This Republic Day, ask one question: Who can you appeal to?

When power moves from files to filters, democracy needs a new guarantee: reasons, reversals, and responsibility.Republic Day has a strange rhythm. We celebrate the Constitution in the morning, and then spend the afternoon watching the country behave as if the Constitution is a suggestion. Still, the day matters. Not because it makes India perfect, but because it reminds us what India is supposed to be: a Republic where power can be questioned. That idea is now facing a problem, the kind that doesn’t look like a crisis until it has already become normal. India is building a parallel state.

Not a shadow government, not a coup, not a conspiracy. Something far more boring — and therefore far more dangerous.A parallel state made of systems. If you want a glimpse of the future, stop thinking about artificial intelligence as “smart machines” and start

thinking of it as a new layer of power — one that doesn’t sit in Parliament, doesn’t contest elections, doesn’t answer questions in the House, doesn’t fear contempt of court, and doesn’t appear in any RTI reply with a name attached.

It just produces outcomes. And in 2026, outcomes are what citizenship feels like. You don’t experience the Republic as a preamble. You experience it as a sequence of permissions: can you transact, can you verify, can you access, can you get approved, can you move, can you speak, can you exit cleanly inside a database.

The Republic promised equal citizenship. The system delivers conditional citizenship. What makes this transition hard to see is that it arrives wearing the costume of efficiency. It even feels like progress. India’s digital infrastructure is genuinely impressive. UPI is the obvious symbol: in December 2025 alone, it processed 21.6 billion transactions worth INR 27.97 lakh crore, averaging nearly 700 million transactions a day. That kind of scale is not a tech story. It is a civilisation story. But civilization-level dependence has a hidden price: when you build a nation around systems, the systems become a form of governance. And governance has only one legitimate test in a Republic: can a citizen challenge it? That is where the AI age breaks something essential.

In the older Republic, even when the state was slow, opaque, or unfair, decisions had authors. A file had a signature. A rejection had an officer. A denial had a department. You could locate the human being who made your life difficult. Now we are walking into a country where the most consequential sentence will become: “the system flagged you.”

Not “I flagged you.” Not “the department decided.” Not “here is the reason.” Just “the system.” This is the death of accountability in the most Indian way possible: nobody is openly denying your rights, but somehow you can’t get anything done.

The problem isn’t that machines will start ruling India. The problem is that machines will start deciding India — and nobody will be responsible for the decisions. Take a simple example. A bank refuses a loan. A student doesn’t make it past the shortlist. A candidate never reaches a recruiter. A welfare payment stops. A citizen gets marked “ineligible” for reasons nobody can clearly explain. A social media post disappears into algorithmic darkness.

Each decision looks small. Each one can be explained away. “Technical issue.” “Risk model.” “Policy threshold.” “System behaviour.” But put them together and you get a new political reality: a Republic where citizens are managed more than Governed. Management is not the same thing as democracy.

Democracy is noisy. It is inefficient. It is annoying. It produces arguments because it allows contestation. That friction is not a bug — it is the price of legitimacy. Systems hate friction. Systems optimise it away. That is why the real constitutional danger of AI is not bias or deepfakes or job loss — those are serious, but they are not the core.

The core danger is this: AI makes power easier to exercise without admitting it is being exercised. The old state needed laws. The new State needs parameters. A tweak in a fraud threshold. A change in the ranking function. A new model trained on different data. A different definition of “suspicious.”

There will be no debate on television, no angry spokesperson, no white paper, no Parliament discussion. You won’t even know a policy changed. You will just notice that life has become harder in a particular direction.

This is how power evolves when it learns to hide. Republics don’t fall only because someone grabs power. They also fall because power becomes too convenient to challenge. and yes, this is where the topic everyone likes to avoid enters the room: elections.

We are now entering a world where reality itself can be manufactured cheaply. Deepfakes and synthetic media aren’t interesting because they look real. They’re interesting because they scale.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report has been blunt about misinformation and disinformation as a top near-term risk because it destabilised social trust. But that language is too polite for what it actually means: it means democratic societies are walking into an era where people can no longer agree on what happened.

And once a society can’t agree on reality, politics stops being persuasive. It becomes programming. The worst outcome isn’t that citizens believe one fake video.

The worst outcome is that citizens give up on truth altogether. They stop trying. They decide everything is propaganda, everything is manipulation, everyone is lying. That is how a Republic becomes hollow—not through censorship, but through exhaustion.

So what does India do? Not the usual “AI policy” talk. Not another committee. Not another aspirational framework full of words like “ethics” and “responsible innovation.” India needs something far more boring, far more technical, and far more revolutionary: the right to appeal to the machine.

If a system denies you something that matters—money, education, employment, welfare, mobility, speech—then the system must be forced to provide three things: a reason, a human reviewer, and a deadline. No review mechanism means no Republic. It’s that simple.

Courts cannot be the only answer because courts are slow and expensive. The Republic needs an appeal layer that moves at the speed of systems. Think of it like a “consumer court” for automated power: fast resolution, enforceable correction, and consequences for repeat failures.

And if AI is used in public systems, it must be auditable in the same spirit that public money is auditable. Auditing isn’t just about catching crime. It’s about preventing a state from slowly becoming unanswerable.

India doesn’t have to fear technology. India should fear something else: governance that cannot be cross-examined. That is what the AI age is offering us—efficiency without explanation, decisions without authors, power without fingerprints.

Republic Day is not about being sentimental. It is a reminder of the one idea that separates a Republic from a machine-run order: Power must be question-able.

In the coming decade, India’s real test will not be whether we deploy AI faster than other countries. It will be whether we can look a citizen in the eye and say: “If the system got it wrong, you can challenge it—and we will fix it.” Because a citizen who cannot appeal is not a citizen. They are just users. And a Republic of users is not a Republic at all.