon a subsidy, quota, licence, reservation, welfare programme or regulatory privilege, abolition becomes politically difficult. The beneficiaries are concentrated and know exactly what they stand to lose, while the costs are dispersed among millions of taxpayers. The institution therefore survives and grows. Eventually it hires administrators whose professional responsibility is to explain why it must continue to exist. The original problem may disappear entirely. The institution does not.

This is path locking: a monopoly insulated from meaningful exit and competition gradually acquires interests that make reversal increasingly difficult. You can leave a restaurant, change your telephone company or sell a bad investment. Try exiting the territorial monopoly while remaining inside its territory, and suddenly consumer sovereignty develops some rather impressive exceptions.

Jerry Pournelle’s iron law holds that institutions gradually become dominated by those serving the organisation rather than its original purpose: a department begins by asking, “How do we solve this problem?” and eventually the more urgent question becomes, “How do we ensure that this department survives?” Robert Michels’ iron law of oligarchy describes the next stage. Voters elect representatives, representatives appoint committees, committees appoint experts, experts write regulations, and the regulations govern the voters. At the end of this magnificent chain of delegation, the voter proudly announces, “We govern ourselves.” Parkinson’s law completes the picture: the original work may disappear, but this merely creates an opportunity to discover new work. A bureaucracy without work is not unemployed. It is underfunded.

Public choice theory — the study of politics on the assumption that politicians and officials pursue their own interests, much as everybody else does — explains why the expansion never stops. Political benefits are concentrated while costs are dispersed. A small organised group may gain enormously from a subsidy or privilege while millions of taxpayers each lose too little individually to organise effectively.

And so every organised group eventually approaches the state with essentially the same proposal: we have discovered a serious national problem, so please take money from everyone else. The state replies: at last, responsible citizens. Each intervention produces distortions, and those distortions become justification for another intervention. Eventually there is an entire ministry administering both the disease and the cure.

The real question

The great mistake is to imagine that centralised democratic states fail merely because the wrong people are elected. Perhaps they function remarkably well according to their institutional incentives. They preserve bureaucracies, reward organised interests, expand political control and convert temporary programmes into permanent institutions, all while persuading the taxpayer that this is being done in the name of “the people.”

The ISRO case was simply a dramatic illustration of the same broader process. An institution produces a narrative. Politicians weaponise it. The media monetises it. The public believes it. By the time truth finally arrives, it is usually carrying several court judgments and wondering why nobody is interested anymore.

So do not begin with the question, are you left or right? That question already places you inside the narrative factory. Ask instead what institutional mechanism produces these categories. How does it compress millions of individual preferences into a handful of political narratives? And why does the machinery remain so successful even when its narratives repeatedly collapse?

The boat may be sinking. But do not worry: the passengers had a choice. They voted on the colour of the lifeboat.